The nirvana fallacy is “is the … fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives.” Its natural breeding grounds are the academy, the punditry, and government, where there is no true accountability for the fabrication and application of destructive ideas.
I was reminded of this fact of life by an article at The American Spectator, where Matthew Xaio makes these observations:
Thomas Sowell, a renowned economist and social theorist, describes academia as “the natural habitat of half-baked ideas” in his book The Vision of the Anointed, noting that “the most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work.” So it’s not surprising, Sowell argues, that we “find the left concentrated in institutions [not just the academy] where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”…
It goes deeper that that, however, as Xaio continues:
[T]here’s a deeper psychological reason to consider, one that has been largely ignored by all but a few prominent scholars: the sense of authority and superiority conferred upon professors who champion liberal policies.
In The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell denounces a particular elite group consisting of left-leaning professors, policymakers, and journalists. He calls these elites “the anointed” because they anoint themselves as the rescuers of the “benighted” masses and are firmly convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority….
Similarly, [the late] Sir Roger Scruton, one of the most influential philosophers and social critics, noted that people who “think about politics in an intellectual way” are more likely to be on the political left because liberal policies allow them to assume “a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system.”
When commenting on the tendency of intellectuals to gravitate toward centralized planning, Scruton said, “It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world.” He added that “Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.”
Truth is found in the acid test of use, not in the pronouncements of academics, pundits, and self-serving bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci.