This set of observations has been made repeatedly throughout history, albeit usually in works that sink immediately into obscurity. That's a pity because the ke

This set of observations has been made repeatedly throughout history, albeit usually in works that sink immediately into obscurity. That's a pity because the key insights are very important. The same theme - why do so many intellectuals find themselves supporting dictatorships long after the rest of the world has understood their true nature - has been extensively explored by Sowell in books like Intellectuals & Society, and a Conflict of Visions. He finds similar explanations: * Difficulty in accepting that individuals are inherently limited and corruptible, and that ideas are often worthless when tested in the forge of reality. After all, intellectuals are almost by definition people whose value to society comes from production of ideas and who see themselves as unchained from the normal moral and mental limits most people slave under. * That reason, reflection and debate are limited tactics that can't yield that much insight about the world. * That to believe in intellectuals as a concept is almost inherently to disbelieve in the notion of democracy, because if insight and wisdom were really so compressed into a few moralistic bookworms and if most people really had none to share, then voting itself is pointless or even harmful. Instead the best outcomes would be yielded by a dictatorship of intellectuals (which is what communism is, in effect). So you end up with academics, writers, some kinds of politician ... the people who would these days be called the 'elite' or 'globalists' ... having a distinctly lukewarm relationship with markets and votes throughout history. Yet because they are fundamentally wrong about human nature, where their ideas are put into practice things inevitably go wrong. The intellectuals who end up in charge don't create a utopia. Their 5 year plans turn out to be not that well planned, their price-fixing turns out to create other problems elsewhere, and their profound belief that most people are too stupid or immoral to rule turns into an oppressive dystopia. And so the wheel turns. If you're interested in these ideas or philosophies, this video interview with Sowell is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok