Thomas Sowell, an economist and icon for the conservative movement, warned that the “road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.” That nine-word quip has more insight than a 5,000-word diatribe in The New York Times about what is wrong with the world today and how it is all your fault because you refuse to listen to the people who pretend to be experts on cable news.
The supposed philistines are told that we must heed the wise gatekeepers of allowable opinion because they know better than the common folk. They have the credentials from some of the finest institutions in the world, surrounded by conforming pundits, politicians, and professors who avoid straying from the index card of acceptable thought. Due to our fear of being denounced by the intellectuals and accused of ignorance, we dismiss our common sense. We choose to listen to the inane ramblings of someone who possesses a Ph.D. in LGBT studies or a master’s in humanities. These members of the intellectual class convince everyone that two plus two equals five or that Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation is a form of colonialism.
If we are to be ruled by somebody, perhaps it would be more suitable, as William F. Buckley said, “to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
Ominous Parallels From Berlin
In the aftermath of World War I, Berlin resuscitated and overhauled intellectualism. It became the chief cosmopolitan city of Europe, a metropol...
