Quote of the Day: Intellectuals and the Really, Really Bad Ideas They Often Support

Heh (my emphasis in italics)!  There's something both breathtakingly arrogant and repulsively atavistic about self-proclaimed "intellectuals" and cultural elites embracing the darkness in the name of moral superiority.  Simply unable or unwilling to live like normal folks, eh?

But intellectuals are no more rational than the rest of us, and none of us are wholly rational in our politics. The attractiveness of the resistance takes place on an emotional level, for like all of the most intellectually captivating modernist grand concepts it is a rejection of the Enlightenment, the boredom and the mediocrity of regular politics. The Enlightenment did away with the blood, the magic and mysticism of the great leader, he who decides life and death with a word. And this is what is to be recovered in the resistance: the charisma and authenticity of the human being unrestrained by what Nietzsche called slave morality. From Pound and T.S. Eliot to Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault and their disciples, for a century the West’s greatest minds have taught that the privilege, and duty, of the Western intellectual is to unmake the West, even—or especially—through violence, even if someone else, like the resistance, must serve as the agent of apocalypse and rebirth . . . The intellectuals are nothing if not spellbound by the economy of force, and equally so in the purgative bloodshed that ensues.

So here's a piece of advice: stay away from wild-eyed idealists who have no grip on reality, who are constantly yelping about "revolution."  These are the folks who, useful idiots and all, enabled and encouraged gulags and killing fields and murderous totalitarianism.  As for me and mine, we shall cheerlead for the West, thanks.  Grad school or not, I make no claims to being an "intellectual," nor do I want to!


UPDATE:  I'm reminded of this very useful statement, including this utterly fabulous quote: 

"It is your responsibility . . . not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. Not merely in their ends, but in their means. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person, then when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction."