I used to have this issue, and it helped me a lot when I read Masses, Elites, and Rebels. Having spent a lot of time thinking about it because certain relationships in my life were rapidly deteriorating, I’m way more able to have constructive conversations now because I have a much stronger belief in the need to empathize with people and understand that even among academics it’s deeply questionable if they’re really treating it as a properly intellectual subject versus just behaving in ways that are rewarded, that functions as a sort of personal and social survival strategy for themselves, which is something that everyone, myself included, does.