Ponder for a moment the sheer practical uselessness of intellectuals. They think, they talk, they write, they fret, but even if they wind up in political office, the actual WORK is done by other people. Their practical power is purely theoretical, purely abstract.
And I think this is the point.
Unprocessed trauma (our stereotypical egghead gets bullied, but the trauma certainly can stem from childhood or other trauma, such as a failure of maternal bonding) breeds intellectualism–emotional dissociation, detachment–which finds its natural resting place in places where abstraction is valued. If you look at a typical English department, or Philosophy, or Sociology, or Cultural Studies, or Linguistics, etc., what you will find is that they generate almost nothing of any practical use.
English, for example, might teach people to express themselves well, and in theory could help people learn to feel more deeply, but practically what seems to happen is that they are given an open license of open ended, completely useless navel ruminating. Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Ricoeur, Habermas: what fucking good are these people? If they had never lived, never written, what difference would it have made? Clearly, they would have needed to be invented to facilitate emotional avoidance through intellectualism, but the names and words don’t matter at all.
Here is the thing: actual, practical impotence leads to fantasies of power. It leads to fantasies of global government, global Fascism under some kinder name. It leads to the empowerment, in the abstract, of the intellectual, who by means of his or her ideas becomes not just relevant, not just important, but powerful. And from this they derive the sense of personal meaning that otherwise eludes them.
This psychological dynamic underlies most of the very preventable misery which happened in the 20th century, and which may yet happen in this century.
It is in my view clinically accurate to describe Leftism as a mental disorder.