Over the Christmas break period, I set about cleaning up my book shelf, getting ready for the grim reaper. Don’t leave it until it is too late I say. So I write this as I flip through some older books all on the theme of the intellectuals and the new class. The idea of the “treason of the intellectuals” is now pretty well out there so out go these books, committed to the flames to increase my carbon footprint and help prevent the next ice age, in a small way.
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1988); a big book with lots of dirt on so called great minds like Rousseau, Shelly, Marx, Ibsen, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sarte, Norman Mailer. There is something wrong with all of them personally, and they all hold to the idea that they are superior to us common folk and that society will be better if their ideas were adopted. In fact, as shown by Marx and others, their ideas are disasters, responsible for untold human misery.