I speak from personal history, but it's really easy to take a bunch of theoretically smart, high-achieving young people, give them a singular purpose, and have them work in overdrive with a level of arrogance that fits their lack of wisdom. It's essentially exactly how Mao was able to create the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
Semi-counterpoint: the actually smart, high-achieving young people adapt to the status quo. The ones one rung lower, who the prevailing system cast aside for some deficit or other, begin their own independent revolutions (often at the margin of society, and achieving little).
The rubes who blindly join someone else's revolution are neither the smartest nor the most high-achieving; they're just... useful.
You're describing Yarvin. Smart, but not smart enough to make it in the mainstream because he has racist authoritarian leanings. So he was cast out of mainstream hacker culture to toil on Urbit and his dark enlightment projects. The rubes are the kids in TFA.
The Cultural Revolution did not have theoretically smart, high-achieving young people. Most of the atrocities were done by people who hated the "theoretically smart, high-achieving young people"
Not at all - I feel like you're saying that since the Cultural Revolution was anti-intellectual, it was thus against "theoretically smart, high-achieving young people".
But that analogy is even more apt for today - these young, energetic, just-out-of-school people want to tear down "elitist" institutions, just like students in the Red Guard did the same. One of the founders of the Red Guard who kicked off the Cultural Revolution was Nie Yuanzi, a Vice Chair of the Department of Economics at Peking University. I hope her Wikipedia page clarifies the analogy I was making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nie_Yuanzi
> Most of the atrocities were done by people who hated the "theoretically smart, high-achieving young people"
No, most of the atrocities were done to eliminate political threats by targeting everyone who had a semblance of power and did not fell in line. Academia was targeted not because of an anti-intellectual push but because they could counter the influence of the new totalitarian regime trying to establish itself. There's a good reason why the leaders of said authoritarian pushes were lauded as the brightest minds in the land, whose writings should be consumed with a religious fervor.
> And what power did most of these professors have if not their minds?
You're completely missing the point. Their academic careers put them in a position where their role was literally to shape and influence the next generation. As they were not fervent supporters, their role posed a threat to the regime. They could be profoundly dumb or grossly incompetent professors for what its worth. It's just that they didn't lockstep with the regime and the regime didn't wanted to risk it.
I think the current idea is for the violence to be done by prison guards in El Salvador. The kind of person that thinks SV "built the modern world", and that they're part of a new tier of human being for having gotten rich for stuff like having worked on a game for kids 11 years ago, and therefore are entitled to co-rule the world from now on, are just useful fools that help to enable that.
