Professor Thomas Sowell – one of the first American blacks ever to hold a Phd - is an American treasure. Lucid, intelligent and clear headed Sowell debunks the 'black plague' carrying disease called the 'intellectual'. Sowell's work needs to be read along with Paul Johnson's 'Intellectuals', another famous and insightful look into the madness of these men and their ideas, and a perplexing narrative as to why we should view anyone trading in esoteric and metaphysical ideas with deep skepticism. Once you read these two books you will begin to see through the fog of charlatans, blow-hards and human-haters and uncover intellectualism for what it is – ideas which disease the mind.

Sowell rightly defines the term "intellectual" to refer to 'teachers' and 'writers' who exclusively focus on ideas and are paid by the media or the state for engaging in such efforts. Sowell makes observations about these people's ideological tendencies, their lack of accountability, and their tendency to live outside the "real world." Naught for nothing do we have the expression the 'ivory tower'.

Sowell makes it clear that not all intellectuals are plague carrying parasites. But many are. In general the over-educated intellectual rejects the world of the 5 senses, and certainly views non-intellectuals with extreme prejudice and disdain. Specializing in arcana, the entire class of intellectuals tend to adopt abstract formulas and unproven methodologies as dogma. Often dealing with complicated metaphysics supported by elaborate word-smithing, intellectuals use the recourse of superior 'wisdom' to propose ideas and programs which have no basis of success in reality. In fact much of their collective 'wisdom' is usually refuted by real world facts. For the intellectual facts are not paramount – engineering a result which satisfies intellectual dogma is.

Once the dogma is established, the intellectual class continues to feed the general public, politicians and bureaucrats with ideas that point toward one solution: an intellectually controlled statist solution. Marxist – socialist ideals thus play a predominant role within the intellectual class. The average person, and the 'market' are too dumb, too ignorant, too un-educated to know what is good for them. Interventionism, wealth redistribution, and other egalitarian absurdities abound in intellectual discourse.

As Sowell relates the intellectual hold on society is rather immense. As I wrote some time ago it all started with Hegel the professor who infected Marx with variants of intellectual arrogance and hubristic intolerance. Hegel was a power mongering academic – the first of his kind in history – whose reach extended into the German military junta under Bismarck and the higher echelons of the German bureaucracy. Hegel was a very powerful influence. Intellectuals and academics have been trying to emulate Hegel ever since.

For whatever reason the public is willing to believe the intellectual class. Globaloney Warming is a case in point. The theory is insane but because 'intellectuals' parading as scientists [or some of them, since 35.000 have signed a petition against AGW], seem to support it, the public meekly accepts this class' claims. And as Sowell relates, the intellectual elite have many tools to enforce their views. They can push politicians to elect left wing judges. They can influence parties and elections to elect left wing politicians to Congress. They can appear endlessly in the mainstream media and push their dogma. The intellectual today has more options and more funding and support, to increase their power and their hold on cultural idea creation.

The intellectual, as defined by Sowell, is someone who works with ideas for a living. As such he or she is paid by the state. If the state is funding these people, it stands to reason that the dogma produced by the tens of thousands of these unionized-government intellectuals will of course benefit the state. As Sowell relates teachers and writers are judged by their peers according to "purely internal criteria" that leaves them "sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality and remain circular in their methods of validation." What is accepted, is the current theory and dogma prevalent in the collective-academic group-think. Intellectual consensus is the end-all and be-all. The empirical validity of an idea is not fully checked. It incubates within the intelligentsia and, according to Sowell, bleeds through to the external world. "The ideas of Lenin, Hitler, and Mao had enormous - often lethal - impact ... however little validity those ideas had in themselves or in the eyes of others beyond the circle of like-minded followers and subordinate power-wielders."

This statement may appear incredible, but it is true. Many casual readers will pass this by, undervaluing its significance. It has been assumed, all too often, that everyone must accept an idea before it can become powerful or affect our lives. But political outcomes are determined by minorities who may or may not be in touch with reality. History tells of regimes, and elites, whose ideas were insane. Islam is another creation of illiterate, mediocre and fascistic minds. It is not more a religion than Scientology. But because the really smart people, aka intellectuals, tell us the opposite we must believe it.

In the first line of his book, Sowell warns his reader: "Intellect is not wisdom." Only the good are wise, and goodness is rare. "Wisdom is the rarest quality of all," writes Sowell - "the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding." He also wrote that wisdom requires self-discipline and self-limitation. Totalitarian ideologies, embraced by leading intellectuals, are self-indulgent and self-expansive. The temptation to power, and ego-aggrandizement, may be hard to resist. Too many intellectuals from the time of Hegel to the Globaloney Warming cult have been infected the disease of ego, and power mongering, not with the benefits of inquiry and truth seeking.

The success of an intellectual idea is not determined by an objective, external test. Success is determined by whether intellectuals find an idea "interesting, original, persuasive, elegant, or ingenious." In other words, a specific class of persons, paid to write or teach or think about such ideas, decide among themselves what is "interesting," and therefore they decide what is published and pushed as 'truth'. If intellectuals have been corrupted by the prospect of power, the prospect of government money, or an envious attitude toward the rich, one might expect the gradual emergence of an irresistible totalitarian tendency.

The demand for intellectuals and intellectual ideas is self-created, self-sustaining, and self-replicating. As Sowell states, "The general public contributes to the income of intellectuals in a variety of ways involuntarily as taxpayers who support schools, colleges, and various other institutions and programs subsidizing intellectual and artistic endeavours." In other words, the people who are warping and destroying our civilization are paid by the rest of us to do their work. We have nurtured them, raised them up, and fostered their conceits with our own cash contributions. In other words, we have paid for our own destruction up front.

Modern day intellectuals do little but invent reasons for their own existence. Radicals and human-haters from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Hitler, to the Frankfurt Cultural Marxist school, traded in bizarre theories which purported to explain history and societal development in some uniform, dialectical and predictable fashion. Much like Islamic jurists and the barely literate scribblers of the Koran, modern day 'thinkers' need to impress their readers with the inevitability, and applicability of their 'ideas'. They parade lies as truths, dogma as scientifically validated inquiry, and intolerance as rationality. Intellectuals as a group are little better than parasites – paid by the taxpayer to come up with ideas to kill the host. These people create little more than distortion and destruction as the entire cadre of socialist-Marxist and communalist 'intellectualizing' proves. Intellectuals are not social giants, but anti-humanist pygmies, trading in, and carrying, a mental black plague.

Once the average person recognizes this fact than the necessary steps – including the elimination of tax payer funds to enrich and empower these frauds – can be undertaken.