53 Comments
Comment deleted
May 29, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I find myself in a similar camp. Was considered "gifted' in school but am by no means "brilliant". I think he touches on what differentiates a "midwit" from the rest of clear-thinking people who have above average intelligence when he talks about honesty and courage. Our working class background most likely engendered these qualities in us.

It's one reason why I feel more comfortable in a redneck bar than a hipster college bar. Why I was more comfortable among fellow Marines than when I was in university. These are places where I was with men who may have lacked intelligence, but had honesty and courage.

Virtue is key here. Intelligence is a dangerous thing to have if you do not possess it.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
May 29, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

You fail to mention religion. But then, you are probably one of those atheists and nihilists who thinks himself smarter than the other atheists and nihilists.

Expand full comment

By virtue, do you mean principles?

Expand full comment

A midwit is an intelligent person who has no principles, rendering him as easy to control as cattle.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
May 28, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

No, because I'm fairly sure I'm not a midwit!

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
May 28, 2023Edited
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as muscle for the Usurers, are responsible for the destruction of more white Europeans than any other race. Examples being the genocide of the Irish over 400 years; the massacre of your co-religionists the Boers; the starvation of the Germans AFTER both world wars were finished.

Anyone who spouts white racial superiority is a midwit.

Expand full comment

White supremacy is only supported by imperial supremacy. But all empires fall.

Expand full comment

Thank you,excellent article.

Expand full comment

At present, midwits occupy the lowest stratum of the intelligentsia, and so, like members of the bottom layer of any social class, live in constant fear of "losing caste." Paul Fussell, please call your answering service. https://extramuros.substack.com/p/college-and-class

Expand full comment

Happy to see a reference to Paul Fussell; it's been decades.

Expand full comment

Yes, a great essay. Thank you.

Expand full comment

No religion, no principles. Midwits are by definition liberals ie subscribers to the current political orthodoxy, which needs to be changed.

Expand full comment

Brilliant, especially the part about how midwits can't acknowledge someone as genuinely intelligent unless they hold midwit opinions.

The midwit can adopt e.g. a mainstream media talking point, or an entire ideology, but he can't defend or even explain it. It's like he's wearing an ornate hat but it's much too big, so he can't move naturally without it falling off.

Vox Day's Gamma category, in his sociosexual hierarchy, is usually higher than average IQ, so there's a lot of overlap.

Expand full comment

That's just saying midwits are liberals, and liberals only talk to other liberals.

Expand full comment

I've never really liked the midwit meme, because most politically engaged people are midwits, regardless of their beliefs, including people in fringe politics. The real problem is smart people who switch their brains off when they encounter any idea that's off the establishment's reservation. And if you're going to bake all kinds of non-intelligence-related terms into the definition of midwit, like courage or honesty, you might as well just say "dishonourable people," "cowards," "conformists," etc.

Expand full comment

Those would be separate essays. There is so much in the human condition to criticise...!

Expand full comment

What is the human condition?

Expand full comment

Politically engaged people are mostly terrified of being on their own, rejected by their political tribe. That's why they won't admit obvious truths or ask obvious next questions.

Expand full comment

For me, the defining characteristic of a midwit isn't their IQ but their overestimation of their IQ, as this manifests in their grating arrogance.

Women often think they're smarter than they are, I think because they're evolved to talk to small children and even a dumb woman is smarter than a 5-year-old. But apart from women, the midwit seems to occupy that zone of "top of the class till he was 18", just smart enough to get good exam results, not smart enough to get a 1st at a decent university.

Genuinely intelligent people are usually aware of how much they don't understand or haven't mastered. You find occasional casual arrogance among geniuses but if you think of e.g. Wittgenstein debating maths with Alan Turing, or logic with Bertrand Russell, at that level you don't strut around thinking you're smarter than everyone, because you regularly encounter your peers, or even those who outclass you (think of CS Lewis being trounced by Elizabeth Anscombe in a 1948 debate, for example).

Expand full comment

It's the same with musicians: highly skilled guitar players for example are typically full of praise and admiration for other skilled musicians and are invariably delighted to see someone doing something inventive or beyond their own capacities.

Wittgenstein was fascinating: on the one hand, I think he was more brilliant (in his field at least) than Turing and certainly the over-rated Russell, who could never grasp his later thought, and Wittgenstein knew this. On the other hand, Wittgenstein was full of self doubt and self deprecation all his life.

Expand full comment

Wittgenstein had an odd mind, he was inherently religious but also had an engineer's autism, one has the feeling he could have been so many different people. Nice to come across a Wittgenstein-knower in the wilds, a Purgatorio Canto 6/7 feeling.

Expand full comment

Dunning Kruger syndrome

Expand full comment

To be a midwit is to be someone prepared to toe the official line for fearing of ending up on the fringes of society.

Expand full comment

What I recognise from this great article is that a midwit is basically a typical narcissist.

Expand full comment

A midwit is someone prepared to swallow any official explanation however mendacious to remain mainstream.

Expand full comment

Superb psychoanalysis of the pseudointellectualism subverting our civilization.

Expand full comment

The matriarchy is subverting your civilisation, but no one wants to talk about it.

Expand full comment

Idk if I'd call it the matriarchy, considering the popular revulsion of motherhood. Maybe the nymphomaniarchy.

