Knowledge is a despotic entity that rules absolutely and exiles any who dare challenge its precepts.

Though shah-like, its supremacy is not quite so oppressive as the reign of more corporeal potentates. Reason, the progeny of fact and honest questioning, can demand no slavish obeisance and makes no secret covenants. All who chose to follow its tenets must enter into a compact of their own accord and in full public view.

This system, the American ideal, is the height of morality, and as such, should prevail in all societal interactions.

Unfortunately, a culture of institutional-aggrandizement has risen to challenge the authority of individual ownership of knowledge. This is the academic feudal state that lords its advanced degrees and peer-reviewed papers over simple villeins and serfs, whose lack of formal indoctrination excludes them from the upper echelons of true intelligence.

This, truly, is the reign of Plato’s “philosopher kings,” who, with their own specially cultivated and endemic brand of thought, benevolently apportion out justice to the ignorant. And it is criminal.

There is an innate hierarchy to knowledge. But its imperviousness is underlain by a populist strain, for its tiers are defined by the extent of an individual’s volitional will to seek out and live within the bounds of empirical truth. But it can only exist when the individual is sovereign. True knowledge comes from examining the duality of ideas — the positive value and its relationship to its antithesis. If this honest questioning is dissuaded and ridiculed by institutionalized elites who claim some sort of superiority merely because of the prominence of their position, this atrophies and dies.

This system does not exclude academics from the pursuit of knowledge, but prevents them from being the exclusive proprietors.

Undeniably, certain scientific pursuits require a broader base of comprehension of certain facts. But, in no case, does it benefit any level of society if only those who have studied it exclusively are allowed to discuss the intricacies of a subject. Freedom of thought includes the ability to make deleterious decisions in matters regarding the self.

And honest brokerage, which can only be promoted through a free and open exchange of ideas, will promote true knowledge regardless of what the truly uninformed or perversely minded advocate.

Shays’ Rebellion, a minor uprising in Massachusetts, was the impetus behind the Constitutional Convention. The Federalists, who claimed federal power was too weak, exploited the fact that no national militia could be raised to fight the rebels, to usurp political power, and through duplicitous means, create a new government even though the situation was resolved quite effectively through private means.

This is an example of intellectual protectionism. Deceit and rashness precipitated political change and prevented any real judgment regarding the merits of the Articles of Confederation to ever really be made. Were the Articles flawed? Certainly, but so is the Constitution.

By doing this, a select group of elites, with some pretended special insight subverted the justice of the marketplace of ideas. By hoarding facts and lying to their constituents, they sold them into a state of ideological slavery from which they could not possibly hope to free themselves. They also circumvented ideological justice in regards to the merits of weaker national government, thus weakening their own position. No one can know whether a loose association of states is politically unsound, and this is a travesty to honest theorists.

The myriad consequences to this kind of ideological protectionism and elitism are clearly outlined in this real-life example. Logic bears out the notion that, because of the absolutist nature of merit, the lessons to be learned from this context are universally applicable. All that remains to be done is to turn words, ideas in this case, to deeds.