The Midwit Menace

It is sometimes said that our biggest problem, the biggest obstacle to saving Western civilisation, is the midwit.

The midwit has several attributes, but the one that gives him his name is that he is brighter than average. An IQ of 110 would make him brighter than 74% of people - the vast majority. Combined with his lack of humility, this gives him an inflated sense of his intelligence. He ceases checking himself for fallibility and soon believes himself brighter than, not just the vast majority, but almost anyone. This “knowledge” that he is very bright comes as a great relief to him, because he does, deep inside, have self-doubt - which he now sets about assuaging by behaving in a supercilious way wherever possible. He has something to prove. And that something is a lie.

His desperation to affirm the self-image he has reasoned himself into makes him very vulnerable.

If you are a snake oil salesman, you look for people who are desperate to buy something, anything. They have little discernment so will fall for your tricks. This is especially true if the thing you are peddling is fashionable, because that assuages any doubts they might have about its virtues. It’s fashionable, therefore they must have it.

In the same way, if you are a peddler of bullshit ideas, the way to sell them is to make them fashionable. Once this is achieved, your most reliable customers will be, not the dull nor the very bright, but those people in the middle who are just desperate to prove that they are not in the middle. They prove this by adopting fashionable ideas, and they pour scorn on their “inferiors”, who prove themselves such by rejecting fashionable ideas.

The midwit is bright enough to believe complex bullshit, but not bright enough to realise that it is bullshit. The complexity blinds him because it flatters him; it presents him with an opportunity to look intelligent. All he has to do is adopt the fashionable idea. All the better if he has to perform a few mental somersaults in order to manage it, as this proves (to him) just how intelligent he is.

What we have today is a lot of fashionable ideas which are fallacious, but complex enough to seduce the midwit. By being complicated, they are indigestible for the less bright, so are by default “luxury items”. The midwit absolutely basks in observing that his mental lessers cannot handle these ideas, because this proves his higher status. The trouble, of course, is that his betters will also reject these fallacious ideas, even though they are fashionable.

While his lessers reject bad ideas because they are thick, his betters have legitimate reasons for rejecting them. The midwit must never realise this.

Thankfully, he never will. This is due to some other traits of the midwit. After all, the term refers to a specific type of person - not everyone between 105 and 120 IQ, but an awful lot of them. The following traits are also required in order to be a true midwit:

• lack of courage

• lack of honesty

• lack of humility

• conformist

What makes the midwit such a menace is his utter inability to recognise himself as a midwit. This is because the traits that make him one are all traits that nobody wants to admit to having.

• nobody wants to be “above average, but nothing special”

• nobody wants to lack courage

• nobody wants to lack honesty

• nobody wants to lack humility

• nobody (especially if they are male) wants to be a conformist who doesn’t know his own mind and is given to following the crowd like a sheep

For these reasons, it is virtually impossible to persuade a midwit that he is a midwit. Even if he has never heard the term before, once you begin listing the traits, he will recoil and do anything to avoid admitting:

• yes, I’m above average, but nothing special

• yes, I lack courage

• yes, I lack honesty

• yes, I lack humility

• yes, I follow the crowd

The midwit is someone who can only be recognised as such by others, never by himself.

One other factor which prevents the midwit from realising what he is, is a truly demonic thing to behold. Because he has convinced himself, by embracing fashionable ideas, that he is very wise, he will not accept that anybody is wiser than him unless they also embrace those fashionable ideas. In his mind, that is the only thing that could prove the person to be as wise as him, let alone even wiser. But a person wiser than him would never adopt those bullshit fashionable ideas, so they would never appear in the midwit’s perception as wiser than him. Thus, the midwit is trapped in his midwittery: destined to reject enlightenment from people wiser than him, because he has a litmus test which disqualifies all people who actually are wiser than him. Moreover, that litmus test is intrinsic to his self-image, so he can never abandon it.

The midwit is a lost cause. He cannot be helped.

But he will never go away. He will always be with us.

This is a huge problem for two reasons:

1. the ideas which are fashionable in our age are mostly dreadful

2. a huge percentage of the influential people in society, including opinion formers and decision makers, are midwits

The midwit is also a character whose central conceit fates him to deceive himself regarding all the other traits which make him a midwit:

• he clearly lacks courage, but tells himself that, for defying the bigoted masses who reject his complex ideas, he must be courageous (“stunning and brave”)

• he clearly lacks honesty, but he can never admit this to himself, because then all the other delusions he has about himself would crumble. His self-image is dependent on him remaining continuously dishonest and self-delusional. Furthermore, the complex ideas he prides himself on holding will frequently jar with reality, so he can only maintain them by constantly being dishonest about what he is seeing in the world. The midwit learns to be dishonest, because it is the only way he can maintain his beliefs and his self-image.

