Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not
Lowest common
dominator
A look at twisted egalitarianism in fiction
and as a means of social control
Greg Klein | January 6, 2025
This is the third of a three-part series. See Part 1, a profile of Mania by Lionel Shriver.
See Part 2, a profile of IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog.
Was it inevitable that the aggrieved—or those who manipulate them—would invent a foe called ableism? Kurt Vonnegut didn’t coin the term but he parodied the concept back in 1961, well before the idea entered the mainstream as anything but a parody. Very succinctly his short story Harrison Bergeron presents an anti-ableist regime that bans not just intelligence but every other above-average attribute.
Enforcing the stricture are no end of ugly, heavy, noisy obstructions (“handicaps”) attached to peoples’ bodies to mask good looks, thwart physical grace, defeat musical ability, prevent cogent thought and generally drag everyone down to the same miserable level. Different handicaps are imposed according to innate ability.
Among one guy’s apparel is an earphone (which he can’t remove without onerous penalty) that blasts loud, unpleasant and unpredictable noises every 20 seconds or so to confuse thinking and erase memory. His wife, on the other hand, “had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts.” That sure seems familiar.
Her husband also wears a 47-pound weight locked onto his neck, to bring his physical abilities down to the handicapped level. The ballet dancers they watch on TV wear those masks, weights, earphones and other handicaps to ensure a thoroughly incompetent, ugly performance.
Today’s entertainment stars wouldn’t necessarily need artificial handicapping gear—not since levelling became a successful showbiz strategy. In many cases entertainers’ popularity now derives from image, not talent. Fans often identify with unmusical “musicians,” for example, largely because very ordinary people can see and hear something of themselves in unaccomplished but famous individuals. Prior to Vonnegut’s story Fabian’s tuneless records were considered pop music oddities. After 1961, people like Bob Dylan could become pop music gods. More recently entertainment has celebrated crudity and grotesqueness to which anyone can aspire.
Inadequates with officially approved identity group status now benefit from DEI levelling at institutions like the Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine. But was such a successfully dangerous policy actually fomented by special needs folk? Or was it bestowed on them by an insane elite? If so, would that indicate hatred of excellence even among the upper class? Fear? Or just the strangely commonplace wish to destroy society?
Vonnegut’s characters include the U.S. Handicapper General, who enforces the levelling regimen. She’s outlined just briefly but nonetheless demonstrates a kind of resentful vengeance that brings to mind Canadian human rights commissioners.
The Handicapper General’s purpose, at least according to two of the story’s characters, was to end competitiveness. That motive might derive from social control or from resentment, although Vonnegut didn’t refer to either specifically. Resentment has since become a driving force behind the social revolution’s culture of grievance, and it’s a force manipulable by those who crave social control.
That’s exercised ruthlessly by the regime portrayed in Kay Dick’s 1977 collection of short stories, They: A Sequence of Unease. Apprehension wafts through these stories as artists struggle to work under impending assault that can be truly vicious.
Repression is often carried out by bands of militantly philistine cretins, modern-day barbarians driven to destroy what they can’t understand, let alone achieve. Encouraging them is a regime with a somewhat different agenda—to stamp out individuality. The stories express the artists’ need to create, the frustration of creativity in a debased society and, whether or not we’re artists, the pressure to conform, especially to rigidly enforced stupidity.
Even if circumstances differ, these stories present horribly uncomfortable parallels with our own times, including the drive to destroy normality as well as Western culture.
Dick’s artistry transcends many more-celebrated writers, yet she died in obscurity. In resentment too? That would have been understandable.
Here’s more about They: A Sequence of Unease.
Depicting stupid people might present difficulties for writers, who generally relegate such shallow characters to the background of their stories. As for some of fiction’s best-known dummies, they aren’t necessarily all that dumb, at least when they remember not to be. Bertie Wooster’s imbroglios show not so much an idiot but an innocent fumbling his way through adversity, although he prevails only with near-divine intervention. Debra Chase, Keith Waterhouse’s Bimbo character, keeps surprising readers with insight unbecoming her idiocy. Truly and consistently stupid TV morons like the McKenzie Brothers endeared viewers with their recognizable goofiness, but could sustain interest only for short skits.
But how might fiction portray a moron, a prominent moron, an insufferably stupid, incompetent moron who’s hypocritically slimy in ethical conduct and venal in human relations yet given a position of influence that’s detrimental to humanity but useful to the regime—for example, a Canadian journalist?
A novella entitled You Can’t Say That attempted just such a portrayal. Consider Toronto Star managing editor Mackenzie Taylor Mitchell as she composes a page 1 editorial following an incoherent announcement from Quebec’s leader:
“President’s address a searing indictment of white Anglo male bigotry,” she recited as a white guy quickly typed. “Quebec calls out to Canada but is once again rebuffed. Centuries of oppression, stuff about their national humiliation. Poetry in their soul. Betrayed by Anglicanism on the Plains of Waterloo. Here’s a really good one, maybe the headline: It’s no accident that Canada rhymes with Ku Klux Klan. You fill in the rest. Make it good. I hear they’re looking for guys at Chernobyl West.”
Verisimilitude? Maybe if you’ve known Canadian journalists. Deja vu? Maybe if you’ve read Canadian journalism. Or slice of life? Maybe Canadians are too mundane to be successfully captured by anyone less than Alice Munro.
But for comic verisimilitude, it’s a shame that the dialects in Idiocracy are distinctly American. So much of this 2005 movie could reflect Canada. Yet there’s no substance, just McKenzie Brothers-like familiarity (although hardly innocuous). It’s a fun dystopia to lighten apprehension of a future likely worse than the present.
The movie attributes the 2505 cognitive plight to dysgenic population growth. Most of the new-normal retards are white but a surprising number of actors are native. Presumably they’re not intended to represent natives but they still look the part. How did Mike Judge and company get away with that?
Among the movie’s few blacks is U.S. president Comacho, a WWF-styled cartoon with Little Richard and James Brown overtones who’s the highest-functioning retard in a totally retarded country. The ending implies America’s hope for the future lies in two partly black children.
Arthur Herzog wrote a black scientist into the research team of IQ 83, although as the story’s “stupid sickness” progresses he descends to a ghetto stereotype. In Lionel Shriver’s Mania, the English lit teacher faces a class of empowered retards except for four students, three of them women, two southeast Asian and, by far the brightest of them all, “the black kid with stupendous literary talent.”
No doubt Shriver, capable of very good writing herself, can catalogue black American literary achievement beyond James Baldwin.
Meanwhile somebody somewhere might have written a dystopian novel about Africa’s birthrate. Even though she mostly limited herself to economic implications, Shriver wrote a commentary on the subject in 2022.
Still, we have enough to fear from homegrown stupidity. Especially alarming symptoms include absolute morons holding powerful positions, real-life you-couldn’t-make-them-up retards like Kimberly Murray and Kike Ojo-Thompson. Very generously remunerated, they push a sick social engineering agenda on deferential, often demoralized and sometimes frightened subjects. In doing so, they serve their maybe not-as-stupid masters well.
This is the third of a three-part series. See Part 1, a profile of Mania by Lionel Shriver.
See Part 2, a profile of IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog.