Thomas Sowell said "Politics is the art of making your self…

Thomas Sowell said "Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest." I interpret Plato as the innovator that created the first special interest group, the philosophers. For generations, intellectuals have gone to university purporting to investigate the proper ordering of society when they were really joining a gang designed to sap resources out of it. I want to take a moment to reflect on Plato and in light of some confusing observations I have made on the modern world. First I ask, why are conservatives so anti-intellectual? Or, one might alternately ask, why are intellectuals so left-wing when leftism is so absurdly stupid? I think in Plato we have rudimentary answer: intellectualism arose, naturally enough, among the stronger, larger, fiercer, and more intelligent upper class, the apex predators of humanity, and it arose, naturally enough, in service of an exploitative way of life. Plato may have been mistaken that men like him, a kind of cat without claws, could exploit the upper class through deception alone, but since his day intellectualism has been an invaluable tool of the upper class. As to the lower class, what do they need of intellectualism? What extra time do the have to unravel a Platonic fantasy that was set before them? Moreover, what profit would it be, given that obedience would be forced upon any who managed to take that time? I also see a potential answer to another longstanding question I have had, namely why are libertarians so ineffective about getting their ideas accross? Why do the keep trying to appeal to leftists who are quite worthelss as allies? Why have they made so little headway with conservatives even though libertarianism is quite good for conservatives? I think we can say that libertarians, while intellectually on the side of the lower class, have more in common with the upper class and, indeed, like many intellectuals, are idea-addicts who sabotage themselves with their desire to reside in a world of abstractions. Conservatives can see that they are addicts, why should they look into their ideas? Libertarians end up like cats who are trying to convince the other cats to give up their claws. Kind of a waste of time!