The Tyranny of Midwits

A disappointing and frightening aspect of Britain’s descent into thought control is the number of willing apparatchiks happily enforcing the rules on expression. Who was the female cop who commented that the things and papers of the thought criminal being subjected to a home search were “very Brexity,” or during the arrest of gifted comic writer Graham Linehan, the cop who, in apparent sincerity, used the phrase “sex assigned at birth” in explaining the crime? And who willingly arrests people whose crime is to be openly opposed to the rape of British girls?

Here in the USA, who comprises the army of midwit twits who patrol Facebook and Google for incorrect thought as detected by badly informed AI modules? Recall during the national fiasco of COVID-19 the alarming number of people who delighted in enforcing mask mandates, vaccine mandates, closings and the suppression of impolitic opinions about policy or treatment options.

Do normal Americans really relish regulating each other? When did that happen?

How did we create hundreds of thousands of positions for DEI-designated thought police on every campus, corporate or government HR departments?

When we think about whether a system is totalitarian, we tend to look at the top figures to see what they do and what power they appear to have when maybe we should also be looking at the lower rungs to see what the system has caused/permitted to emerge. The Soviets had “block leaders” and empowered busybody old ladies by making them quasi-official informants. The Nazis had the rank of Blockleiter to deploy state power at the local level by spying upon and ratting out neighbors. East Germany combined the worst of both systems but more efficiently.

In the Western totalitarian model, the “cancel culture” paradigm allows for a much larger layer of busybody enforcers to pounce and also call forth a large coordinated body of attackers. Why would any normal, sane, balanced person want to waste time and risk emotional well-being to be part of that?

When we examine the impact of policies and ideologies on civil liberties, there is always the necessary high-level treatment of how courts and law enforcement agencies will deal with this or that new rule. But there also needs to be a level of analysis centered on the question Does this rule or policy value have the effect of encouraging and empowering insecure twits and complete [redacted]s to harass normal people for having and expressing normal thoughts and performing normal actions?