Smart people, evil regimes Tom Smith

A good question and worth keeping in mind at all times.  Also one that consistently gets my goat.  Some points:

• Unfortunately, we humans are almost unbelievably selfish and do a remarkable job discounting the costs others must endure because of our actions.  We find the pain of others easy to endure.  So why do intellectuals so often endorse evil regimes?  Partly because the cost to them if they are wrong is so low.  Does anybody hold the fall of Vietnam, the boat people, the reeducation camps, the killing fields against not just opponents of the Vietnam War but the many in the anti-war movement who supported the NLF?  Not that I am aware.  I am old enough to remember when defense and apology for the Soviet Union, if not quite Stalin, was absolutely the standard academic position.  Now we know that the USSR was pretty much an unmitigated horror of dreadfulness.  Any regrets from former apologists?  Nope.  And why should they?  There's no price to be paid.  If intellectuals had to put say a few thousand dollars of their own money on whether some regime was murderous or not, or had to forfeit a similar amount if say (on an option contract) more than 100,000 innocent people were slaughtered, they would be as discrete as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in their opinions.  Of course, such a contract would be almost impossible to structure and enforce; my point is the moral one.
• It's exciting, dramatic, literary and all that stuff to be an intellectual praising big political changes.  That's more important to many intellectuals than being right or doing any good.
• It is almost impossible to overstate the egotism and narcissism implicit in many of these kinds of people, who burn down houses in order to cast pretty shadows on the clouds.
• Intellectuals may be smart, but they are not smart enough to understand the complex dynamics involved in chaotic political change.  Many of them are great puff-upped toads of pseudo-science, such as Marx and for my money, the likes of Paul Krugman.  Beats the Hell outta me doesn't get you headlines.  Better to claim gnosis of world historical currents and occult forces.
• The Webbs and other Bloomsbury sorts were just a special breed of obnoxious.  It is probably wrong to imagine everybody remotely connected with Bloomsbury being deported to Bikini Atoll shortly before a big test.
• Another way to get intellectuals to be more considered in their opinions would be to deprive them of alcohol and drugs in the event they were spectacularly wrong about something of great moment.  Ideas have consequences.
• Should the neo-cons be included in the group of intellectuals who have caused great harm?  I guess we will have to await the results of the next war in the Middle East to know for sure.
• Global warming hysteria is a new wrinkle -- something so sophisticated and complex that it's hard to claim it's pseudo-science (though I bet it is or at least incorrect science), that also involves massive bets of other people's money, prospects and lives.  And of course, if it turns out all to have been bunk, it's not as if anybody who supported it will lose much, except all those idiots investing in green tech, though a lot of that is just to grab subsidies.
• Stupidity, greed, narcissism, ambition, pride and chaos explain a lot.