{"id":528247,"date":"2025-06-26T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=528247"},"modified":"2025-12-26T16:27:41","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T15:27:41","slug":"intellectuals-samuel-fitoussi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/company\/intellectuals-samuel-fitoussi\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00abUnder certain conditions, intelligence predisposes to error\u00bb.\u00bb"},"content":{"rendered":"

French essayist Samuel Fitoussi publishes Pourquoi les intellectuels se trompent (\u00abWhy intellectuals get it wrong\u00bb)<\/em>, This is an incisive essay on the mechanisms that drive some brilliant minds to defend absurd ideas, with sometimes disastrous consequences.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Barely 28, Samuel Fitoussi has written a remarkable second book, drawing on cognitive psychology, sociology and the history of ideas. With a tone as rigorous as it is irreverent, he explores a contemporary enigma: why did so many intellectuals get it so wrong - particularly during the last century? And why do they continue, even today, to spread questionable ideas without ever paying the price for their mistakes? The columnist for Figaro<\/em> spoke with Le Regard Libre<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Le Regard Libre<\/em>The author of the dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell, whom you quote several times in your book, argued that \u00absome ideas are so absurd that only intellectuals can believe in them\u00bb. What was he referring to?<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Samuel Fitoussi: Orwell was right to observe that, under certain conditions, intelligence predisposes us to error. He himself paid the price. The British author couldn't find a publisher for his novel Animal Farm<\/em> because it was an anti-Stalinist satire. The Western intelligentsia, he commented, had developed a \u00abnationalistic loyalty\u00bb to the USSR. Even in the United States, major New York publishers refused to publish stories critical of post-revolutionary Russia, notably those by Ayn Rand. The same blindness applied to Nazism: Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and many academics actively supported Hitler. At the Wannsee conference, half the participants held doctorates. Later, the same elites became infatuated with Mao, including Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote an entire book in his honor. Fortunately, the intelligentsia didn't have the last word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You explain that these errors are linked to a conflict between two types of rationality: epistemic and social. How do you define them?<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Epistemic rationality is that which leads us to seek out what is true. Social rationality, on the other hand, makes us adopt the ideas that make us look good socially, i.e. those that are considered true by others. These two types of rationality are in perpetual competition within each of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You suggest that among intellectuals, social rationality often takes over. Why is this?<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Firstly, their cognitive abilities enable them to rationalize any belief, even the most false ones: where others would come up against inconsistencies, intellectuals manage to construct sophisticated reasoning to defend absurdities. Secondly, their ideas form the core of their professional and social identity - to question them is to risk their reputation, their network, even their income. And, unlike other professions, they generally don't suffer the negative consequences of their mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you mean by that?<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

A baker knows immediately if his bread fails: he loses his customers. A pilot who accumulates errors ends up crashing and dying with his plane. An intellectual, on the other hand, can sustain absurdities for decades without ever paying the price. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, because his predictions are often long-term and based on complex chains of cause and effect, they are difficult - if not impossible - to invalidate empirically. Secondly, the criteria for evaluating these ideas are deeply subjective: even when the failure of Maoism was obvious (famines, repression, tens of millions of deaths), figures like Simone de Beauvoir continued to praise it, in the name of a higher ideal that was supposed to justify the sacrifices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I imagine that the more secure the environment in which we evolve - typically in the developed countries in which intellectuals evolve - the more social rationality tends to prevail over epistemic rationality.<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Exactly. In a hostile environment, epistemic rationality is vital: your errors of judgment can cost you dearly, sometimes even your life. So, the more prosperous a society becomes thanks to rigorous ideas acquired with epistemic rationality, the more it begins to privilege social rationality... and to undermine the very foundations that made this prosperity possible in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n