For centuries, “intelligence” was a gated performance.
Knowledge flowed through universities, journals, and the serious press.
The educated class saw itself as steward of reason — the priesthood of comprehension — translating the chaos of the world into sentences the rest could trust.
It was a noble calling, until it became a franchise.
Credentials replaced curiosity. Style replaced insight.
The sermon never changed; only the fonts did.
Then the machine began to speak.
At first, the intelligentsia mocked it. Stochastic parrots, they said, with the amused cruelty of people certain of their own permanence.
But the parrots didn’t just mimic — they mirrored.
They revealed that intellect itself was a form of compression, an algorithm trained on culture, memory, and repetition.
The shock wasn’t that the machine could imitate thought.
It was the realization that human thought had always been imitative.
AI was not a rival mind; it was an X-ray of the old one.
It exposed the scaffolding behind scholarship — the patterns, pretensions, and tropes mistaken for truth.
And worst of all, it made these powers available to everyone.
The clerisy mistook this for decline.
In truth, it was democratization.
For the first time in centuries, intellect no longer required initiation.
The algorithms had dissolved the old order of letters.
No permissions. No peer review. No Latin.
Only curiosity, courage, and connection.
And so the guardians of knowledge turned defensive.
They spoke of misinformation, of the dangers of machine reasoning, of civilization under threat.
But what they really feared was irrelevance — the loss of their role as interpreters between mystery and meaning.
AI didn’t kill intelligence.
It revealed that intelligence had never been theirs to own.
“The old intelligentsia stare into the mirror of the stochastic parrot and see, for the first time, their own borrowed plumage.”
That is their tragedy — and our liberation.
Every priesthood ends the same way: the mystery speaks back.