Robert Nozick on the strong self-regard of intellectuals.

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. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that he was sure that history would be kind to him because he intended to write that history. That's why the intellectual class has such a high opinion of itself; they are the ones who write the opinions that are read. It's why kooky ideas are treated seriously like gay marriage, multiculturalism and global warming. Even after they have been proven disastrous in actual practice, socialism and communism are treated seriously because they are the means by which the intellectual class gains power and they can dismiss the actual practice and propound they theory where everything works as planned.