All these crazy ideas and more are the product of our allegedly educated and intelligent overclass, the experts, policymakers and media types who in theory represent the thinking part, the brains, of our society.
But there’s something wrong with these people — the “brains” of our society are basically crazy.
Crazy is when you believe and do things that obviously don’t make sense or fit with the facts.
It’s important to have an intellectual class.
Exactly how important is open to question — in his recent book “How Innovation Works,” Matt Ridley argues that most 19th- and 20th-century innovations actually came from tradespeople and industry, not academics doing abstract research — but important enough.
There are dangers to an intelligentsia, though.
Communism and Nazism started as intellectual movements; so did such fads as eugenics and lobotomies.
The Tuskegee Experiment wasn’t the product of racist Klansmen but of the curiosity of credentialed public-health experts.
In a 1999 essay, Neal Stephenson wrote that “during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.”
It’s gotten worse.
nypost.com
But there’s something wrong with these people — the “brains” of our society are basically crazy.
Crazy is when you believe and do things that obviously don’t make sense or fit with the facts.
It’s important to have an intellectual class.
Exactly how important is open to question — in his recent book “How Innovation Works,” Matt Ridley argues that most 19th- and 20th-century innovations actually came from tradespeople and industry, not academics doing abstract research — but important enough.
There are dangers to an intelligentsia, though.
Communism and Nazism started as intellectual movements; so did such fads as eugenics and lobotomies.
The Tuskegee Experiment wasn’t the product of racist Klansmen but of the curiosity of credentialed public-health experts.
In a 1999 essay, Neal Stephenson wrote that “during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.”
It’s gotten worse.
Our society’s ‘top brains’ have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result
“Suppose we got it all wrong and the real crazies are the TV people in nice suits and $300 haircuts?”
nypost.com