Why did the Russian intelligentsia at the dawn of the twentieth century so eagerly join the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, calling for violence and justifying political terror? And why in the early twenty-first century has a significant part of the Western intelligentsia justified mass riots, vandalism, and the transformation of once-thriving cities into ghost towns with boarded-up shopfronts, overrun by vagrants and gangs? What is this mental stance: erudition, intellectualism, rationality—and at the same time, a pronounced hostility toward the rational, a thirst to overturn all values, to glorify violence and barbarism?

The common explanation is that mass movements, and those who incite them, are driven by irrationalism. The French philosopher and polemicist Julien Benda, in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), and the American thinker Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), both argued along these lines. [1] I would strongly disagree. One can hardly expect rational conduct from mobs smashing shop windows and torching police stations—but the Western academic world is largely guided by rational motives.

Two Forms of Rationality

Rationality comes in two distinct forms, or levels, clearly distinguished by Kant and, even more sharply, by Hegel: Intellect (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft). Tentatively put, Intellect is the analytic mind; Reason is the synthetic. In standard English translations of Kant and Hegel, Verstand is usually rendered as “Understanding,” but here I prefer “Intellect” to avoid the warm, everyday sense of understanding and to preserve the cooler, schematic connotation of Verstand.

Intellect, and accordingly intellectualism, point to the realm of abstract ideas, formal schemes, and cerebral detachment. The Intellect orders and structures the raw material supplied by the senses. It operates within a fixed system of coordinates—a closed rationality: dissecting, schematizing, categorizing. It tends toward dryness, abstraction, dogmatism. As Kant noted: "All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds thence to the understanding [Verstand], and ends with reason [Vernunft],  beyond which nothing higher can be found in us for elaborating the matter of intuition and bringing it under the highest unity of thought.” [2] Reason moves beyond the Intellect, embracing the living interplay of contradictions and the concrete wholeness of phenomena. In Hegel's conception, Reason is the self‑developing, dialectical faculty that finds in concepts and their antitheses not a rigid dogma but a dynamic source of self‑movement, open to the infinite. The Intellect functions according to established rules, aiming for what is "correct" and "proper" as though these were unique and exclusive. Reason seeks a truth capacious enough to embrace deviations from rules, the richness of life, and the freedom of spirit.

Already in Plato one finds the notion of a "narrow mind," excellent for certain practical ends: "Have you never noticed how a narrow mind flashes in the shrewd glance of an intelligent scoundrel—how impatient it is, how clearly its petty soul sees the path to its goal? It is the opposite of blindness, but its keen vision is condemned to serve evil, and it is as harmful as it is clever."[3] The Intellect, the "narrow mind," is not in itself evil—it may serve wholly benevolent aims. But what defines it is confinement to a practical goal, and mastery in selecting the means to reach it.

Between Intellect and Reason lies a boundary—the creative I. Everything up to that "I" belongs to Intellect; everything beyond it, to Reason. The task of Reason is to reunite what the Intellect has dissected. Even in the Russian raz‑um ("reason"), the prefix raz- ("apart") is present—but here it marks not the final outcome of analysis, as in ras‑sud‑ok ("intellect"), but the premise from which Reason begins.

Etymology underscores the distinction: rassudok derives from sud ("judgment"), not um ("mind"); it dis‑assembles and judges. Reason seeks to comprehend the whole. Pushkin observed: "Reason is inexhaustible in the combination of ideas, as language is inexhaustible in the combination of words." Vladimir Dal's Dictionary makes the same point: "In the narrow sense, mind or sense—Intellect (ratio, Verstand)—is the applied, everyday part of this capacity, the lower degree; the higher, abstract one is Reason (intellectus, Vernunft)."

