More Corruptible

Eric Hoffer told Sevareid that intellectuals were the most corruptible type of human, more than businessmen, soldiers, workers, etc. I agree?

Why is that? Intellectuals, the pseudo-kind, are usually bureaucrats first: in church, schools systems, in government, in the university, etc. Being cogs in the institutional machine, they have had all the individualism bred out of them. Joiners are addicted to power and more fanatical. They can never regulate frree other enough, or make them conform enough. Their tyrannical power lust is a bottomless craving.

Add to this the historical fact that intellectuals were professors, scribes, clerks and clergy, they were part of the governing elite.. They see it as their right, their mandate and their noble calling to oversee and supervise the masses, depriving them of independent thought, self-reliance, individual, separate existence and liberty.

Soldiers, farmers, business people and workers, relatively speaking are not cogs in a hierarchical machine. Their more individualistic life style renders them more self-loving, so therefore more other loving, less inclined to tyrannize others at all, or to tyrannize them to the nth degree like intellectuals do when wielding police authority.

As one is individual, independent and success, this more moderate personality kind is less interested in power accumulation, in ruling others, in snooping into the affairs of others. Thus, power does not corrupt them so much.