Prometheus Brings Fire by Heinrich Friedrich Füger

THE quaint notion that the intellectual is an enlightened guru leading the masses out of darkness cannot be seriously maintained. In the modern world, the intellectual is often a destroyer. His alienation from the ordinary person grows more and more pronounced.

At the root of their estrangement is this: the ordinary person needs something the intellectual doesn’t need.

He needs reality.

Falsehood and fantasies are, for one, expensive. Tell the plumber or the store clerk that reality is a figment of his imagination, a mere product of his thoughts; that there is no transcendent God and no absolute morality; that the past was a series of mistakes and cruel tyranny, and the plumber or store clerk will quickly run up an onerous bill. He can’t really afford the divorces, the drugs, the therapists and the purposelessness.

The intellectual supported by a foundation, a university, or a publisher, on the other hand, may actually be paid to be irrational. He can afford to abandon common sense. He can afford to entertain utopia. His mental work may also so satisfy that the simple pleasures of stability and routine lose their savor. He doesn’t need them to the same extent as the common man and he has more self-control anyway. Ideas, disconnected from reality, are the opiate of intellectuals.

The examples of intellectual destroyers are legion. Let me offer just one.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, head of the gender clinic of at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, is ostensibly a medical doctor but her primary field is in ideas. It is here she has had her greatest impact. Ideas motivate and drive her.

When a 12-year-old boy feels he would be happier if he was a 12-year-old girl then she helps him embark on a long road of expensive and painful medical procedures. What the boy feels must become physical reality. According to Olson-Kennedy her work is a “congregation [sic] of science and human rights and social justice and medicine.” Her patients are “chasing authenticity” and what she gives them is nothing less than a “second birth.”

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is a real life version of Victor Frankenstein, the character in Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name.

Frankenstein was also an intellectual who got carried away. At a university in Germany, the fictional scientist immersed himself in his studies of chemistry. He developed a secret technique for creating life from inert matter. Things did not go well. The human simulation he created ended up killing what he valued even more than science: his young bride.

Olson-Kennedy says quite openly that she is creating life.

Parents, the doctor contends, are not competent to make decisions on this issue. She (and her “husband”) tell parents that if they do not accede to their wishes for their children, their offspring will commit suicide. (See minute 12:45 in this interview.) The problem with parents, according to Olson-Kennedy and their like, is that they are too caught up in reality. In the mind of an intellectual unbound, the ordinary person just can’t past what is and always has been.

According to Olson-Kennedy, if an adolescent girl who wants to be a boy has “chest surgery” and later regrets her decision, it’s no problem. She can just “go and get them.” Excuse my bluntness, but for the ordinary person a decent pair of fake breasts is prohibitively expensive, not to mention a sad substitute.

The intellectual’s fantasies are oh-so costly.

Frankenstein was, according to Shelley, a ‘modern Prometheus.” Indeed the Greek god was another “Intellectual as Destroyer,” so enamored of ideas that he stole forbidden fire from Mount Olympus. The Promethean fire will ever tantalize the man or woman of mental gifts. Today, it is their many victims who are pinned to the rock.

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