But I still think the Dark Mother Theocracy fits best.

Expand full comment

Matriarchy is a society prioritising the preferences of unmarried parents who casually conceived and parented their illegitimate offspring. (That's us in the West.)

Patriarchy is a society prioritising the preferences of married parents who want to properly parent their legitimate offspring.

Expand full comment

That's something different altogether. Patriarchy and matriarchy just describe a sociocultural structuring of a civilization/culture around either male or female clan leaders/heads of households, basically.

You also have the feminist-concocted caricature of patriarchy, where society is designed to give men power over women, but Idk what the words are for what you're describing. Although the Dark Mother (Cyborg) Theocracy narrative does address the issue of those pathological attitudes towards parenting and relationships.

Gynocentric is the closest thing I can think of, otherwise.

Expand full comment

Another part of the problem is that the system strongly and continually encourages midwitism and intellectual fads: the paradigm of this in the US is John Oliver, the Comedy Channel, and NPR, endlessly affirming the superior status of the in-group and low status of the out-group. They repeatedly mock the lower statuses and maintain and report the current rules and opinions required for continued membership of the middle tier.

Through these machines the system has become expert in quickly reacting to events and able to consign unacceptable and dissident views to the low status tier. Ukraine was their finest episode yet, I think. Elon is now repeatedly associated with Trump: he is now low status. The current wave of anti-trans activism will soon be vehemently consigned to low status. The midwits will fall in line. It works every time.

Julius Evola referred to this kind of behaviour as 'intellectual stupidity': "That which has been observed with regard to people who always follow fashion, also applies to today’s public: they are ridiculous from fear of seeming ridiculous. They passively allow their opinions to be prompted and manipulated, they do not dare to openly express what they think and feel for fear of being accused of being philistines or fools, once a verdict has been passed by the pontificators of “criticism” on such and such a work of contemporary art or literature."

Evola is right that our culture's obsession with intellectual fashions is not an arbitrary characteristic of the times: it proceeds directly from the rejection of tradition. I think one can sum it up by calling it the exile of wisdom and its replacement by mere intelligence.

Expand full comment

Unprincipled people no matter how intelligent will just sound unprincipled and mendacious because they demonstrate their willingness to toe the official line which they dare not question.

Expand full comment

Always a good day when Woes posts. Can't help but think of Pope's words here

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fir’d at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,

While from the bounded level of our mind,

Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But more advanc’d, behold with strange surprise

New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

Expand full comment

The traditional class structure contained the midwit by allowing him to perform a useful function that suited his natural competence, up to school head master, bank manager, etc. He understood his place in the hierarchy and was not free to entertain delusions of grandeur.

Expand full comment

Yes, that's a very good point. So much nowadays, we hear about how awful and stifling the class system was, and how awful it is that "people knew their place" - but actually it must have relieved a lot of people of the imperative to rise ever further.

Expand full comment

And of their opportunities to fall into purposelessness and its infinite miseries.

Expand full comment

When we imagine an army run on egalitarian principles, we would realise that this value of liberalism is fundamentally unsustainable.

Expand full comment

The egalitarianism of liberalism was a disaster waiting to happen, but questioning liberalism and representative democracy remains a taboo which midwits ie atheists and nihilists which the culture had produced dare not breach.

Expand full comment

I haven't yet read The Populist Delusion, but have read a synopsis and believe I have digested enough of AA's work to understand its key points. I believe that this dovetails nicely with those ideas, and demonstrates the main problems with democracy.

Midwits compose the horde of the managerial class and thus the middle class. They are the bureaucrats and yes-men. There was a video I watched recently that asked "why are the Middle Class so left wing?" And here we have our answer, I believe.

The midwit is an NPC and will follow the current zeitgeist. The elites in power set the tone for the midwit, and currently that elite is dead-set on a sort of globalist communism .Except it's not real "communism" of course, because such a thing was never intended to exist; it was always a means for the elite to consolidate power while convincing the proletariat that they were being empowered (as they were made slaves instead).

So there IS a solution to the midwit problem, but that solution means that the elite must be replaced (clear them out) with a truly rightist regime. That ain't going to be easy, but if the course of history informs us of anything, it's that the current paradigm cannot be permanent, and something's gotta give sometime.

Expand full comment

Midwits are just people who do not have the principle of submitting to Truth, Logic and Morality if doing so requires saying things that would be disapproved of by the establishment or your political tribe.

Expand full comment

I used to have amusing conversations with people like this (usually women) and enjoyed dropping the big one on 'em: Ph.D. in physics. Nuclear status weapon on the midwit. Their comebacks were usually something weak like "where did you go to school" or "why don't you have tenure."

The midwit (usually a woman or a reddit male with female hormonal profile) isn't interested in knowledge, doesn't understand much (probably knows it), and their "knowledge" (usually they're some kind of glorified clerk) is more of a Veblen good than anything else. It is of course why censorship is popular: you're taking their precious status away from them when they lose the argument. The historical way of getting rid of such pests is mockery. That's how they got rid of previous generation normies views, maybe starting with Upton Sinclair's Babbit. I figure these people will fall into line once their views become low status, which is a process presently underway.

Expand full comment