by James A. Bacon
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the “Black Swan” and “Antifragile” author and curmudgeonly critic of just about everyone, coined the term Intellectuals Yet Idiots (IYIs) to describe the modern-day class of journalists, academics, and other cultural elitists who think they know everything better than anyone else.
The term well describes professors with the University of Virginia Department of History who signed an open letter critical of President Jim Ryan’s crackdown on the “Encampment for Gaza” protest on UVA grounds in violation of university rules.
“As historians” they wrote, “we are acutely aware that this police action fell on the anniversary of the murder of four student protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. History has not judged those who ordered the violent repression of that protest kindly. History will also judge the University of Virginia’s actions on May 4, 2024, and we have no doubt that history will also condemn the disproportionate, draconian and excessive use of force against nonviolent protesters exercising their free speech rights on an academic campus founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence.”
Yeah, right. The crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters was just like the Kent State massacre in which four students were killed and nine wounded by the Ohio National Guard…. except for the fact that no one at UVA was killed. Or wounded. Or seriously injured.
Only IYIs living in a cloistered academic setting like the UVA History Department where the most ridiculous ideas go unchallenged could fail to see the idiocy of the comparison.
Taleb elaborates on the larger phenomenon of highly educated people believing the most extraordinary things.
These self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. …
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.
Taleb wrote that in 2016. Academia has grown only more insular, myopic and infected with deranged ideas since then. These are the people “educating” the supposedly best and brightest of Virginia youth at UVA and American youth in Ivy League institutions.
Modern America’s cultural elite combines unprecedented cluelessness with unprecedented arrogance and an unprecedented desire to impose its beliefs on others.
James A. Bacon is executive editor of the Jefferson Council. The views expressed here are entirely his own.
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