In his Intellectuals and Race, Thomas Sowell points out that one of the most destabilising forces a modern society can be afflicted with is a growing pool of newly educated ‘intelligentsia’: the vast bulk of these are university-educated graduate from ‘soft’ fields, rather than the sciences. With no marketable skills and limited employment opportunities, these people form a class of ‘over-educated and under-employed’.
Having been thoroughly inculcated with the dogma that a university education was their golden ticket, they are left with two choices. Either to admit that they were sold a lie, and saddled with a huge debt in return for a useless qualification; or they can cast about for someone or something else to blame for their predicament.
Three guesses which most of them opt for.
Before WWII, members of this ‘intellectual proletariat’ in Central Europe – teachers, lawyers, students and graduates – became the foot soldiers of anti-Semitic authoritarianism. Most of them were ‘first-generation intellectuals’ drawn from petit-bourgeois families. Enhanced social status and wealth, they assumed, was their due. When their ‘right’ failed to materialise, they fixated on the relatively large numbers of Jews in universities and professions.
It’s no accident then, that three or so generations removed from WWII, university humanities schools are once again the hotbeds of virulent, violent anti-Semitism.
But the resurgence in overt anti-Semitism among the ‘intelligentsia’ is a very recent phenomenon. Since the end of the war, the intelligentsia’s collective conceit regarding their own moral superiority made such obvious hatred unutterable in their version of polite society. It’s only by the mental prestidigitation of re-classing Jews as ‘oppressors’ that the intelligentsia are able to screech such obvious hate with clear consciences. Still, while Jews are the targets du jour (well, toujours), the name of the game for the intelligentsia has always been identity. The class who babble so much about ‘the other’ are the most dab hands and ‘othering’.
As mentioned, though, the most fervent haters from this class of the uselessly newly educated are drawn from the ‘soft’ disciplines. “The intelligentsia in many countries around the world,” as Sowell observes, “have played a central role in promoting intergroup and international animosities and atrocities”. In his study of violent nationalism, William Pfaff noted that “Few nationalist militants were engineers or economists, or professional administrators.” Universities instead churn out armies of ‘surplus academic proletariats’, who are unable to be usefully employed. The academy becomes an incubator of surplus activists, politicians and demagogues.
Especially activists.
If the first stage of destablisation of a modern society is led by humanities professors, and the second comes when, as historian A J P Taylor said, “the pupils of the professors get out into the world” – the third and most devastating comes when this uselessly over-educated class become professional activists.
Activism is an immensely attractive career path for the ‘intelligentsia’. It not allows them to maintain the giddy excitement of their student years through the rest of their lives, it means never having to rethink what they imbibed in those years ever again. It also immensely appeals to their self-righteous vanity: they’re fighting the good fight, after all.
Besides all that, it’s very lucrative.
Journalist John Tierney points out the huge money activist groups rake in. Greenpeace Australia Pacific, for instance, rakes in $27 million a year. Their parent organisation an eye-watering $111 million. The head of the World Wildlife Fund pays himself $1.2 million a year. BLM founder Patrisse Cullors has treated herself to not one, but three mansions: between herself and other leaders, they’ve spent $12 million of the uncounted funds raised by BLM on luxury real estate.
That’s chump change, though, compared to the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Centre. SPLC founder Morris Dees said he’d stop fundraising once they raised $55 million. Now they have $600 million and they’re still begging for more.
Activism is a huge money-spinner. Which goes a long to explaining why activists will never, ever, admit when they’ve won.
A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist.
Greenpeace saved the whales. From a population crash in the early 20th century, for instance, humpback whale populations are reaching heights not seen since the early 19th century. From the brink of extinction, blue whale populations are in the tens of thousands.
So, why didn’t Greenpeace just shut up shop and go home?
The KKK is all-but extinct. From a membership in the millions in the 1920s, the total Klan membership today is, according to the SPLC itself, less than 5,000 across the whole USA. And still declining.
Yet, the SPLC is still here, and wealthier than ever. The SPLC, says Tierney, “fabricat[es] the idea that there’s a rising tide of hate in this country. … It scares people, and they get money.”
The Human Rights Campaign, another activism money-spinner, claims that American gays are under attack. In 2023, for the first time in its history, it declared a ‘national state of emergency’ for LGBTQ+ people. Except…
“Last year, public support for gay rights reached an all-time high,” says Tierney. “Gays can marry in every state. There’s no stigma against homosexuality. Gay characters used to be taboo on television; now they’re practically obligatory. An anti-gay slur is this career suicide. But these activists need to declare some kind of emergency.”
Let’s face it: A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist.
It’s not just the money – although the money is a huge attraction for an activist whose qualifications are useless for anything else: certainly better money than they can look forward to as a barista or burger-flipper – it’s their entire worldview.
Activists build their entire lives around a single conceit: that their cause is the most important thing in the world and it’s in crisis. It’s not just their career, it’s their social life. Protests are the kaffeeklatsches of the activist class.
Admit that things are actually pretty good, that homosexuals are not only tolerated but celebrated, that a particular ethnic identity is a golden ticket to the front of the queue for everything from housing to medical care, or that forests and wilderness are spreading again and then what? Close up the office, spend weekends doing something other than protesting and abandon almost their entire social circle?
I mean, they’d have to get actual jobs and work for a living. Your average ‘intellectual’ would sooner die.
So, they keep finding ways to up the crisis ante and justify their continued activism.
Public health campaigns saw smoking rates plummet. Vapes did even more to shift the stubborn holdouts away from cigarettes. Lots of lives are saved because vaping is much safer than smoking.
“But this was a huge threat to anti-smoking activists,” says Tierney. I mean, what are groups like QUIT supposed to do when everybody does quit? They started scaring people about vaping.
“They’ve succeeded in persuading most people that vaping is as dangerous as smoking,” says Tierney. Which is terrible for public health, but great for anti-smoking activists: it means they’re still in business. If vaping won’t do the trick, they can still build massive (and lucrative) campaigns around sugar.
But the really smart activist money these days is on ‘climate change’.
It’s the “perfect crisis”, says John Tierney. “You can attribute anything to it and it’s always in the future.”
Forget the poor: the activists we will always have with us. At least, so long as we keep rewarding these bitter, useless, leeches for their idiot screeching.
