The foolishness and gullibility of the educated classes is one of the most enduring paradoxes of modern life. From a conservative vantage — sceptical of unchecked intellectualism, deferential to tradition, practical wisdom, and the accumulated experience of ordinary people — it appears not as an anomaly but as a near-inevitable consequence of how credentialed elites think and live.
The core problem is structural. Intellectuals, academics, journalists, NGO staffers, think-tank inhabitants, and the broader "laptop class" inhabit a world insulated from material consequences. They trade in abstractions, models, theories, narratives, and moral posturing rather than in things that can break, bankrupt, or bite back. When ideas fail spectacularly, the cost is usually borne by others: taxpayers, small-business owners, working families, or future generations. This separation breeds a dangerous confidence. The more letters after one's name, the more susceptible one becomes to fashionable nonsense precisely because dissent feels like a threat to status within the guild.
Thomas Sowell captured this dynamic decades ago. He described the "anointed" vision: a self-congratulatory worldview in which the educated see themselves as the shepherds of history, uniquely qualified to redesign society from first principles. Ordinary people — plumbers, farmers, truck drivers — are cast as benighted, in need of guidance. Yet time and again, the anointed prove gullible to their own fads. They fall hardest for ideas that sound noble on campus seminar slides but crumble under real-world friction.
Consider a few vivid illustrations from recent years:
COVID policy zealotry. Large swathes of the professional-managerial class embraced maximalist lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates long after evidence showed minimal benefit to children and massive collateral harm. Many of these same people worked from home with Zoom, Peloton, and DoorDash, while lecturing essential workers about sacrifice. When Sweden's lighter-touch approach produced comparable or better outcomes on mortality without the economic devastation, the response among many elite commentators was not humility but dismissal or outright denial. The pattern: theory over data, moral signalling over prudence.
Climate catastrophism and net-zero utopianism. Educated opinion-formers routinely treat IPCC worst-case scenarios as certainties, demand immediate civilisational rewiring, and vilify anyone who notes trade-offs (energy poverty, grid reliability, developing-world growth). Yet the same cohort flies to Davos, owns beach houses in rising-sea-level zones, and rarely reduces their own carbon footprint in meaningful ways. The gullibility lies in accepting apocalyptic framing without scepticism toward models that have repeatedly over-predicted warming or the feasibility of rapid transitions.
Identity-politics orthodoxies. The rapid institutional capture by DEI frameworks, gender ideology in schools, and "anti-racism" training regimes shows how quickly elite institutions can adopt untested, internally contradictory dogmas. Concepts like "white fragility," "decolonising the curriculum," or fluid gender as settled science, spread with astonishing speed through universities, corporations, and media, not because of overwhelming evidence, but because questioning them invites social and professional ostracism. The educated are peculiarly vulnerable to purity spirals: the higher the status within the knowledge economy, the greater the incentive to conform to whatever marks one as virtuous and enlightened.
Why this recurring gullibility? Several conservative critiques converge:
1.Over-reliance on abstract reasoning detached from tradition. Intellectuals often disdain inherited wisdom — customs, religion, common sense — as backward. Yet those "backward" heuristics have been stress-tested across generations. When you discard them for novel theories, you become easy prey for the next charismatic idea.
2.Status competition within echo chambers. In elite circles, being "ahead of the curve" confers prestige. Adopting emerging orthodoxies early signals intelligence and moral superiority. Scepticism, by contrast, risks looking stodgy or bigoted. The result is a cascade effect where bad ideas gain momentum precisely because smart people fear being seen as less smart.
3.Lack of skin in the game. Nassim Taleb's phrase applies perfectly. The consequences of bad policy rarely touch the people who advocate it most fervently. A tenured professor or think-tank fellow suffers little when crime rises after "defund the police" rhetoric or when energy prices spike under green mandates. The working class pays.
4.Hubris born of credentialism. Higher education increasingly rewards ideological conformity over intellectual courage. The result is a class confident in its intelligence but poorly equipped for doubt, nuance, or falsification.
From a conservative perspective, this is not anti-intellectualism per se. It is anti-hubris. Wisdom is not the monopoly of the degreed; it is distributed unevenly and often resides in the tacit knowledge of those who actually do the work of the world. The educated classes would do well to remember Burke's warning: the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, calculators, and economists has succeeded — and we know how that story tends to end: disaster.
The foolishness is not stupidity. It is a specific kind of cleverness unmoored from reality, tradition, and accountability. Until the educated classes recover humility, until they are willing to learn from the "uneducated" rather than lecture them, the cycle of fashionable error will continue. And the rest of us will keep paying the price.
Given this, it is high time the Australian freedom movement dealt with the question of the universities, whose lobby aided mass immigration and the accommodation crisis. Only this blog has systematically critiqued the universities and their foul deeds. It is the herd of elephants in the room.