Good question. I dodge it in my recent companion article, "The Ancient Cold War Between Intellectuals and the Unreflective Masses" (link below).
What I say there is that it's hard to get over the ambivalence. Both sides, the intellectual elites and the unreflective masses fear and resent the other. Intellectuals have long been appalled by mass people, by "the herd" or "the rabble." But as Leo Strauss points out, the intellectuals need mass society too, which is why Buddhist monks wandered around, begging for food. It's the same with bohemian artists.
Certainly, I've shown my scorn for mass society in lots of my writings. I hold out a sliver of hope, though, for liberal humanistic society, with some transhumanist speculations.
To answer your question more directly, I suppose it's important for intellectual elites to stay humble. I aim to do this, too, in my writings, to deflate intellectual pretentions with some postmodern irony. That way, the cold war in question can seem like a tragic comedy. We needn't lose ourselves in one-sided zealotry since that would be a primitive bit of tribalism. The monks who begged for food were likely pretty humble, so they'd have had no basis for condescending to the unenlightened mob.
