Partly this:
"...the penetrating clear-sightedness and benevolence toward humanity that intellectuals often claim for themselves by comparison with the benightedness of the rest of the population is at least sometimes—and maybe often or always—self-serving and mythical."
"The special ability to see beyond appearances that intellectuals like to congratulate themselves for possessing is, indeed, their raison d’être: for if they cannot perceive what others cannot perceive, what is their role? Whereas the simple-minded see in a massacre of priests only a massacre of priests, for example, intellectuals discern in it the operation of the dialectic of history, the imagined future denouement of which is more real to them than the actual deaths themselves, merely eggshells on the way to the omelette."
Plus, there is the idea that this kind of fantasy is a type of religious belief for the secular, godless, leftist masses. That's definitely something I have considered over the years. Leftism is a religion/cult.
