Review of Samuel Fitoussi's book, Why Intellectuals Are Wrong , Éditions de l'Observatoire, 2025.
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Samuel Fitoussi's book answers a question that everyone has already asked, as the phenomenon appears to be an anomaly and a scandal: why are intellectuals, supposedly the most educated and the most trained in critical thinking, capable of making the worst mistakes and persevering in them? And why do they never pay the price? One naturally thinks spontaneously of the left-wing intellectuals of the second half of the last century, of whom Sartre is the consummate model, since he supported all totalitarianisms: while accommodating himself very well to collaboration, he supported Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Iranian revolution. There is no doubt that he would have supported Islamist governments today. More broadly, the entire French intelligentsia was filled with admiration for the communist regimes, to the point of relegating to the ranks the rare lucid minds, such as Raymond Aron and Simon Leys, who was forced to pursue his career in Australia.
Let's be honest: if this question matters so much to us, it's not for the pleasure of taking posthumous revenge on this sinister clique, nor to substitute damnatio memoriae for the veneration it still incomprehensibly receives. It's because we would like history to serve as a lesson, according to its very vocation as historia magistra vitae , and prevent us from falling into the same traps. Alas! The enthusiastic adherence of most intellectuals to woke totalitarianism appears as yet another repetition of this pattern. Everything is there, with the (admittedly immeasurable) exception of the gulag: Lysenkoism, a pseudo-science that has become official (sex replaced by gender); the ostracization of dissidents (Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, Gilles Kepel, Céline Masson, etc.); The demand for "situated knowledge" (decolonial science, rather than Aryan or proletarian science); a bloated bureaucracy effectively disseminating Orwellian Newspeak (whiteness, heteronormativity, systemic racism, etc.); and a complacency towards radicalism and violence that shake the foundations of democracy. It is to be hoped that those concerned will buy the book and reflect upon its contents.
While Samuel Fitoussi's book suggests this parallel, it doesn't do so explicitly, nor does it adopt a polemical tone. Drawing on numerous neurological, sociological, and anthropological studies, he takes a cognitive approach. He begins with the fundamental distinction between two types of rationality: epistemic rationality (which leads us toward truth) and social rationality (which compels us to conform to societal expectations). Since time immemorial, humankind has always been led to prioritize the latter, so as not to be excluded from the group or endanger our lives. In other words, two tendencies vie within us: the pursuit of truth and the desire to be well-regarded. And reason leads us not toward what is true, but toward what is judged to be true, or justified, at a given moment. Furthermore, unlike the baker who, if he makes bad bread, will be driven to bankruptcy, the intellectual is not judged on the validity of his ideas. He is judged little on the objective merits of his opinions, and much on the opinions of others. Moreover, he bases his social identity on his ideas, which is not the case for the baker or the cabinetmaker. But while the individual cost of error is low, its collective cost can be very high: the Nazi and Communist dictatorships could not have survived without the support of a compliant intelligentsia, to the point of being veritable "pedantocracies" (Bakunin). The intellectual spends his time rationalizing his errors: embracing a false idea, he constructs a demonstration after the fact to legitimize it. Studies show that the most educated and intelligent people are those who have the greatest propensity to ignore contradictory evidence.
A large part of the book is devoted to analyzing the cognitive biases that distort our judgments. First and foremost, the bias of partiality: the more informed people are, the more polarized they are. And those who watch the news every day have a much more distorted perception than others, because everyone remains in their own bubble and sorts the information. As Pierre Bayle, a scourge of superstition before Voltaire, already said: "The obstacles to a good examination come not so much from the mind being empty of meaning as from its being full of prejudices." This bias itself can be explained by several reasons, including emotional comfort: we avoid confronting the most painful facts. Raymond Aron admits that he turned a blind eye to the genocide, and Merleau-Ponty writes: "We had secretly resolved to ignore violence and misfortune as elements of history, because we lived in a country too happy and too weak to consider them." The bias is reinforced by confirmation bias, which makes us inattentive to information that refute our ideas. However, if we sort through the information, we can find elements consistent with almost any theory.
Another bias particularly strikes intellectuals: the agency bias, which consists of seeing will where there is only chance or spontaneous order. Indeed, through their propensity for abstraction, they tend to minimize objective factors (physical, economic) in favor of purely ideological factors, and to exaggerate the weight of ideas in history. In other words, they overestimate the influence of moral paradigms on behavior, and underestimate that of infrastructure: sexual liberation is less linked to feminist ideas than to the widespread use of contraception. Seduced by a naive Rousseauism, they believe that man is good by nature and that it is enough to eliminate the causes of evil to engender a radiant world. It is up to them to develop solutions to definitively remedy all the imperfections of social reality.
The influence of the elite also spreads through prestige, which encourages the majority of graduates to commit the most egregious errors. There is a snobbery of chic error, which sends society the message "I am more loyal to the group than to reality." Thus, liking Duchamp's urinal or paying millions for a Jeff Koons balloon is a sign of distinction, in the Bourdieusian sense of the term, creating a Veblen effect: demand increases as the price rises. A century later, this results in miles of contemporary art museums filled with horrors.
Thus—and this is the most fascinating part of the argument—intellectuals are the people most likely to be wrong. This phenomenon is all the more worrying given that the number of graduates in Europe has increased twentyfold since the mid-20th century, and that they occupy almost all decision-making positions. When they are not in power, they control the media and shape the thinking of the entire population. Their influence extends in particular through the illusory truth bias: by repeatedly hearing something (“I was born in the wrong body”), we come to accept it as true. “An error that has entered the public domain never leaves it” (Remy de Gourmont). This is especially true when these outlandish ideas become academic disciplines, through what could be called an “institutionalization bias” (the term is not in the book). Peter Boghossian recounts how Fat Studies developed in the United States, in three stages. First, academics become convinced that the negative perception of obesity is a social construct. Then they launch a journal, Fat Studies , complete with a peer review committee and a board of directors. Finally, a new academic specialty is created, disseminating "knowledge" throughout society. A misguided opinion has been transformed into knowledge through a simple "whitewashing" (Bret Weinstein). Samuel Fitoussi proposes amending Tocqueville's paradox by adding an epilogue: when the gap between reality and the ideal is almost entirely closed, the situation continues to be perceived as intolerable; then, the pendulum swings back, and intellectual dishonesty intensifies in an attempt to rationalize the denial.
However, the deviant elite does not drag the entire population in its wake. On the contrary, its appetite for intellectual impostures mechanically widens the gap with ordinary people, who often feel they are governed against common sense, or living in a perpetual feast of fools, minus the masks and laughter.
