Intellectuals?

"The institutional world needs intellectuals because they are intellectuals, but it does not want them as intellectuals."

--Irving Howe, "This Age of Conformity" (1954)

'Because there are so many intellectuals',:
Let's try, for a second, to complete this proposition about American life.
For just a second. Corollaries. We'll try a few different ones.
What can we honestly adduce?
'Because there are so many intellectuals':

• NYRB runs in the black?
• Book readership something something?
• Movies and TV etc etc?
• Higher education uh bluh bluh bluh bluh?

There are over thirty times as many adult intellectuals in the United States today as when Irving Howe wrote the Partisan Review esssay quoted here. And yet for all this burgeoning culture of resistance and critique and intervention, and yet for all this analysis and systematization and decipherment and conjecture and avowal, for all this dialogue and diegesis, for all this effort, for all this habitual action of reasoned freedom--of liberty--are we not, truly and in the final instance, enslaved?
Books cost money, computers cost money, little garrets with ink-pots and ashtrays cost money. Benzedrine and matrimony and open-heart surgery and double-espresso and childbirth: you balk, it needles at you, you take on debt. You wear the yoke! Anyway, the only people moaning over it are intellectuals, thus Q.E.D.