Thread by @omni_american

"Intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom
to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism."

2/

"Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power; those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals.

3/

"From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held
that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons
to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves.

4/

"What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools.
... There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How
could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better. ... Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own
greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.
The wider market society, however; taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. ... Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the
intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority 'entitled' them?

5/

"Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals.