Wolfe told the Class of 2000 that this was the one thing he wished someone had told him when he graduated forty-nine years earlier. The observation was vintage Wolfe — a social critic's X-ray of how intellectual life actually works, beneath the surface of high-minded rhetoric. He wasn't attacking ideas themselves, but the way people wore them as status markers without examining their substance. The fashion metaphor was deliberately provocative: just as people chose clothes to signal belonging to a certain social group, they adopted intellectual positions — about cultural relativism, about American power, about the middle class — not because they'd thought them through, but because holding those positions made them feel sophisticated. This set up his central distinction between 'intellectuals' (people who speak out on topics they know nothing about) and 'people of intellectual achievement' (those who actually add to human knowledge).