“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

– George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945

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.”

Law professor Glenn Reynolds continues with this..

A century ago, the people running our government, our economy, our academy and our media were varied.

Now they’re all members of the same class, educated usually at the same elite institutions, incestuously intermarried and driven by class solidarity.

As J.D. Tuccille recently wrote regarding the press’ supine attitude toward government censorship, today’s journalists “love Big Brother”: “Prominent reporters and powerful officials know each other, share attitudes, and trust each other.”

Agriculturalists know that in a monoculture, diseases spread rapidly because the entire crop is identical.

In a social and intellectual monoculture, groupthink ensures that bad ideas spread the same way.

This is especially so because our ruling class has substituted reputation for achievement.

One can be a successful CEO if the company does badly, so long as it pursues the right political goals.

Journalists, bureaucrats and political operatives routinely fail upward because they play to their peers.

It is all about credentials and class medallions, the passports to the elitist fools’ club.

RTWDT.