Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not

 

When Mental Parity
became a moral panic

Lionel Shriver portrays an ideology
of stupidity and the stupidity of ideologies

Greg Klein | December 26, 2024

 

 

This is the first of a three-part series. See Part 2, a profile of IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog.
See Part 3, a look at twisted egalitarianism in fiction and social control.

 

Evidence abounds of our super-not-OK culture of idiocy: politics, public discourse, social media, pop culture, the arts, all levels of education, social engineering, karenocracy, PC, DEI, SOGI, dysgenic immigration, dysgenic birthrate, special needs empowerment, elite flakery, underclass destructiveness, Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize—the list runs on relentlessly, but one more symptom could be emphasized: scant awareness of an obvious problem.

So here’s the first of a series about fictional portrayals, beginning with Lionel Shriver’s recently published cognitive dystopia, Mania.

Rebellion distinguishes the protagonist, who came of age struggling against her parents’ overbearing belief system. “The bedrock of who I am is rejection,” declares Pearson Converse. “I’m a construction of negatives. Where most people store their convictions, I stockpile what I don’t believe.” But years after fleeing to a wider world, her contrary nature softens. Then comes 2010.

And with it, the Mental Parity movement. Shriver presents an alternative history of those years, starting with “the last great civil rights fight.” Suddenly gaining near-universal support, a “newly minted anti-intelligentsia intelligentsia” takes on “cerebral supremacy,” “intellectual chauvinism” and the concept of “cognitive inferiority.”

Oddly, the ideological hysteria first finds expression in that archaic medium of a forgotten era, books. Social and mainstream media follow that phantasmagorical beginning.

The rabid perversion of egalitarianism isn’t all that fanciful but, unlike the many other causes converging in our real-life dystopia, Mental Parity replaces all others, even race. U.S. president Obama falls victim. “Nobody gives a crap anymore about his being a black president. He’s a know-it-all president. It’s death.”

Pearson experiences the madness at work where she’s supposed to teach English lit. Bright students have to hide their intelligence while she’s challenged by dumb punks, smug and surly with “the whole Western world” on their side.

Repression hits her family too. Pearson’s two genius children (spawn of a Japanese sperm donor father) stifle under the new regime while a third kid turns zealot, spying on her family and denouncing her mother like Tom Parsons’ totalitarian brat in 1984. Pearson’s husband suffers serious injury by a moron he’s forced to hire, then suffers more due to health care worthy of the Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine. Accusations of malpractice are now considered cognitive bigotry.

The Gleichschaltung affects everything, everyone, all aspects of life at all times. “There’s nowhere to hide. There are no spectators in this game.”

 

“Canadians, Irish, Kiwis, and Aussies were even more fanatical.”

 

Persons-retaining-expertise defect to Russia, which takes advantage of a mentally enfeebled American military to invade its neighbours; China strengthens its dominance over most other countries; language gives way to anti-cognitive Newspeak; books are banned and some games too; pop culture is expunged of incorrect themes, references and portrayals; hospitals are converted to morgues; new buildings collapse; trains derail; planes crash; fridges freeze cucumbers and melt ice cream. “Retard” becomes the new “nigger.”

So far, so disastrously bad. Eventually comes the catastrophe of catastrophes: “We crossed a line with the vaccines.”

 

“Social hysterias do not stand still. If they are not yet losing steam, they are getting worse. And this one was getting worse. Radical movements keep ratcheting up their demands, because nothing enervates a cause more than success.”

 

As all that’s happening, personal and family life come under intolerable pressure. Six years of MP drive Pearson into a fit of blasphemy. It costs her her job, husband, children and home. Yet she lives to see MP’s sudden downfall. True to form for this society, though, one stupid evil gets replaced by another.

That’s wrong, obviously. But obvious doesn’t stop Shriver from explaining it. Her people do so through tendentious little speeches and rebuttals that take the place of conversational dialogue. Not just detracting from characterization, all this violence against dead horses can make readers wonder: Does she think we’re stupid?

Furthermore the book often consists of a soul-searching diary or inner dialogue in which Pearson struggles to understand her relationship with her closest friend, Emory. This novel joins, unsuccessfully, two very different stories.

At times Shriver relates the human side of these circumstances, the vital aspect of any crisis. But in that respect especially, Mania pales in contrast with Shriver’s earlier work The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. Readers of that book—surely a classic of American literature—will find this one sorely disappointing.

Still, Mania presents lots of parallels to our own times, not just a period of flat-out stupidity but of ideological hysteria. Reading Mania is a bit like dimming the gaslight.

This is the first of a three-part series. See Part 2, a profile of IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog.
See Part 3, a look at twisted egalitarianism in fiction and social control.