The Intellect is the starting point; Reason, the point of arrival. When Socrates said, "I know that I know nothing," he used "know" in two senses: the first refers to Reason, the second to Intellect. By Reason, one knows that by Intellect alone one knows nothing. Consciousness here appears twice: as subject (Reason) and as object (Intellect). Thus consciousness contains within itself the conditions for self‑development: the knower and the known. One marathon runner remarked that if, during a race, he allowed himself for even a moment to feel his body, he would immediately collapse. To keep running, he relied on some other, stronger body that did not feel itself—a body that carried him to the finish. So too, we reach the essence of things by means of a "second rationality", Reason, that stays alive when the first—our Intellect—has exhausted itself and stands on the brink of incomprehension. Only a mind aware of its own limits can reach for the whole—and precisely because it knows those limits, it can transcend them. This is why, as Pascal wrote, "reason is never so manifest as in the consciousness of its limitation."

Ideology and the Cult of Suspicion

The dominant form of rationality among a significant portion of today's intellectuals—both in Russia's past and in the contemporary West—is that of the Intellect. This schematic, formalizing rationality permeates the writings of Marx and Lenin: rigid ideological formulas, absolute intolerance of dissent, obsessive enforcement of the party line. This same rigidity is evident in the doctrines of political correctness—rules about what may, and especially what may not, be thought, written, or spoken. The number of prohibitions far exceeds that of permissions. The Intellect, in its schematic and formalizing mode, naturally inclines toward the restriction of all that is spontaneous, living, growing. It manifests as total suspicion toward works of literature and philosophy—a "hermeneutics of suspicion," as Paul Ricoeur called it. Such works are regarded not as sincere searches for truth, but as disguised instruments of power, as stealthy mechanisms for defending the interests of one class, gender, race, or social group over others. The Intellect constantly seeks signs of ideology; indeed, ideology itself is one of the most stable forms of intellect‑driven thinking—a static rationality that constructs a master schema of categories and principles. At its center stand the interests of a supposedly "advanced" class, group, or nation, to which all "progressive people" must submit. The central question becomes: Who dominates whom? Power, supremacy, control—these are the blunt instruments by which the Intellect grasps the world.

Individual persons are flattened into group identities. Their unique singularity is erased. Over fifty years ago, Susan Sontag—a prominent cultural icon and champion of progressivism—made a statement that would today be considered emblematic of this approach: "The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—that eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, that has upset the ecological balance of the planet, and now threatens the very existence of life itself."[4] This idea has since become a central dogma of left‑leaning academic and journalistic thought. In the humanities, students are taught to appreciate complexity and nuance in texts—but the strategic end point remains unchanged: to condemn the author if they belonged to the "dominant" discourse and glorify those from "oppressed" groups.

Identism is the ideology of identity—the belief that a person is wholly defined by their group: class, nation, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, ethnic tradition, etc. What is most striking is that identism thrives precisely where it should be weakest: in intellectual inquiry, artistic creation, and professional ethics. Here, too, individuals become trapped in the loop of group self‑representation. The identist cares for nothing but identity, and will assess literature and science only in terms of the "contributions" of their co‑identitarians. In its latest form, this retribalization re‑creates a vision of cultural supremacy, ethnic exceptionalism, and the prioritization of one's group identity over any shared human values. "The universal" or "abstract humanism" is now treated with the deepest suspicion.

This worldview, narrowed down to identity alone, was once called multiculturalism—but that term, as it turns out, fails to capture the essence of identism, or identity politics. Multiculturalism, in its original intent, was tolerant, embracing cultural plurality and diversity. Identism, by contrast, preaches not so much the "multi" of multiplicity as the supremacy of one's own group identity. The "cultural" aspect of this ideology is equally dubious, since culture here has nothing to do with creativity and serves merely as a vehicle for expressing the same self-identical physical or social essence.

Alongside Identism stands a related phenomenon: Neo‑Chekism. This is a translation of the now‑common American political term woke—from "to wake," to be alert. Woke people are those who are always on guard (Russian "na cheku"), ever‑watchful, ready to denounce, cancel, and destroy the social standing or career of anyone who dares to deviate from the correct set of progressive dogmas. These "neo‑Chekists" are not direct descendants of the Soviet chekists (secret police), but share their essential function: vigilance against enemies of the one true worldview, grounded in class or ethnic identity. The result is a climate of suspicion and censorship: cancel culture, or more precisely, cancellation politics, where it is not culture but politics that is ultimately affirmed. Whoever watches, cancels. Whatever your accomplishments—in science, art, business, or sport—one poorly chosen word, one insufficiently progressive remark, can cost you your career, your reputation, your entire life's work.

