Wolfe drew a sharp line between 'the intellectual' and 'the person of intellectual achievement' — and insisted they were 'very, very different animals.' People of intellectual achievement increased the sum of human knowledge. Intellectuals, by contrast, were a twentieth-century invention: ordinary storytellers who discovered they could achieve eminence simply by becoming morally indignant about some public issue. He illustrated this with Academy Awards ceremonies, where actors rose to microphones to express moral outrage, instantly elevated to the status of public intellectuals despite having done no mental work whatsoever. Wolfe quoted Marshall McLuhan: 'Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.' The attack was equal parts funny and serious — Wolfe was asking graduates to distinguish between the appearance of thinking and the reality of it.