Mediocre Man

Guest Post by The Zman

When trying to understand what has gone so terribly wrong with the Occident, observers often point to intelligence as the main driver. The populations of the West are getting dumber, so they are less capable than in the past. This is not to say there are no geniuses today or that there are fewer of them. It’s that their proportion of society is smaller than in the past. It is the smart fraction that is getting smaller. As a result, the progress of the West has slowed and may be in reverse.

The typical way this is explained is this way. Imagine a man dragging a sack of rocks down a road. If he is a large man and the sack has only a few rocks, he can drag the sack as fast as he could walk without it. If on the other hand, he is a small man and the sack has many rocks, he will move much smaller than his capacity. This will show up most prominently when his path is not clear. He may even come to a halt when he comes to a hill or a long incline.

Now, one reason for this decline in intelligence, is the mass invasion from outside the Occident over the last fifty years. Minneapolis is now a dysfunctional city because of the importation of sub-Saharan Africans. The sorts of people who think Ilhan Omar is a great leader will struggle with modernity. The reason these people are trapped in the Neolithic age is they lack the cognitive ability to go much further. California looks like Mexico because it is now full of Mexicans.

Another reason, and most likely the reason for the mass invasion from over the horizon, is white people are getting dumber. A quick look at what average students did in school a century ago makes that clear. Most college freshman would flunk this eighth grade exam or be so offended by it they would need counseling. Ed Dutton has written a book on this issue and continues to do videos explaining the topic. The short version is that white people have been in decline for a long time.

There is another aspect to this that does not get mentioned. That is, the smart fraction in the West may not have changed that much, but the middle fraction has grown rapidly over the last century. Better nutrition and education have swelled the ranks of the mediocre, changing the nature of our societies. Men who used to be supervisors on job sites now run offices. Women who volunteered in the community and kept a good house now run the nation’s human resource departments.

In other words, that man dragging the sack has not changed much. He is not as big and fit as before, but he is pretty close. His sack is larger and heavier, but he also has modern tools to mitigate much of it. He’s not moving anywhere near as fast as he could, but it is not the burden in the sack. It is the regulatory burden he must navigate to even pick up the sack. Around the superior man is an army of mediocrities with a myriad of rules and regulations governing the dragging of sacks.

Everywhere you go in the West, you are confronted with rules and regulations that make little sense at face value. Every business has to have people who spend their days keeping up with the rules, which change constantly. The “compliance officer” has taken the role of the ideological enforcer. Instead of making sure everyone is properly enthusiastic for the latest truth from the party, the compliance officer makes sure everyone is enthusiastic about following the rules.

These rules, of course, are the domain of the mediocre. Now, don’t confuse mediocre with average. Average people know they are average and accept their limitations, while the mediocrity imagines himself as an elite. Every “policy expert” in Washington is sure he knows more about his subject than the people who actually do the work. Every lawyer thinks he is Blackstone. Every politician thinks he is a great historical figure. The mediocrity does not know what he does not know.

This is the reason mediocrities love complex rules. The Mediocre Man loves rules for the same reason small children love large bulky toys. Just as the child lacks the fine dexterity and spatial awareness to manipulate small objects, Mediocre Man lacks the cognitive ability to act independently. He is a man who grasps the rail when going down a few steps, because that’s what you do. His mastery of the rules is proof that he is the smartest man in the room.

This is why the West is so burdened with elaborate and complicated rules that have no obvious point. It’s why Massachusetts now has a curfew to fight Covid. It’s not just that they think Covid is a night stalker, but that an army of mediocre men came up with a plausible sounding, but ultimately absurd, reason for the curfew. The mediocre men in politics, being mediocrities themselves, embraced it for the same reason a toddler picks up the big toy. It’s what makes sense to them.

Mediocre Man and his love of rulemaking is why we have a war on reason and observation in the West. Mediocre Man sees the rules against reading Table 43 of the Unified Crime Report and assumes anyone mentioning its contents broke the rules, which the worst possible crime. There are rules about what you can say about Covid, peace be upon him, so anyone not in full compliance, even if he is right, must be hounded out of polite society. The rules demand it.

None of this is to say that the mass invasion of stupid people and the decline of native intelligence are not factors. In fact, the domination of Mediocre Man may be another result of the Occidental decline. For the same reason we have allowed millions of barbarians to enter our lands, we have allowed Mediocre Man to take the controls of society and drive us into a jungle of rules. It is why Mediocre Man has locked himself in place by a form of regulatory capture.

Just as regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries or interests they are allegedly regulating, Western societies have been captured by those rule loving mediocrities they should be controlling. The smart fraction, like those in the classic science fiction story, find themselves the slaves of stupid people who think they are the masters of the universe. The problem in the West is that it has been taken over by Raskolnikov, who thinks he is Petrovich.

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