Even former president Barack Obama, himself a progressive icon, has criticized the woke ethos: "Some young people on social media seem to think the way to bring about change is to be as judgmental as possible. If I tweet or hashtag about how you did something wrong, I can just sit back and feel pretty good about myself. Did you see how woke I was? I called you out!"[5] A prominent example has been the 'cancelling' of J.K. Rowling by transgender activists for daring to suggest that biological sex is not a fiction, and that "people who menstruate" are also called "women."

The Intellect, as the lower level of rationality, remains close to the sensual world—it classifies, categorizes, systematizes. Thus it distrusts anything outside the bounds of the material and tangible. It affirms only what is "given to us in sensations" (Lenin), and insists that the material is the basis for all that is ideal or spiritual. Neither Marx nor Lenin, neither Stalin nor the ideologues of political correctness, are capable of understanding anything living, joyful, lyrical, capricious, poetic—anything that slips past their schemes or escapes the grip of "useful" and "progressive."

Imagine such a mind—Marx's or Lenin's, or perhaps Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or Lida Volchaninova in Chekhov's "The House with the Mezzanine" (a forerunner of political correctness). Try explaining to them that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet, to them, would be a dithering weakling. Poetry, at best, would be rhyme in service of ideology. They lack that sixth sense once expressed by the poet Nikolai Gumilyov—executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921:

But what are we to do with the roseate dawn
Above the frigid, darkening sky,
Where silence reigns, and otherworldly calm?
What use to us are immortal lines of verse?
And so, century on century—how long, O Lord?—
Beneath the scalpels of art and nature both,
Our spirit cries, our flesh grows faint,
Giving birth to the organ of a sixth sense.

Those governed by the Intellect have yet to develop that organ. And that organ is precisely Reason—the higher faculty, capable of grasping the spiritual in both cosmos and human being, of self‑reflection, of emotion and inspiration. Reason can contemplate the unthinkable, explore the mystery of being, of non‑being, and of what transcends being—while Intellect idolizes its own categories: the idols of progress and reaction, of left and right.

Intellect and Religion

Intellectualism is not synonymous with atheism; it can just as easily flourish within a religious worldview. But when the Intellect turns toward religion, it treats it as a system of dogmas, laws, and codes of worship—a set of externally prescribed rules for piety. People of the Intellect are drawn to the doctrinal and ritual side of faith, the parts clearly regulated by canon and statute. Religious intellectualism is diverse, but one of its recurring forms is the elevation of Law over Grace—the belief in an unconditional causal connection between all events of the spiritual world, and that God, following a once‑and‑for‑all established rule, always rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked.

The biblical Book of Job is precisely about this collision: the believing Reason, which seeks to grasp the deeper design of God, and the believing Intellect, which offers a canonical explanation for the suffering of the righteous. In the end, it turns out that Job's "theologically correct" friends are wrong in God's own eyes, while Job is right—if only because he refuses to speak about God as if He were already fully known, fixed within an unchanging law. Job wishes to speak directly with God Himself.

The circle of people operating with ready‑made concepts—well‑versed in how to use them "correctly," but incapable of living thought—is vividly drawn in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Yuri Zhivago, physician, poet, thinker, is alone among his intellectually respectable friends—a modern echo of that same confrontation between the creative Reason of Job and the well‑bred Intellect of his friends:

Gordon and Dudorov belonged to a fine academic circle. They spent their lives among fine books, fine thinkers, fine composers, fine music—always fine, yesterday and today fine, and only fine—and they did not know that the calamity of average taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness. Gordon and Dudorov did not realize that even the reproaches they showered upon Zhivago were inspired not by loyalty to a friend or the desire to influence him, but only by their inability to think freely and to guide a conversation at will. <...> The mechanics of their reasoning were transparent to him, as was the shakiness of their engagement. But how could he tell them: 'My dear friends, how hopelessly ordinary you are, and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and artistry of your beloved authorities.'

