Our postmodern society, a world of fabulous frauds, owes its crazed condition to a historically unique circumstance: the existence within it of a huge, autocephalous class of intellectuals. This oddity derives from two further anomalies. First is the production, in unprecedented numbers - both absolutely and relatively - of people who possess university degrees, regard themselves as intellectually sophisticated, and either work in higher education or take their lead from those who do. Second is a willingness to allow academics to build for themselves positions of near-institutional impregnability. Although not generally remarked upon, these twined peculiarities of the Western thought-world - its growth to vast disproportion and the heavy entrenchment of its academic core - comprise the taproot of our deepening delirium.
- Stephen H. Bach, "The Plague of 'Mind-Working'" in The New Criterion, May 2022
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