"Have the 'intellectuals' ever been the providers of 'change'? I dont think so.
To change society requires self-belief, emotion and guts, none of which reside naturally in the 'intellectual'."

YE GAWDS!!

Ake, you obviously know nothing about the foundations of the whole Rights of Man movement growing out of the Age of Enlightenment. And all of this actually started centuries earlier, during the reign of kings and emperors—an INTELLECTUAL movement!

INTELLECTUALS getting together in such gathering spots as coffeehouses in Oxford, London, and for that matter, Boston and Philadelphia and many other places and discussing the state of the world, and particularly the state of the way things were governed. And matters of fairness and equity in times when heredity was considered the only criterion for who should govern and determine the fate of the multitudes.

Have you never heard of Thomas Paine? John Winthrop? Roger Williams? Jean Jacque Rousseau? You can take it back to Plato and Aristotle, for that matter, but it wasn't until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that The Rights of Man really became a major movement, with an INTELLECTUAL base.

". . . self-belief, emotion and guts. . . ." Yes, of course. But that's the engine. And the engine will get you nowhere without the steering wheel. The INTELLECT.

Good grief, man, read some history. Read some philosophy. Read some political ethics!

Read a BOOK!

Don Firth

P. S. There is damned little intellectualism behind tyranny and greed. And that's a fact! All that's needed is a lust for power and a lust for wealth.