The most common division of worldviews is still presented as "religion versus atheism," "faith versus unbelief." But there is another division just as crucial: "Reason versus Intellect." Those of the intellectual type, whether they belong to a church or to an atheist party, whether they honor the Bible or Das Kapital, share much common ground. The Intellect has passion, but no self‑reflection. It has consistency, but no depth. Whether believers or, more often, non‑believers, people of the Intellect are strangers to all that is poetic, mystical, or imaginative. They do not sense the irony of being, the jokes and sly twists of history. They live by schemas, emotionally charged to extremes—whether in the positive or the negative.

Intellect and Ethics

Another realm where the Intellect readily asserts itself is ethics, especially when it enters into an alliance with ideology. Dividing all people into classes, categories, identities—and then issuing moral verdicts on every individual based on their membership in these compartments—is a characteristic stance of the Intellect. Since the 1970s-1980s, ethics in some Western societies has growns ever more rigid and authoritarian, gradually taking over the role once played by religion, politics, or the justice system, with their stern demands and prohibitions. Corporations, public institutions, and professional organizations began to establish "ethics centers" tasked with monitoring employee conduct and resolving conflicts beyond the scope of legal jurisdiction.

In principle, ethics should serve as a legislator of society's inner life, softening the harshness of legal norms and strengthening the internal factors of behavior—acknowledging the diversity of personalities and the freedom of choice. In practice, however, ethics has started to turn into a police of morals, harsher precisely because it works from within. Each person becomes their own censor and inspector. Morality is undergoing increasing institutionalization, especially in educational settings.

Lev Tolstoy, in his 1860s essay "Education and Upbringing," remarked: "Upbringing is the elevation into principle of the striving toward moral despotism." [6] The most frightening thing that can happen to ethics is its enthronement as political power—ethictatorship. If once there was refuge from ideological or religious diktat in freedom of conscience, now the apparatus of control is embedded in conscience itself. Nothing is more immoral than the institutionalization of morality. The moralistic state may in fact be more dangerous than a theocracy.

Under the noble pseudonym of "ethics," ideology gains an even more convenient channel for infiltrating public consciousness. There is a simple arithmetic rule for distinguishing ethics from ideology:

• Ethics addresses the inner person, hidden in the depths of the individual: conscience, self‑awareness, guilt, the capacity for forgiveness and repentance.
• Ideology addresses the masses and collectives; it replaces conscience—not even with law or justice, but with moralistic mob justice, ostracism, cancel politics.

Where the uniqueness of the person dissolves into the multitude of the collective, ethics ends and ideology begins. This is minus‑ethics: subtracting from a human being precisely what makes them an independent, self‑valuable individual. No one should doubt that people of all social and ethnic identities—whether inborn or acquired—must be equal before the law and worthy of respect as individuals. But to reduce the individual to being merely the "representative" of an ethnic group, class, or gender—this is not the demand of Reason, but of the Intellect.

The ethic of the Intellect demands of people an impossible perfection: not a single word or gesture that could be interpreted as ambiguous. And since "ambiguity" is defined by the measure of others' sensitivity—and in our age of mass communication, that "others" can mean virtually the whole population of the planet—the potential number of the offended and the offenders is infinite. The demand for flawlessness applies, moreover, almost always to others, not to oneself—feeding resentment, hostility, and grievance, and leading straight into a social hell.

How the Intellect Thinks

The Intellect thinks in straight lines. It cuts reality into discrete segments, each neatly labeled and placed in its proper drawer. Its path is always the shortest between two points, the most "logical" and "correct" route—even if that straight line passes through the living heart of a human being. The Intellect is impatient with ambiguity, multiplicity, or irony. It demands clarity in the sense of finality: once a judgment is reached, it is fixed, like a verdict carved into stone. The fluid and the elusive—the half‑tone in a painting, the hesitation in a voice, the deliberate paradox in a philosophical aphorism—are, for the Intellect, signs of weakness or deception.

It does not so much seek truth as seek to bring every statement under an already existing rule. And if a fact does not fit the rule, then the fact must be ignored, denied, or reinterpreted until it does. This is why the Intellect can serve diametrically opposed ideologies with equal zeal: it is not loyal to truth, but to the consistency of its own schema.

