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RELATED (scivillage): The Making of Roger Scruton
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With regard to the video content: A bit too universal when minus the adjective "literary" preceding "intellectual". And barring them being the kind of grassroots, self-taught illuminati that early Marxist revolutions depended on for widespread proselytizing (an example in the Higbie quote below), many of the groups he subsumes as "intellectuals" would often as individuals just be mere supporters or the pseudo kind at best. Like the reference to entertainment celebrities, journalists, and others (and obviously they do have day jobs and skills). There are also business magnates like Singham who even admire and champion non-subtle communism. So it's not always due to lack of entrepreneurial experience and knowledge. Anyone can become enchanted with socioeconomic utopias in the sky to the point of zealotry.

Tobias Higbie: Don Lescohier traveled the length of the Great Plains during the summer harvest seasons of 1919, 1920, and 1921, documenting the lives of farmworkers. In one migrant camp he met his intellectual match in the person of an unschooled Irish immigrant named Doyle, who was, Lescohier wrote in his field notes, “one of the brainiest and thoroughly read” workers he had ever met.

“I drew him, or rather he drew me, into an economic discussion. This hobo, this bum, this chap who had never been inside of a school … knew the classical economists well and quoted readily from Ricardo and Adam Smith.” Doyle identified himself as both a Bolshevik and member of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and impressed Lescohier with his thorough knowledge of current events.

He couldn’t agree with Doyle’s radical politics, but Lescohier respected his intellect and his commitment to social justice. “The ‘Red’ is on a higher social level than the unorganized hobo,” he concluded. --Labor's Mind
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JOSEPH T. SALERNO
https://youtu.be/NCpCPvg8GSY

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: When Hayek wrote this article in 1949, intellectuals in Western nations overwhelmingly supported socialism. This is still the case today, when intellectuals loudly and proudly proclaim themselves to be progressives. Of course, the progress they promote is toward a democratic socialist state.

Hayek explains the inherent bias of intellectuals towards socialism by describing their position and function in society. Intellectuals, he says, are professional second-hand dealers in ideas. They are not creative thinkers, and they have no expert knowledge in any particular field or discipline.

Hayek identifies journalists, TV commentators, novelists, school teachers, even ministers and physicians as making up the bulk of the class of intellectuals. Today, I am sure he would add podcasters, social media influencers, and entertainers to the list. What distinguishes all these professions and groups is that they are masters of the technique of conveying ideas, but amateurs in evaluating the content of the ideas that they speak and write about.

While intellectuals are not exceptionally intelligent and have no specialized training in any field or discipline, they do have one major advantage over ordinary people. The reading, writing, and personal interactions that are routine part of their professions regularly bring them into contact with new political and social ideas before most people have heard about them.

Intellectuals are thus ideological filters who feed their preferred ideas to the public and thereby mold public opinion. Hayek also points out that real experts and scholars outside their specialized fields are just as susceptible as ordinary people to the influence of intellectuals on their political opinions.

In fact, intellectuals create the public reputations of scholars and experts. And these reputations may be wildly inconsistent with their reputations among their fellow scholars or scientists. Pop economists like Paul Krugman and John Kenneth Galbraith come to mind, as do celebrity natural scientists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.

So why, according to Hayek, are intellectuals naturally biased towards socialism? First and foremost, they earn their living in professions far removed from the world of practical business and financial affairs. They therefore have no real knowledge of the operation of the economic process.

In addition, their professions encourage and reward thinking and communicating in terms of abstract and speculative ideas and ideals. Socialist ideology is built on speculation about utopian political and economic systems.

Because they lack knowledge of the actual working of existing capitalist society, intellectuals are incapable of understanding that their favorite socialist utopias are profoundly unworkable. Intellectuals therefore decide which new ideas are worth conveying to the public by how well the ideas fit with some idealized socialist worldview.

Hayek raises an extremely important question regarding the extent to which the growth of the intellectual class has been artificially stimulated by the existence of copyright law. For many intellectuals earn their living by writing books, essays, and articles protected by copyright. Hayek doubts that an open and frank discussion about whether the law of copyright is socially beneficial can ever take place with a class with an interest in maintaining the law largely controls the channels of public communication.

