Thanks poconopundit! Dostoevsky was a Christian intellectual who wrote about the darkness of power-hungry intellectuals. The Grand Inquisitor was the greatest expression of this, with Raskalnikof of Crime and Punishment coming in as a close runner-up.
I once read a Dostoevesky analyst describe his works as follows: when portraying intellectuals, D makes you feel how twisted and disturbed they were, while when portraying Christians, D made them resonate with mystical experiences. It made for painful reading whenever the scene involved an intellectual, such as the Grand Inquisitor or Raskalnikof, and it made some fascinating reading whenever the scene involved a Christian.
Our fake manipulative media fancies themselves to be intellectuals, whereas we see them as power-hungry control freaks. If D were still with us, he would portray them in the darkest light.
Well said!
Perhaps it's no surprise that Christians -- men of reason whose minds can fathom the laws of societal growth and decay -- are also the most receptive to mystical experience.
Maybe mysticism and reason are not at opposite poles after all! The power of great thinkers like Emerson, Alan Watts, and Wittgenstein is their ability to leap above reasoning to get a brief glimpse of God or the Great Wave that connects each of the tiny droplets.
When I read Leftist (fake) intellectuals, their writing doesn't unify thoughts or clarify issues: they usually just muddy things up. The same goes for a guy like George Will, who sounds smart, but ends up saying nothing profound. And perhaps this is why Will has been a fixture of Washington intelligentsia for decades: his mental processes mirror those of the nihilist Leftists.
As I researched this vanity, I came across a telling interpretation by Peter Brooks, a NYTimes columnist:
In that paragraph, I think Brooks has accidentally described Leftist intellectuals very well. They are only comfortable with ambiguity. They cringe at authoritarian answers. And truth is merely an open-ended dialogue by an anguished soul.