In politics, the Intellect's thinking yields slogans, platforms, manifestos—simplifications designed to fit complex realities into the confines of a single marching chant. In art, it gravitates toward the programmatic: literature with a message, music with a function, painting with a manifesto attached. The Intellect is the natural home of bureaucracy—not only in government but in the mind itself: a bureaucracy of concepts, where every new idea must fill out its forms, pass through multiple layers of approval, and be stamped with the seal of ideological conformity.

Reason, by contrast, tolerates contradiction—indeed, it needs it, because contradiction is often the midwife of truth. Where the Intellect insists on the exclusion of opposites, Reason seeks their synthesis. The Intellect fears the unstable; Reason knows that instability is the condition of growth. Thus the most dangerous mind is not the ignorant one, but the hyper‑literate Intellect that has turned away from Reason: a mind armed with categories, impervious to doubt, and convinced of its own "logical" infallibility.

The fundamental operation of intellectual thinking is reduction: to reduce the complex to the simple, the higher level of organization to the lower. The same operation occurs among believers—this is called dogmatism, ritualism, the performance of formal procedures that supposedly testify to faith by themselves and lead to salvation. In Gospel language, this reduction of faith to external piety and ritual worship is called Pharisaism.

Indeed, the idols of the mind described by Francis Bacon are precisely the sanctuary of the Intellect. Idols of ideas, concepts, correct and all-conquering doctrines. The unit of intellectual thinking is the didacteme—an operational unit resembling an instruction manual. Everything can be arranged on shelves, distributed into categories. Qualities are abstracted from living persons and transformed into self-sufficient essences, set in binary opposition to one another. The Intellect operates through oppositions: "progressive-reactionary," "proletariat-bourgeoisie," "homo-hetero," "black-white"—in perfect accordance with the definition of Intellect as normative-schematic rationality. If opposition is the basic model of relations between social groups, then every person must inevitably identify with one of these groups. If the meaning of history lies in the confrontation (struggle, antagonism) between exploited and exploiters, or North and South, or East and West, or metropoles and colonies, then participation in history is possible only through self-identification with one of these groups.

The Intellect easily falls into dogmatism, and then thought is replaced by pathos and slogan. Theories are reduced to initial axioms that supposedly need no verification or proof, since they are "known to all." Nearly every article by Lenin contains the thesis: only a fool doesn't know this ABC truth of Marxism. From Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909): "...only the sensuous exists; there is no other being except material being. These are the ABC truths that have already entered the textbooks, which our Machists have forgotten." [8] And then follows an endless rehashing of this truth in infinite variations, without the slightest attempt to reflect upon or examine what is already "known to all." Such a thinker becomes an ideological priest or parrot, endlessly repeating bombastic tirades: the suffering people, the oppressed strata, surplus value, bloody autocracy, matter is primary. Indeed, intellectual thinking, despite its pretensions to being "scientific," is prone to obsession—thought becomes enslaved to simple schemas that acquire absolute power, paralyze the mind, and abolish common sense. As Agatha Christie observed, "Irrefutable logic is characteristic only of maniacs."

Irrationality and Intellectualism: Enemies and Traitors of Rationality

Returning to the nature of mass movements described in Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals and Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, one cannot deny that some of them relied on an irrational worldview. Fascism, Nazism, Russian Eurasianism and "Rashism," indeed all movements based on the cult of race, blood, soil, and national spirit—are deeply irrational. They oppose to the rationalism of "Western," or "white," or "non-Aryan," "Jewish," "capitalist" civilization the pathos of life instinct, will of race, voice of blood, spirit of soil, etc. The mass movements of the 20th–21st centuries traditionally labeled as far-right or fundamentalist, including neo-fascist movements in Russia and Europe operating in the name of "Arctogea," "Nordic Spirit," or "Great Tradition," are rooted in irrationalism, in purposeful mythmaking designed to the will of the nation.

