I agree that what I call elsewhere the ancient cold war between the intellectual elites and the unreflective masses has always been asymmetric in that way. The intellectuals have always been in the minority and in the vanguard.
As I say in this article, though, I don't think it's just about IQ or even literacy. It's about character, mental illness, introversion, oversensitivity, antisociality, and so on. There are lots of alienating factors besides academia. Academic education refines the intellectual, supplying him or her with a wealth of data to chew on. But shamanic elitism was based on sobering, psychedelic experience.
I'm aware there are still some practicing shamans, but they're outliers in sedentary societies. Maybe neo-shamanism is needed to cure the toxic aspects of modernity, though.