Hayek ends his article with an appeal to classical liberals to have the courage to embrace true radicalism and promote a program for the full realization of a free society. Only by sticking to their principles, daring to be utopian, and not worrying about offending politically powerful groups, like labor unions and crony capitalists, can classical liberals hope to nullify the influence of socialist intellectuals.

https://youtu.be/NCpCPvg8GSY

I suggest a less pejorative explanation for the general anti-capitalist sentiment of intellectuals. Intellectuals tend to live in the rarefied atmosphere of ideas and truths and principles, not so much that of material possessions and class prestige. It's hard to imagine Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or even Marx living in a mansion. Maybe some shoddy little one room flat. Capitalism is driven by the need to accumulate wealth and luxuries and property, a value not held in high esteem by those who think and create new ideas for a living. They are probably generally adverse to physical labor and employment too, confined largely to teaching and writing for their meager sustenance. Money is looked down on with contempt by most of them. Perhaps at most a necessary evil. So an economic system whose main driving force is greed and consumption and hoarding up status symbols would tend to be anathema to them. Intellectuals thrive by being anarchal and iconoclastic---a sort of eternal resistance to the systems in power. And so that's exactly what they try to do.

Intellectuals live in "ivory towers" where they often have tenure and don't have to produce anything someone would pay for outside of academia. The rest of us who do actual work understand merit, and the need for a system that freely allows you to trade your merit for fair market value. That voluntary system is capitalism (not to be conflated with crony-capitalism, mercantilism, etc.). Socialism is a system were your actual merit doesn't matter, because it's about pandering to the lowest common denominator, literally at everyone else's expense.

MR has basically been a ward, mostly of the state, for most his life (Navy, some nepotism, and disability welfare). He would identify with those who do not earn a living on their merit. People who talk about "the need to accumulate wealth and luxuries and property" don't understand the work it usually takes to achieve any degree of such things. And statistically, most ardent capitalists aren't wealthy at all. But that doesn't fit with ignorant stereotypes.

Quote:MR has basically been a ward, mostly of the state, for most his life (Navy, some nepotism, and disability welfare). He would identify with those who do not earn a living on their merit.

In a system that requires an overpriced education and lifelong student dept and specific marketable skills and knowledge and largely appearance-based, racist, sexist, and heteronormative evaluations of who to hire and promote, meritocracy is a joke. White privilege and cronyism and vicious stereotyping largely guide corporate hiring policies, not some imaginary ethical commitment by the employer to how much work one has done. Capitalism ensures that the only value motivating corporate America is its own financial profit, not how hard anyone works.

And as far as disability is concerned, that was a benefit built into our own capitalist system which I fully qualified for based on their own strict criteria. There's nothing noble about working your ass off in an unfulfilling job all your life only to get laid off when you get near retirement age. It happened to both my dad and my brother-in-law. There's nothing fair nor meritocratic about our capitalist system at all. If you buy into that horseshit, you are little more than a corporate tool.

(4 hours ago)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:MR has basically been a ward, mostly of the state, for most his life (Navy, some nepotism, and disability welfare). He would identify with those who do not earn a living on their merit.

In a system that requires an overpriced education and specific marketable skills and knowledge and largely appearance-based, racist, sexist, and heteronormative evaluations of who to hire and promote, meritocracy is a joke. White privilege and cronyism and vicious stereotyping largely guide corporate hiring policies, not some imaginary ethical commitment by the employer to how much work one has done. Capitalism ensures that the only value motivating corporate America is its own financial profit, not how hard anyone works.

Spoken like someone whose never accomplished anything and has no clue what it takes or what kind of people do. Just a bag of blaming excuses for personal failure.

Quote:And as far as disability is concerned, that was a benefit built into our own capitalist system which I fully qualified for based on their own strict criteria. There's nothing noble about working your ass off in an unfulfilling job all your life only to get laid off when you get near retirement age. It happened to both my dad and my brother-in-law. There's nothing fair nor meritocratic about our capitalist system at all. If you buy into that horseshit, you are a little more than a corporate tool.

