Intellectuals and creation of the political order.

Here's an interesting thought about the endless capability of collectivists, statists, liberals, communists, progressives, and fascists to be wildly wrong about political matters and hence court disaster in their policy prescriptions:

Intellectuals since the so-called Age of Enlightenment have theorized that political societies are merely projections of ruler’s minds and that a ruler, or ruling intellectual elite, can make of a society whatever it wishes. Liberal-progressives’ atheistic materialism leads to their faith that whatever exists is the product of rational minds and, therefore, rational minds can change things at will in order to perfect them.

No weight is given to historical precedent. There is no sense that political order is the product of centuries of accumulated adjustments and understandings among people who constitute the society. There is no sense that societies do not survive without a set of core beliefs and principles to which almost everyone subscribes.

"Unwritten Constitutions." Thomas E. Brewton, The View from 1776, 1/27/06.