Why are literary intellectuals obsessed with socialism? (Sowell style)

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THOMAS SOWELL
https://youtu.be/DuqwRMQh0cU

VIDEO EXCERPTS: When you refer to intellectuals in society, whom do you mean?

I mean people whose end products are ideas. There are other people with great intelligence, whose end products are things like the Salk vaccine.

A research scientist is not necessarily an intellectual.

That's right. An engineer isn't necessarily an intellectual. Because the engineer is judged by the end product, which is not simply ideas.

If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn't matter how brilliant his idea was, he's ruined.

Conversely, if an intellectual who is brilliant has an idea for rearranging society, and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.

Consequential knowledge is a concept that runs through this book. Explain that concept.

Knowledge whose presence or absence has consequences; serious consequences.

[...] You can put together a large group of professors, and they're still not going to possess the knowledge that would enable them to run General Motors, for example.

[...] They believe that since knowledge is concentrated in people like themselves, what needs to be done is -- in the quote from President Obama -- is to put more power in the hands of of the experts. So the intellectual temptation is to say: Look, we already know everything that's right. If only we also had the power -- all the power, everything would be just fine. [philosopher kings]

[...] One of the things that happened all around the world in the 20th century was that all sorts of countries have tried central planning...

[...] This is a vision of human beings as livestock; to be fed by the government, and herded and tended by the anointed. All the things that make us human beings are to be removed from our lives, and we are to live as denatured creatures controlled and directed by our betters...

https://youtu.be/DuqwRMQh0cU

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DuqwRMQh0cU

[Magical Realist]

"Intellectuals cannot understand why someone with an “inferior intellect,” someone who might not even have an undergraduate degree, should end up making a lot more money and living in a much bigger house. They feel offended in their sense of what is “fair” and thus vindicated in their belief in a malfunction of capitalism or the market, which needs to be “corrected” by means of redistribution on a massive scale. By divesting the rich of some of their “undeserved wealth,” intellectuals console themselves with the fact that, even if they can’t abolish the brutal capitalist system altogether, they can at least “correct” it to some extent.

In a 1998 essay, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick asks the question: “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” His explanation is based on the assumption that intellectuals feel superior to other members of society. Ever since the days of Plato and Aristotle, intellectuals have been telling us that their contribution to society is more valuable than that of any other group. But where does this sense of entitlement come from?

According to Nozick, it starts at school, where the intellectual brilliance of “verbally gifted children” is rewarded by teachers with effusive praise and good grades. This leads them to expect society at large to operate according to the same norms. In particular, in capitalist societies, which promise the greatest success for the brightest and most deserving, such promises of meritocracy fuel their expectations. But, for anyone who has been brilliant at school, the subsequent realization that the market economy doesn’t hold their particular skills in the same regard leads to feelings of frustration and resentment that fuel an intellectual hostility to the capitalist system.

Intellectual anti-capitalism has become as powerful as it has only because the business elite has so far been unable to muster an intellectually adequate response. Pro-capitalist intellectuals – economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Hayek and Milton Friedman as well as writers such as Ayn Rand – have tried to take up the battle that the business elite itself is unwilling or unable to fight, whether out of lack of courage or intellectual wherewithal and verbal agility. However, such supporters of capitalism have always been outsiders among their fellow intellectuals."-- https://austrian-institute.org/en/blog/w...apitalism/

Q: When you refer to intellectuals in society, whom do you mean?

A: I mean people whose end products are ideas.

That suggests 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 Kant 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. So an economic system whose main driving force is greed and consumption and hoarding up status symbols would tend to be anathema to them.

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Roger Scruton: Why intellectuals are mostly left
https://youtu.be/FYo4KMhUx9c

COMMENT: With respect to the excerpts below... Any radical, populist movement will potentially "tears things down". Whether Marxist revolutionaries wiping out the old order to establish the USSR, or Trump doing the reverse of razing the new order to restore some semblance or effigy of the old one.

Both were populist movements because they appealed to the common people. On the Left, back in that day, it was literary intellectuals declaring themselves guiding paladins for the working class; and with Trump populism it was the reverse of anti-intellectualism winning over the working class. (Against humanities scholarship, anyway; how much things have flipped since the early 20th-century: Labor’s Mind - A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life).

Progressive capitalism, OTOH, realized that it could survive by simply assimilating the propaganda of the Left, and outputting tamer, less venomous and marketable versions of those various socioeconomic rebellions. Thus, things like holiday worship of a "super-peaceful" MLK (stripped of his valued radical rhetoric and visions), the timidity of watered-down mainstream feminism, etc. The commoditization of Left philosophy -- symbolic ideas reduced to trade goods, which capitalism can drape around itself and thereby ironically posture as a champion and preacher of social justice. Rather than the classic enemy of such, as originally promoted by Marx.

It is invincible capitalism that will once again adapt to whatever part of the political spectrum is holding the reins -- even to Trump's motley crew of conspiracy-oriented independents, disaffected Democrats, far-right vultures, and Republicans befuddled by these "strange bedfellows" they have acquired.

VIDEO EXCERPTS: I became a conservative in May 1968, in Paris. I didn't have a very clear idea of how to articulate it.

All I knew was that when I looked down the street and saw all these rowdy students throwing stones at policemen, I just said to myself: Whatever they believe, I believe the opposite. Back then I didn't know what it was. It was a sort of lifetime's work to find out what the opposite is.

And I somewhat arrogantly came to the conclusion that if you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left. Because that provides a systematic solution, an answer to their questions. Put it all in a system that also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system.

But once you started thinking, if you think a bit harder and longer about it, you'll move back to what you would have been if you had never thought at all.

[...] I think one of the things that's so tempting for many people, because the world is so troubling, and and so many people suffer in this world, and a lot of what the liberal left tends to rely on is that sense of indignation. That a lot of idealistic people feel, because there are things that are deeply wrong with the world.

But then when we look historically at how and when these people have gotten into power [...] they tend to really tear things down. [...] It's what Hegel calls the labor of the negative. The the initial instinct on the left is that negative instinct: Things are wrong, and it must they must be rectified. They can only be rectified, however, by the seizure of power and so we're going to seize power in order to rectify them.

But once you've got the power, the negative is still there in your heart. Because it's driven you all along. You know that's the thing that has inspired you, so you set about destroying things, at punishing people. You find classes who are to blame. You know, the Jews, the bourgeoisie -- whoever it might be. And you don't get out of that negative structure. I feel that's what I felt very strongly in 1968...

[...] There are things that are wrong in France, but there are also things that are beautiful. You've got to go through this, and come back, and rescue those things. Which is much more important than destroying a few obstacles along the way.

Blake has interesting take on this. He said:

The hand of Vengeance found the bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead."

And that tends to be a pattern that we see again and again...

Roger Scruton: Why Intellectuals are Mostly Left ... https://youtu.be/FYo4KMhUx9c

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FYo4KMhUx9c