• he clearly lacks humility, but tells himself that, for taking the time to “understand” and embrace complex ideas, he must be humble

• he is clearly a craven conformist, desperate for social affirmation, but on the metric of conformism he compares himself not to his peers but to the bigoted masses. For not conforming to their ideas, which are low-brow and simplistic, he is obviously a non-conformist, a brave trend-setter, an intellectual pioneer, a guy who knows his own mind, etc. He would realise how conformist he actually is were he ever to compare himself humbly with his betters, but that will never happen since, lacking humility, he cannot recognise his betters: since they reject his ideas, he sees them as morons.

Those of us who actually are intelligent, courageous, honest, humble and willing to defy the norm are in a war against a sea of midwits who believe themselves to be everything we are, and believe us to be morons. After all, we reject the fashionable ideas by which the midwit “knows” himself to be a genius.

In truth, he does not know himself at all. But he feels, deep down, that he is not a genius, that he is not courageous, etc. At a very deep level, he feels that his self-image is a mirage. He feels the insecurity, the constant war against reality. He spends every day frantically refuting the truth he feels: that he is, in fact, nothing special.

And that is why he hates us all the more.

There is one other point worth making in this regard. The midwit can be out-done not only by those superior to him in intellect, but also by those who are lesser than him in intellect but superior in courage, honesty or humility. The guy who isn’t very bright can see the truth that the midwit uses his brains to deny. And unlike the midwit, he is not inclined to delude himself by cowardice, dishonesty or vanity; he knows his place, and is comfortable with it, so can afford to just “call things as he sees them”. This happens frequently on social media. Perhaps the favourite pastime of the midwit is to talk down to such people, lecturing them on how they “just wouldn’t get it” because “you’ve probably never even set foot in a university”. A great deal of social media activity is this exact thing: midwits talking down to people less intelligent but more courageous or more honest than them - better people than them.

It is worth asking, why are we suddenly engulfed by midwits? Where did they come from?

The potential midwit has always been with us. With an intelligence-diverse group such as Europeans, especially Anglos, inevitably a great number will be in the middle and a great number of them will be unhappy about it. But in a healthy society, the ideas of the midwit would be benign, not the abominable ideas that are fashionable today and which reasonable, honest and highly intelligent people are compelled to argue against, thus coming into conflict with the midwit who inevitably defends them.

In addition, a healthy society lauds genuine intelligence, not the mere ability to pass exams or say “the right thing”.

In addition, a healthy society keeps intelligence in its correct perspective, rather than regarding it as a necessity in life (eg. “everyone must go to university”). Therefore, those in the middle of the range are much less insecure.

In addition, a healthy society protects against midwits rising up by denouncing the other traits which bring him about. It enforces standards of intellectual probity. It encourages humility. It celebrates courage and despises cowardice. As for his conformity, that is a general necessity that no society can afford to discourage, but if his other traits are discouraged, things should be okay.

It is when these virtues - courage, honesty, humility - become passé that the midwit becomes supreme. Of course, nobody would ever say openly “we do not celebrate courage, honesty or humility” - but the situation is plain to see by the number of midwits dominating discourse, undermining their superiors and talking down to the working-class.

And once the midwit dominates culture, he will deny the societal deficits that enable him to dominate, since acknowledging them would undermine his status and, in any case, these societal deficits reflect the personality deficits that he denies in himself. On the contrary, in a midwit-dominated society, it will be preached that “we celebrate courage, we treasure honesty, we admire humility” - all while these things are trodden underfoot on a daily, hourly, minutely basis.

But perhaps the worst feature of living in a midwit-dominated society, apart from having to endure the general atmosphere of refined stupidity, is how risky it becomes to try to put things right. The social penalties are often simply too great. Like the lion besieged by a pack of hyenas, anyone genuinely smart and honest will find himself swarmed by the vengeful mediocre, that is so much more numerous.

Experiencing this so many times is, of course, why we have so many variants of the midwit meme. Whatever the topic, he is there, believing some fashionable lie, preaching a rationale for it that he got from elsewhere, and ostracising those who disagree. It is staggering how easily he will believe what is obviously false, and how gleefully he will mock those who do not believe it.

Quality does speak for itself. That is actually the problem. Untutored, the mediocre reacts to quality with, not respect, but loathing. This fundamental truth of society, which is a fundamental truth of nature, is denied by the great lie of democracy.

I am not sure what the solution is. I think the masses ultimately respect power, and the midwit is, for all his pretensions, of the masses. But, while the low will sometimes respect straight talking and accept simply being told what’s what, the midwit will always fight against you if he can, so with him more than with the low, power is the only tool that will work. It is pointless trying to reason with him, trying to persuade him, trying to negotiate with him: you must walk straight over him like you would a loathsome bug. You must refuse to take him seriously, deny him the social status he believes is his. You must subdue him with contempt, defeat his mealy-mouthed drivel not with arguments but with force.

I wish I were talking about a tiny minority, but really it is something like 10% of the population, and most of the movers and shakers in society.

If you have greatness, be aware that you will also need ruthlessness. The ability to create is only protected by the willingness to destroy. Those masses who do not have the former will delight in using the latter against those who do, and that precious few are only safe if they can match the hordes pound for pound.