I am an intellectual.
There, I admit it. I get paid to write for a living, and before that, I got paid to research, write, and brief political candidates. Before that, I was paid to persuade people through words and writing. And before that, I was a college instructor.
I've only worked two non-intellectually-focused jobs: pizza delivery and camera sales, although you might call my two summers selling Pepsi and popcorn at University of Arizona football games in high school a job, so perhaps three is the correct number. Only one of those jobs lasted more than a few months.
Most of the rest of my years on this earth have been devoted to intellectual training, either in college or graduate school, where my studies focused on philosophy and politics. My life skills amount to...well, I can drive, so that counts, I guess. But ask me to manage a household budget, and you have exceeded my skill set.
In other words, to use the terminology common enough among the intellectual set, I have lived the life of the mind, which is a pretty high-minded way of saying that when the apocalypse comes, I will be among the first to be eaten because I am useless. I was raised to be a member of the elite, went to elite schools, taught at elite schools, and most of my life I have participated as a (dissident) member of the elite.
I don't make elite-level money, but members of the elite like money well enough; however, social prestige is not attached to it in any practical way. The starving artist or aspiring novelist is likely a member of the Western elite.
If you have read my pieces, you are aware that I am quite hostile to our current elite, but I am actually a defender of the need for an elite for civilization to flourish and leave a lasting impact on the world. 2500 years after the collapse of Classical Athens as a political power, we still model our most prestigious architecture after the Parthenon, and no college education is complete without Aristotle's Politics and Plato's Republic.
Socrates argued that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and I used to believe that wholeheartedly. But as I spent more time around people in my class, I realized that this is a rather cramped understanding of what makes for a good life. Plenty of people—the vast majority of people, actually—live what intellectuals would consider the "unexamined life," and in many ways these are the people who make society work and thrive. And, if they embrace the good things in life, such as family, friends, and community, their lives are often happier than those of intellectuals who are inclined to fret and overthink everything, and to devalue most things other than intellectual attainment.
"Elites instinctively want to advance policies that serve people like themselves, which requires using narratives about people like themselves as the basis for the policy." https://t.co/4n6ZNMbRNd
— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) October 27, 2025
Intellectuals look down on those who make their lives of the mind possible. Intellectuals, with the exception of engineers, who are often considered almost tradesmen rather than true intellectuals, only exist because economically successful societies produce such great surpluses that they can afford to pay people to just... think and write. Aristotle understood this, and he formulated it in a way that is often misunderstood: "Man is a political animal."
By that, he didn't just mean that we must engage in politics, but rather that to fully realize our potential, we must live in functioning communities that allow us to do more than just subsist. The good things in life stem from our living in communities with divisions of labor that produce surpluses, allowing us to pursue activities beyond hunting and gathering.
A properly useful elite doesn't model or measure its society by whether everybody else mirrors themselves, and Oren Cass's essay linked above hits the nail on the head. The American elite finds America wanting because everybody else isn't just like them, and they want to remake America into a place where the measure is the extent to which everybody either is like them or exists to serve them.
The practical arts are beneath them, and to have a son who becomes an electrician is a disappointment. This comes out in the stories they tell about themselves and their lives.
Cass shares his experience from participating in a conference called "Democracy 360," where a bunch of intellectuals were discussing the state of American society:
Yoni Appelbaum’s grandfather was a mailman. Appelbaum shared this fact with me in Charlottesville last week, onstage at a “Democracy360” event hosted by the University of Virginia and cosponsored by The Atlantic, where he is an editor. We were there to talk about “building the American dream” and, by Appelbaum’s account, being a mailman was once a way to do that. “He was proud of that job. And it was enough, together with my grandmother’s job, that they could buy a row house in Canarsie and raise a family.”
That was not, however, the point of the story. Rather, Appelbaum wanted to emphasize that his grandfather:
didn’t, though, hope that his son would grow up to be a letter carrier. In fact, when he retired from the postal service, what he did was he went and enrolled at night school so he could earn the university degree he’d never had a chance to have because, from his perspective, the American dream included education and included access to ideas, to culture, to art, to the things that a kid who grew up in the circumstances he grew up in didn’t have when he was a kid, but maybe could earn over the course of his life.
