Review of the work of Samuel Fitoussi, Why intellectuals are wrong, Observatory Editions, 2025.

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Samuel Fitoussi's book answers a question that everyone has already asked, as the phenomenon appears to be an anomaly and a scandal: why are intellectuals, supposedly the most educated and the most trained in critical thinking, capable of making the worst mistakes and persevering in them? And why do they never pay the price? One naturally thinks spontaneously of the left-wing intellectuals of the second half of the last century, of whom Sartre is the consummate model, since he supported all totalitarianisms: while accommodating himself very well to collaboration, he supported Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Iranian revolution. There is no doubt that he would have supported Islamist governments today. More broadly, the entire French intelligentsia was filled with admiration for the communist regimes, to the point of relegating to the ranks the rare lucid minds, such as Raymond Aron and Simon Leys, who was forced to pursue his career in Australia.

Let's face it: if the question matters so much to us, it is not for the pleasure of taking post-mortem revenge on this sinister clique, nor of substituting a damnatio memoriae to the veneration to which it is still incomprehensibly subject. It is because we would like history to serve as a teaching, according to its very vocation ashistoria magistra vitae, and prevents us from falling into the same ruts. Alas! The enthusiastic adherence of most intellectuals to woke totalitarianism appears as yet another repetition of this pattern. Everything is there, with the (admittedly immeasurable) exception of the gulag: Lysenkoism, false science that has become official (sex replaced by gender); the ostracization of dissidents (Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, Gilles Kepel, Céline Masson, etc.); the demand for “situated knowledge” (decolonial science, and no longer Aryan or proletarian science); a hypertrophied bureaucracy effectively spreading Orwellian newspeak (whiteness, heteronormativity, systemic racism, etc.); complacency towards a radicalism and violence that shake the foundations of democracy. It is to be hoped that those concerned will buy the book and reflect on it.

While Samuel Fitoussi's book suggests this parallel, it does not do so explicitly, nor does it adopt a pamphleteering tone. Drawing on numerous neurological, sociological, and anthropological studies, it adopts a cognitive approach. It starts from the fundamental distinction between two types of rationality: epistemic rationality (which makes us tend toward the truth) and social rationality (which pushes us to conform to society's expectations). Since time immemorial, man has always been led to favor the latter, so as not to be excluded from the group or put his life in danger. In other words, two tendencies compete within us: the concern for truth and the concern to be well thought of. And reason leads us not toward what is true, but toward what is judge true, or justified, at this or that moment. Furthermore, the intellectual is not judged on the validity of his ideas, unlike the baker who, if he makes bad bread, will be forced into bankruptcy. He is judged little on the objective merits of his opinions, and much on the opinion of others on his own. Moreover, he bases his social identity on his ideas, which is not the case for the baker or the cabinetmaker. But if the individual cost of error is low, its collective cost can be very high: the Nazi and communist dictatorships could not have held without the support of a complacent intelligentsia, to the point of being true "pedantocracies" (Bakunin). The intellectual spends his time rationalizing his errors: embracing a false idea, he constructs a demonstration a posteriori to legitimize it. Studies show that the most educated and intelligent people are the ones most likely to ignore conflicting evidence.

A large part of the book is devoted to analyzing the cognitive biases that distort our judgments. First and foremost, the bias of partiality: the more informed people are, the more polarized they are. And those who watch the news every day have a much more distorted perception than others, because everyone remains in their own bubble and sorts the information. As Pierre Bayle, a scourge of superstition before Voltaire, already said: "The obstacles to a good examination come not so much from the mind being empty of meaning as from its being full of prejudices." This bias itself can be explained by several reasons, including emotional comfort: we avoid confronting the most painful facts. Raymond Aron admits that he turned a blind eye to the genocide, and Merleau-Ponty writes: "We had secretly resolved to ignore violence and misfortune as elements of history, because we lived in a country too happy and too weak to consider them." The bias is reinforced by confirmation bias, which makes us inattentive to information that refute our ideas. However, if we sort through the information, we can find elements consistent with almost any theory.

Another bias particularly strikes intellectuals: the agency bias, which consists of seeing will where there is only chance or spontaneous order. Indeed, through their propensity for abstraction, they tend to minimize objective factors (physical, economic) in favor of purely ideological factors, and to exaggerate the weight of ideas in history. In other words, they overestimate the influence of moral paradigms on behavior, and underestimate that of infrastructure: sexual liberation is less linked to feminist ideas than to the widespread use of contraception. Seduced by a naive Rousseauism, they believe that man is good by nature and that it is enough to eliminate the causes of evil to engender a radiant world. It is up to them to develop solutions to definitively remedy all the imperfections of social reality.

The influence of the elite also spreads through prestige, which encourages the majority of graduates to commit the most egregious errors. There is a snobbery of chic error, which sends society the message "I am more loyal to the group than to reality." Thus, liking Duchamp's urinal or paying millions for a Jeff Koons balloon is a sign of distinction, in the Bourdieusian sense of the term, creating a Veblen effect: demand increases as the price rises. A century later, this results in miles of contemporary art museums filled with horrors.

Thus—and this is the most fascinating part of the demonstration—intellectuals are the people most likely to be wrong. This phenomenon is all the more worrying given that the number of graduates in Europe has increased twentyfold since the mid-20th century, and that they occupy almost all decision-making positions. When they are not in power, they control the media and determine the thinking of the entire population. Their influence extends in particular thanks to the illusory truth bias: by dint of hearing something (“I was born in the wrong body”), we consider it to be true. “An error that has fallen into the public domain never leaves it” (Remy de Gourmont). Even more so when these crazy ideas become academic disciplines, through what one might call an “institutionalization bias” (the word is not in the book). Peter Boghossian describes how the Fat Studies in the United States, in three stages. First, academics convince themselves that the negative perception of obesity is a social construct. Then they launch a journal, Fat Studies, with a reading committee and a board of directors. Finally, a new academic specialty is created, which disseminates "knowledge" throughout society. A mistaken opinion has been transformed into knowledge by a simple "whitewashing of ideas" (Bret Weinstein). Samuel Fitoussi proposes to amend Tocqueville's paradox by adding an epilogue: when the gap between reality and the ideal is almost closed, the situation continues to be perceived as intolerable; then, the pendulum swings back and we redouble our intellectual dishonesty to rationalize denial.

However, the deviant elite does not drag the entire population in its wake. On the contrary, its appetite for intellectual impostures mechanically widens the gap with ordinary people, who often feel they are governed against common sense, or living in a perpetual feast of fools, minus the masks and laughter.