The Correct Stratosphere
- Fred
- Aug 16
- 2 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
The Correct Stratosphere
Every scene has a hierarchy, and everyone in it is quietly convinced they've placed themselves correctly within it. Not consciously, usually nobody says it out loud. But watch how taste gets deployed. Say enough about what you dislike, in the right company, with enough conviction, and you've made a claim about status disguised as a claim about aesthetics.
Bourdieu named this decades ago: taste as distinction, a socially respectable form of contempt. Connoisseurship doing the work that snobbery used to do more honestly. It isn't cynicism to notice this, it's just how art worlds run.
But the more interesting failure isn't sociological, it's psychological, and it's why the hierarchy survives every generation that claims to see through it. Ask people to rate their own judgement, taste, or intelligence against their peers, and the majority place themselves above average, a mathematical impossibility for the group as a whole. This isn't unique to taste. It shows up wherever the thing being judged has no scoreboard. A sprinter finds out fast whether the self-assessment was right; a stopwatch doesn't negotiate. Taste has no stopwatch. Nothing external corrects the estimate, so it drifts upward, unchecked, for exactly as long as nobody says otherwise.
Nietzsche's contempt for "the herd" runs on the same uncorrected fuel: the conviction, never seriously tested, that the writer is obviously the exception rather than an instance of it. Every gatekeeper defending a hierarchy believes, usually sincerely, that their position was earned by judgement rather than assigned by the same reflex they'd criticise in anyone else.
None of this is really about one venue or one falling-out. It's what happens by default in any field where merit is supposed to be self-evident but is actually adjudicated by people with a stake in the verdict.
Which is the actual test worth applying, and it isn't rhetorical: not whether you feel above the hierarchy, but when you were last told, plainly, by someone with nothing to gain from flattering you, that you were wrong. If the honest answer is "not recently," that isn't evidence of good judgement. It's the symptom this piece has been describing.