The letter carrier’s son, Paul Appelbaum, went on to Columbia College and Harvard Medical School, with a stint at Harvard Law School along the way, became chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and served as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Paul’s sons, Yoni and Binyamin, attended Ivy League universities themselves, became published authors, and write for The Atlantic and the New York Times, respectively.
That’s wonderful. I’m happy for the Appelbaums, truly. But does such an anecdote provide a basis for defining the American dream broadly or, as was the context for this story, asserting the universal importance of traditional higher education? No. It only underscores the enormous problem of survivorship bias in our political discourse.
Applebaum assumed that the measure of whether society is successful is how far up the elite ladder one can climb. To intellectuals, this assumption is natural, which is why so much effort has been put into universalizing college education. Obviously, the more people who go to college, the better, because the life of the mind, as they think of it, is the standard.
Upon reflection, though, the idea is absurd on its face, although it explains so much about what is wrong with policies elites pursue. Unlimited immigration is necessary because we need people to "do that job that Americans won't do," despite ample evidence that Americans WILL do them if you pay fair wages. Unlimited immigration suppresses wages (supply and demand, folks), and our elites broadcast to everybody who goes to college that they are better than the plebs, so both money and prestige signal that to be worthy, you must be elite.
Women shouldn't want to be merely a homemaker, as if raising a family is just daycare. Go to college, and then work a corporate job, and be angry you aren't the CEO. College is the key to prestige.
What does everyone else think? We should probably ask them, which is what American Compass does, though surprisingly few other institutions seem similarly interested. Which is a more important purpose for public education: helping students develop the skills and values needed to build decent lives in the communities where they live, or helping students maximize their academic potential and pursue admission to colleges and universities with the best possible reputations? By 71% to 29%, parents choose helping people to build decent lives. By 80% to 20%, young people say the same thing.
If policymakers would have created one of the following options for your child upon their graduation from high school, which do you most wish would have been available: a 3-year apprenticeship program after high school that would lead to a valuable credential and a well-paying job, or a full-tuition scholarship to any college or university that your child was admitted to? By 57% to 43%, parents choose the 3-year apprenticeship.
“Most people would agree that schools should treat students fairly and give them all the best possible chance at success,” we explained to parents in the American Compass survey. “But people often disagree about how to do that. Some believe that schools should use tracking to offer students different pathways based on their aptitudes and interests. Others reject the idea of tracking and say that schools should set a goal of bringing all students along to the same end point, which is typically preparation for college. Which is closer to your view?”
We got the single most lopsided result we’ve seen in five years of polling. Fully 86% of respondents preferred “high schools should offer families different tracks to choose from, which would place their children in different courses. For instance, one track might focus on college preparation, while another would focus on technical skills and workplace experience.” Only 14% chose “high schools should try to keep all students on the same track and in the same courses, with a goal of preparing all students for college.” Among middle-class families, 95% chose tracking. Half of the respondents saw the term “diverse pathways” instead of “tracking.” This made no difference.
Most Americans, but not Team Life-of-the-Mind, recognize that the choice is not really between tracking or no tracking. Unless the plan is to hire every student an individual tutor, tracks will always exist. The problem today is that we have just one track, the college track. It may not feel that way for those well suited to that track. But it sure as heck does to the majority who fall off. Indeed, if we want to “avoid” tracking by having just one track, lest we bifurcate kids at a young age, the only fair solution would be to place everyone on a non-college track. Focus on helping everyone develop skills and values to build decent lives in the communities where they live. And if that doesn’t work so well for some of the more academically inclined students, well surely they can figure that out after high school is over.
Our elite—the ones who, not coincidentally, design our educational system and set the policies—have aimed to recreate themselves. We don't have educational institutions from K-Post-secondary education designed to help most people succeed in life, whatever path they choose. We have a system that is labeled a failure if you are not "college-ready" instead of "life-ready."
As for those who go to college and get a degree? Many are employed in jobs that don't need them, and many jobs that "do" need them shouldn't.
The current Western elite designs everything to cater to themselves and attempts to reproduce itself in everybody else, despite the fact that most people are neither inclined to nor could possibly be members of the elite class. But since the elite live in a bubble where the people who DO things are nearly invisible or are servants, it doesn't occur to them how destructive this tendency is.
That's why you get Angelinos complaining that ICE is driving away their gardeners.
Cass's essay is well worth reading. I think it touches on an essential truth about the Davos/WEF/TDS class, which is repelled by the plebs.
