Quote of the Day: the Idiocy of Some Intellectuals

British physician Theodore Dalrymple sums up one part of our current so-called intelligentsia's trouble:

The avoidance of the obvious is an occupational hazard for intellectuals, because the obvious threatens them with redundancy. One might have thought that it was perfectly obvious that there were deep psychological currents in suicide bombing, and equally obvious that there us widespread greed and incontinence during epidemics of speculative behaviour. Therefore it is only natural that intellectuals should be found who would argue precisely the opposite, that deep motives are in fact shallow and shallow ones deep.     

It's positively Orwellian. Look, there is nothing so obvious that an "intellectual" won't utterly misunderstand it, and there is nothing so stupid that an "intellectual" won't believe it.  There is practically nothing so pernicious that a self-proclaimed elite won't espouse it in the effort to separate himself from those whom he (or she) considers to be the great unwashed masses. Now wasn't I just saying that the ostensible leadership class right now is utterly useless?  There is, of course, also this.