It looks like, based on this part of your post...

But that pleasure in noting that the obvious was not always true became both a sign of being intellectual (as said before, a worthy goal), but a bit addictive in a social climbing way .... and a bit too much of a sign of superior thinking than it deserved. That is, a good mind with less-than-honorable goals of feeding their self-esteem and lording knowledge over peons helped create the pseudo-intellectual.

This false intellectual is very practiced � not at displaying a talent for discovering truth that seems counter to the obvious, rather, at making falsehood appear to the naive as truth.

...that who one labels as "pseudo-intellectual" will be determined by what one considers to be the "truth".