How does a society with no widely shared vision of truth endure?
Last Saturday night, a 31-year-old computer science graduate—described by his professor as “a very good student”—checked into the Washington Hilton and attempted to assassinate the president of the United States and his cabinet.
Cole Tomas Allen had a job, was a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, and, by his own account, was acting on principle: the conviction that it was his duty to target officials he believed were destroying the country. Which is why the shooting he attempted is notable, not merely for what it was, but for what it represented: the logical end point of an education system that has mistaken zeal for truth.
Allen, after all, is only the latest highly educated person to attempt an act of violence. Think of the physics prodigy who perpetrated the December shooting at Brown University, or Luigi Mangione, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. One survey shows that Americans with graduate degrees are about twice as likely to support political violence as those with some college or less. The problem of determining what is true and false, just and unjust, has always plagued mankind. But if even those educated at the most prestigious universities feel sufficient moral certainty to commit murder, we must conclude that the problem has grown so acute that it is rotting the civilizational pillars of our existence.
And so, the question is not only why so many of our countrymen are willing to commit violence. It is why so many of the willing are so highly educated.
