Source - OGS16
Q: What is it that intellectuals find so attractive about Maoist, Naxalite, and separatist ideologies? A: They are intellectual in origin.
.. Redner shows that intellectuals have literally intellectualized the world, resulting in people being disenchanted with it.(4) From cultural dimensions like art, religion, ethics, politics, all the way to philosophy and so on, intellectualization has degraded it all. Which is precisely why intellectuals tend to be hated and despised by their own people because the people often find them disgraceful.
To paraphrase Toynbee: “Wherever we find an intelligentsia, we can infer that one of two civilizations is in the process of being absorbed.” And that is also why Arnold Toynbee described intellectuals as “suffering from the congenital unhappiness of being hybrids."
Another great thinker who picked up on the same was Raymond Aron, who hailed from the line of the even greater Alexis de Tocqueville. In “The Opium of the Intellectuals”, Aron highlights the mentality of intellectuals: they exist to denounce their past and renounce society. Why do intellectuals do that? As Aron points out — since
“reality is always more conservative than ideology”—intellectuals turn to revolution. The desire for a systematic certainty is known as “determinism”. This is the foundation of Leftism and the hallmark of intellectualism."(5)
To put it differently, intellectuals are first and foremost occupational, as Thomas Sowell explains in “Intellectuals and Society”. By occupational, it is meant that intellectuals are workers of ideas, of the abstract, not concerned with the practicality of traditions.
“Liberals conceptualize freedom by the sum of individuals (i.e., individualism) rather than the sum of communities making up civil society. .. A religious-like certainty—that “nostalgia for the absolute”—provides intellectuals with something definite, like how Leftist ideologies do.”
Revolutionary tendencies
And since intellectuals “no longer feel attached to anything, they instead opt for certainty, a system. Revolution is their opium.” An ideological example of a revolutionary opium is Communism; and “the Communist opium invites intellectuals to revolt.” That’s why Aron says “the myth of the revolution serves as refuge for utopian intellectuals”—it’s their “universally comprehensive scheme”.
But the best definition of intellectuals is given by Francis Wilson in his “A Theory of Public Opinion”, a study on how values are formed.
“Intellectuals are those who least respect what may be called the traditional values of any long-standing or operating community.” –F Wilson