Disability aid is not an inherent property of capitalism. That is a feature of a mixed economic system. Conflating the two is lazy.
Adults do things they don't like, in order to provide for themselves and their own. What's not noble is leeching off the hard work of others to sit on your ass and get fat. Losers whine about what's fair. Winners just do the work.

I perceive the left as the coalition of the alienated.

Just look at the democrats --- workers feeling alienated from the bosses, racial and cultural minorities feeling alienated from America's founders and its white majority, homosexuals alienated from the straight majority, feminists alienated from what they perceive as the patriarchy. And historically white Southerners alienated from the victorious Yankees after the Civil War and Jews (history's prototypical alienated minority) alienated from the Christian majority.

And yes, add to that the PhDs, the university professors, alienated from a middle-class middle-America that they perceive as their intellectual inferiors: a rabble better fit to be governed than to govern themselves. Add the journalists, government bureaucrats and the entertainment celebrities whose job is to tell you what to do, think and feel, believe themselves to be an elite aristocracy of the superior, the world's natural rulers by right. It's nothing new, it's there in Plato's Republic and in the Confucian tradition (which helps explain Chinese authoritarianism). And it's profoundly antithetical to the Democratic tradition.

The intellectuals of the political left hope to exploit all this by building a coalition of the alienated that they hope will add up to a majority of voters. And in some places (New York City and parts of California) it does. Nationwide, it's why they favor wide-open borders, because illegal aliens are alienated almost by definition.

But it's a fragile coalition with different groups promoting their own agendas and pulling in all different directions. They've already lost the once solid South along with white males nationally. They are in the process of losing the Jews, who were once the heart and soul of the intellectual left but are perceived as expendable today. Socially conservative Hispanics are starting to bail.

And I think that they hope to preserve as much of their coalition as they can against all the centrifugal tendencies by focusing maniacally on hatred for Trump and Maga. That way they hope to keep feminists and homosexuals aligned with people like the Islamists without having to address the obvious contradictions. Keep them all distracted and keep them all voting D on their ballots.

And to answer the question that led off this thread, I think that many of these alienated groups perceive socialism as promising a future in which their feelings of alienation are healed and their various senses of grievance are answered. In that regard it's something like the traditional concept of kingdom of God, except with no God. The promised land. Unfortunately, it's impossible to imagine any real-life state or condition that would simultaneously satisfy everyone. So it's a dream, a fantasy.

Quote:Spoken like someone whose never accomplished anything and has no clue what it takes or what kind of people do.

20 years in the military and in civilian jobs isn't "never accomplishing anything." Fortunately I realized long ago that our value as human beings doesn't depend in any way on what we do for a living nor on how well we serve our corporate overlords. As if man was a mere wealth-generating commodity to be exploited and then discarded as useless later on in life. You can chalk that epiphany up to my own intellectualist prowess.

Quote:Disability aid is not an inherent property of capitalism. That is a feature of a mixed economic system. Conflating the two is lazy.

"Disability is structurally integrated into and shaped by the capitalist system.

Creation of the "Disabled" Category

Industrialization and Productivity: Scholars argue that modern concepts of "disability" arose alongside industrial capitalism. A system organized around maximizing profit and worker output categorized bodies based on their ability to perform standardized wage labor.

Exclusion from Wage Labor: Individuals whose impairments prevented them from fitting standard production norms were labeled "disabled" and largely excluded from the formal workforce, creating a distinct social and economic category.

Economic Functions of Disability under Capitalism

The Reserve Army of Labor: State-managed welfare and disability policies help regulate the labor supply, keeping a pool of workers available or threatening able-bodied workers with the consequences of non-compliance.

Shifting Social Costs: Social security and welfare structures allow the capitalist class to avoid the cost of accommodating or retaining non-standard workers, shifting those burdens onto state-funded poverty programs.

Commodification: Parts of the medical-industrial complex, rehabilitation industries, and accommodation sectors extract profit and revenue from managing impaired bodies."

Too bad your AI couldn't address what I actually wrote. 9_9