ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Benjamin Y. Fong is a faculty fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, the author of “Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism,” and an editor at Damage Magazine

BENJAMIN FONG—The problem with the general view that intelligence will save us is that it involves pinning the failures of capitalist society on supposedly dumb people (them), who, so the logic goes, need to be replaced with supposedly smart ones (us). This is a spectacular delusion.