Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those were two cherry-picked examples of things intelligentsia got right. It was not a claim that they get everything or almost everything right. I generally share the author's opinions about intellectuals as a category, and the gold standard was, in my opinion, a particularly good choice of an example that intellectuals get right where the common man is often quite wrong. The same concrete connection to the real wor…
It's impossible to take you seriously when you use Stalin's Five Year Plans as evidence that "Intellectuals" are negative. That's a flawed argument on so many levels: 1) It's ridiculous to conflate modern science and Stalin. It's worse than ridiculous. 2) Even if you can somehow convince yourself that it's reasonable to treat Stalin and modern scientists as a homogenous pool, Stalin's actions worked out quite well fo…
First of all, I absolutely place Communism in the domain of "intellectualism". The only reason to do otherwise is simply because it failed and you don't want the stain of Communism on the word "intellectualism", but there is no other reason. It was, and remains, an intellectual-driven movement, since Communism is hardly dead. It is impossible to understand it from any other point of view. There were no Communist revolutions I know of led and driven by "the people". There were no Communist revolutions I know of where "the people" ended up in charge, rather than an intellectual who drove it. It started with intellectuals sitting around and theorizing, and was continued by other intellectuals taking the theories as truth and then trying to put them into practice despite the complete lack of evidence in their favor. (One can't help but feel that the fact that it flatters their egos played a significant role.) If there weren't communist intellectuals still running around today, I would let it go, but it is absolutely one of the things I had in mind that are still alive that should have died decades ago.
Secondly... Five Year Plans are alive and well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China And I hear the phrase from other places every so often as well. The idea that you can make grandiose plan years in advance is hardly dead. (The word "grandiose" is not extraneous. I have multi-year plans to pay off my mortgage, for instance, but that's not "grandiose".) While I fully intended the Stalinist overtones, the general criticism is about glorious planning disconnected from reality, which many large institutions (governments, corporations, etc.) become prone to.
Finally, you missed the true core of the post, which is that I have contempt for so-called intellectuals who react to the failure of their theories by clinging to them all the harder. One of the things about being an intellectual is that you have the mental firepower to rationalize harder than the common man, and I have contempt for those who use their mental firepower that way. Words and theories must not take priority over the facts on the ground. That way lies madness. I do not theorize about how that way lies madness because I need merely look out at the facts on the ground and see a wide variety of "intellectuals" propounding insane theories with epicycles piled on epicycles that they should have given up decades ago, some of which have had devastating consequences on the world. For instance, I lay the bulk of the blame for the obesity epidemic on certain intellectual's disastrous failure to notice how blindingly wrong their theories about healthy eating were when the evidence was staring them in the face (and gut, and thighs, and heart, and cholesterol, ....). So if I seem a bit incensed about false intellectualism, it's this sort of thing that leads me in that direction. Most fat slobs you see waddling down the road next to you are caused by false intellectualism by my reckoning.