But there are other mass movements, typically of the radical left variety. In contrast to the right, they rely on rationality—but of an extremely superficial, intellectual type. Why does the Intellect gravitate toward socialism? Because socialism itself, indeed any planned, centralized ordering of society and economy, is in essence intellectual. The Intellect cannot accept that life and humanity are imperfect, and seeks to eliminate everything that obstructs such perfection—everything accidental, exceptional, indirect and incorrect, which is to say everything alive. The Intellect finds the wide spread of possibilities unbearable; it wants to narrow the world down to a norm, to an ideal. The Intellect gravitates toward collectivism—either socialist or corporate, the dictatorial state or the state-church—because it distrusts the individual and freedom.

Thus we must distinguish between enemies and traitors of rationality. Fascism or mystical nationalism are enemies but not traitors of Reason, since they challenge it from the outset. But the radical left are precisely rational-traitors, because they betray Reason as the higher form of rationality while stubbornly following the dictates of ideology. In history it sometimes happens that the bearers of scientific-technical and socio-economic progress betray that very progress. Rational-traitors—scientists, politicians, corporate executives, managers, businesspeople, professors, journalists, computer specialists—are fans and instigators of political radicalism, ressentiment, vandalism, class or ethnic retribution. These are people of rational temperament, professionals of intellectual labor, infected and infecting others with an ideology of violence, negation of rational values and the foundations of civilization. Relying on the lower form of rationality, the Intellect, they betray its higher form—Reason.

The Rake and the Mirror

There are two emblematic tools of self-knowledge: the mirror and the rake. The first is the rake: to step on it and take the handle squarely to the forehead. This is how life shatters the self‑assurance of the Intellect, breaking apart even the most elegant of schemes.

In the mirror you see at once the familiar and the strange; you become both the subject and the object of contemplation. The mirror can reveal the limits of the Intellect without humiliating it—it offers a chance for self‑correction before catastrophe.

History knows many examples of societies that learned only from the rake: revolutions, wars, and collapses that could have been avoided had they only looked into the mirror in time. Reason demands dialogue with the unknown, patience toward the unclear and the ambiguous, and the ability to hold opposites without forcing them at once into the scheme of "winner takes all." Reason looks into itself, reflects upon itself, comes to know its own limits, and foresees in advance the paradoxical consequences of its actions. Pascal wrote: "The highest manifestation of Reason is to recognize that there is an infinite multitude of things which surpass it. Without such recognition it is simply weak. If natural things surpass it, what shall we say of supernatural things?" [8]

The authors of the 1909 famous collection Vekhi (Landmarks. Collection of Articles on Russian Intelligentsia) [9] urged the intelligentsia to throw off the yoke of the Intellect and to heed the deeper voice of creative Reason—a Reason that acknowledges the mysteries of life and the dangers of social engineering where intellect becomes the servant of utopian abstractions. Nikolai Berdyaev observed that "dislike for objective Reason can be found equally in our 'right' camp and in our 'left' camp"---that is, both in the Black Hundreds and in the Red avant‑garde. The other contributor to Vekhi, Sergei Bulgakov criticized the type of intelligentsia for whom "history is, most often, material for the application of theoretical schemes that dominate minds at a given time"—such is the "intellectual educated on abstract schemes of the Enlightenment."

While the Russian thinkers of Vekhi warned against rationalistic utopianism, a parallel critique emerged in the West. In the same year as Vekhi, 1909, G. K. Chesterton published Orthodoxy, in which he defended Reason and Christian values against the intellectualist, abstractly rationalistic, and thus anti‑rational ideas of socialism, materialism, and atheism: "For our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits". Chesterton lamented that "rationalism tries to cross the ocean and limit it. The result is mental exhaustion akin to physical exhaustion," reflecting that "Reason has been weakened by rationalism." [10]

The majority of Russian intelligentsia  continued to believe in revolutionary schemes—and fell victim to their own logic, of that very upheaval they themselves had prepared. It remains to be seen whether the West in the 21st century will not follow the same path of intellectual and then socio‑political self‑destruction. The Intellect stubbornly marches forward, following an unyielding dogma, and as a result receives the harshest, sometimes fatal blow. The mirror of Reason reveals not only the self, but the unfamiliar within the self—a tension the Intellect seeks to resolve too hastily. The more consistent the Intellect becomes, the more dangerous it gets. Such is the consequence: stepping squarely onto the rake—a final blow delivered by reality to Intellect that has severed its bond with Reason.

Endnotes