In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

by Joel Stein

Narcissism has been destroying truth. Liberals have been dangerously eroding the word truth when they use it instead of perspective or side of the story in the phrase “sharing your truth.” On college campuses, believing in science itself is questioned because it has been used by those in power to oppress others: phrenology to justify racism, nutrition to shame fat people, and psychology to institutionalize gays. In its place, professors teach truths based on personal narratives that can’t be questioned by people outside the author’s tribe because they cannot know the truth of that group’s experience. Scott’s two-movies theory is the reigning philosophic outlook. It was originally called perspectivism by Friedrich Nietzsche and it states that due to the limits of our dumb brains, we can only see from our point of view and not from an objective position, so truth is unknowable in a practical sense. Everything is equally true and false. Every fact is a cat in Schrödinger’s box. Or as Scott writes in his book, in an aphorism Nietzsche would admire: “Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.”