One of the most persistent and destructive forces in the political life of any nation is anti-intellectualism. As much as every society produces intellectuals of one stripe or another, it also produces a certain amount of anti-intellectual sentiment.

Often, this is directed both at intellectuals as individuals, and at intellectualism as a whole via its products, its establishments, its professions, and its affectations. No matter how enlightened or advanced a society might be, there is always the potential for and possibility of an outbreak of anti-intellectual sentiment.

It is worth noting, at this point, that in the history of the twentieth century, which saw many a bloody uprising of revolution, intellectuals were nearly always one of the first groups scapegoated and neutralized, if not outright killed. This is not just a matter of making life a little rough for quiz kids. At times, it has been quite literally a matter of life and death.

Being an intellectual myself, and having suffered that particular brand of individual anti-intellectualism known as “bullying” as a child, I have spent a great deal of time wondering why this is. What is it about intellectuals that creates such fear and resentment in others? What is it about the presence of a high IQ that makes so many people uncomfortable and unsettled? What do people have against us, anyhow?

And being of a particularly stubborn brand of intellectual known as a “philosopher”, I was not satisfied with the simplistic and dismissive answers I discovered when asking others about the subject.

“Jealousy” was often the first thing people thought of. But that simply doesn’t cut it. There are many reasons to be jealous of someone, but rarely have those ever coalesced into the sort of paranoid resentment that fuels political movements that anti-intellectualism represents as a historical force.

“Fear of the unknown” comes closer. We intellectuals are often nonconformists and come across as strange to the more average population due to the gap our intelligence create between us and others. We see things, understand things, and do things others do not, and this makes us stick out. But mere nonconformity does not quite explain the vehemence and pervasiveness of anti-intellectual sentiment.

No, the answer is simpler, more primal, and in some ways more shocking that the standard ones.

It’s about power.

And not just any kind of power. The power of superior intelligence is unlike any other kind of power, because intellect grants power that renders those with less of it are uniquely helpless against. It is a power advantage that is both hard to defend against and difficult to even understand.

Someone who is a great deal smarter than you can hurt you in ways that nobody else can. They can cheat you, trick you, mock you in ways you don’t even understand, manipulate you to their own ends or just for the hell of it, and the terrible truth is that there is very little you can do about it.

You cannot hope to meet them on their own terms and trust that you will be safe. They say they just want you to be reasonable, but that’s exactly what you cannot afford to be. Reason is their battleground. They have every possible advantage there. Like primitive peoples dealing with those from advanced cultures, average people can only possibly defend themselves by using irrational, unreasonable, broadly defined and perforce poorly thought out tactics that try to compensate for this wizard-like advantage the intellectually gifted have over them through force, suspicion, and mistrust.

It’s hard for us intellectuals to grasp the basic fact of how frightening an advantage that intellectual might gives to them, because most intellectuals have not met someone who has that same level of advantage over them. Individual intellectuals might vary by a notch or two on the IQ scale, but that is nothing compared to the qualitative gulf between those of standard intelligence and the gifted.

It’s not simply a matter of being able to do a little more than others. The power differential is not like the difference between being tall and being of average height, or even being naturally good-looking over having average looks. It’s more like the powerful and mysterious advantage an adult has over a child. To a child, all adults are magic, and they too often resort to unreasonable and irrational tactics in order to try to even the playing field a little.

Viewed from this point of view, the fear and mistrust of intellectuals by the public at large is entirely understandable, and even sensible in its own fashion. We might know that we are sweet and harmless, well-meaning peoples, but all it would take is one bad experience with the wrong kind of intellectual to make a person wary of us for their entire life, and they have no way of telling which one of us are good people and which might do them wrong in ways they can’t even understand.

So as prone as we are, as a group, to think ourselves the victims of an unthinking and jealous population who seem willfully insensate to the wonderful beams of enlightenment we wish to use to illuminate their lives, in reality, we are the ones in the position of power and we should really cut the average folk some slack. Give them some respect and understanding for the impossible position our intellectual gifts put them in. Do what we can to reassure them we are on their side.

After all, it’s the only intelligent thing to do.