The learned should not—and cannot—be popular.
Virtuous, but not learned, is the pathway to the happiness religion brings—the poetry of religion and the religion of poetry, which transcends understanding, is a gift to those who don’t have time or circumstances to really study things (valley, cliffs, gorges) and understand.
It is against this backdrop that we make the bold suggestion: be wary of any learning which is popular—if it is, we have every right to question its sagacity.
Any so-called expert, any policy or philosophy, which prevails upon the public, and does so by claiming expertise, should be highly suspect, especially when it calls upon that same public to make sacrifices based on the learning which the advertised expertise professes.
The consciousness of a people is its final protection, and this consciousness must remain transparent and neutral, never giving in to the temptation which flatters it as more than what it is, in its floating but vital role as neutral perceiver. Infected with the pride of popularized knowledge (an oxymoron), mass consciousness, as much as any individual, will stumble into self-importance and delusion.
The learning which attended the polio vaccine, for instance, was not privy to the general public; a lone scientist, after much study, cracked a difficult, magnificent, and even outlandish secret. The idea of a polio vaccine did not become popular—the public was simply required to follow a scientific edict, and they did, for their own general protection and gain.
Contrast this with socialism. The knowledge which defines socialism, the future benefits assigned to it, is completely understood and grasped by a public enthusiastic for it, and which fully believes it understands its precepts. In this example of socialism, as opposed to the polio vaccine, learning itself is popular, and in this instance, dangerous. The public is not trusting to science arrived at by long study; the public is trusting itself to be learned and full of understanding, and this is precisely where neutrality of judgment is lost, and chaos and crisis are constantly close at hand.
The late sir Roger Scruton said capitalism and socialism are not opposites, any more than feminism and journalism are. You can have a feminist journalist; and, as he joked once, you can have “a capitalist socialist, which means they keep what they earn, but also look smart.”
Socialism is an “-ism” which tells the public it is smart. It makes us look smart, and also, empathetic, too, and it makes us seem so, right now, with a great deal of people all around us, all aware of how smart and virtuous we seem to be to each other—even if no one really knows anything, or does anything, about governing, but protests a lot in the street.
Governing came about, in actuality, a long time ago, by a few scientific, philosophical types thinking long and hard, perhaps when they were very much alone. The U.S. Constitution is science, not an “-ism,” which merely gives the flattering appearance of learning. It has nothing to do with you and your friends being smart and prescient and virtuous now. The Constitution was put together a long time ago. Even the Bill of Rights, a series of important amendments everyone talks about, were written a long time ago, finalized back in the 18th century, before Karl Marx, and his really smart facial hair, even existed.
There’s only one way to be smart. And like Lisa Simpson, standing in front of a blackboard which says, “Paying taxes to the government will not change the climate,” there’s only one way to be calm.