“Otherwise, intellectual curiosity and the capacity for analytical and abstract thinking are impaired or nearly absent.”
I’m 100% in agreement with your analysis.
I see these elitists as a low IQ cult of government trained monkeys who manage to master one or two skills, which is just enough to keep them from living under a bridge and howling at the moon.
A few days after an office space reshuffle in our department in the state capitol building, Tico, my most status-obsessed and aggressively conniving colleague, plopped before me in my office. After desultory small talk, he asked how a James Bond character might measure the relative size of offices on the floor at a glance without it being obvious what he was doing.
I suppressed my urge to laugh because I knew what Tico was up to. I was busy so I answered him straight. "Simple," I said. "Count the ceiling tiles in an office in both directions and multiply." He looked at the ceiling of my office and his eyes lit up. I sent him on his way as I got back to work on a file on my desk.
That same day, two colleagues came to me and described how Tico had gone into their offices on a pretext, chattered for a moment while glancing at the ceiling, and then left. I let my friends in on what Tico had been up to. Both immediately realized that they would soon have trouble because he regarded them as targets.
Tico, of course, outlasted all three of us in that department and did less work than anyone.