Intellectual sophistication can blind people to real political threats

Evidence

Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 259

Categorization

• QUESTION: What is it about education that suppresses accurate threat assessment — overconfidence, abstraction, or status investment?
• XREF: connects to: Public intellectual status can function as an evasion of rigorous political work; Intellectuals’ self-image as autonomous shapes ideology and politics.; Dehumanizing contempt can blind observers to the causes of squalor — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and…, 544 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Public intellectual status can function as an evasion of rigorous political work #expands (0.80)
• Dehumanizing contempt can blind observers to the causes of squalor #exemplifies (0.80) — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 544
• Intellectuals’ self-image as autonomous shapes ideology and politics. #expands (0.75)
• A dominant theorist’s blind spots can propagate through an entire field #corroborates (0.75)
• Genuine political knowledge requires sentimental connection between intellectuals and the people #expands (0.75)