Machiavelli points out:
“They who lay the foundations of a State and furnish it with laws must, as is shown by all who have treated of civil government, and by examples of which history is full, assume that ‘all men are bad, and will always, when they have free field, give loose to their evil inclinations; and that if these for a while remain hidden, it is owing to some secret cause, which, from our having no contrary experience, we do not recognize at once, but which is afterwards revealed by Time, of whom we speak as the father of all truth.”
Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses (p. 11). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
This is why it took Buddhist rulers in the past to suppress such views among teachers. The problem is that, nowadays, the Buddhist countries don’t have such rulers, and are too interconnected with each other and with non-Buddhist countries, which is why we live in a kind of Buddhist chaos world which is quickly deteriorating.
It goes back to Western civilization (of course, these kinds of things can happen without the help of Western civilization, but with it, they are given rocket fuel).
Of course, given the chance, the “intellectuals” will always take up these views and make it their life’s mission to propagate them, as we see so many do. And the rest of us (which include all the regular people of average intelligence as well as the rare ones of very high intelligence - far higher than that of the intellectuals) will always be subject to their campaigns. That is why the Commentators had to be so exactingly thorough and specific, and why the Theravāda only accepted their official Commentaries, and so on.
Renaldo