Midwit is a new pejorative in the online discourse wars—a very useful one, because it allows you to acknowledge the superficial intellectual appeal of your opponent while also positioning yourself intellectually above them. The midwit is not the dimwit. Unlike the latter, the midwit is intellectually curious. Perhaps he went to college, but he studied for a remunerative degree that taught primarily technical skills. This proved him smarter than liberal arts majors—he’s attuned to the hard realities of the world, the promises of money, and his intellectual freedom from ideologically conformist humanities classrooms—and yet he aches for the cultural and intellectual capital of a liberal arts education: great books, name-dropped philosophers, and social criticism. So he must search out an education on YouTube, podcasts, and Twitter personalities.
Indeed, being self-taught—or better yet, undertaking a pseudo-monkish quest to find “teachers,” usually with sterling academic credentials, through online media products—is, to him, an additional sign of his cognitive merit. This intellectual vanity is the constitutive element of the midwit, because what he enjoys is the appearance and the practice of intellectualism. What he lacks is actual discernment, which requires intellectual development and rigor. So he googles which books to read and has his mind blown at twenty-four by The Count of Monte Cristo and The Alchemist, but more likely, his bookshelf is full of titles about mindsets, egos, and habits. He takes his mind very seriously. He also takes his body seriously. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” as the ancient Romans said. Who better to trust than the Romans?
It’s fair to say that I’m describing a certain type of midwit. There are other types. Grad students are notorious midwits. Opinion columnists are midwits. Substack writers, including yours truly, are midwits. Perhaps it’s telling that we can form a hierarchy between dimwits and midwits but that there’s nothing above a midwit. Keeps you humble.
The midwit that I’m describing is almost always a straight, white man, one who feels deeply alienated, perhaps angry, at being called as such. Due to his opposition to wokeness and his faith in entrepreneurialism, his beliefs likely skew right-of-center, but he isn’t an all-out reactionary (though he probably won’t say what he really feels about trans people—who are more like his Jungian shadow than his opposite). He will probably admit that black people have it tough and that things for women have improved, even if he has complaints about feminism.
But his concern is always for men and boys. He must constantly talk about men’s mental health, positive masculinity, the ways that society fails men, and so on. Not only do these beliefs position him against the mainstream media, which, as he likes to point out, ignores these issues because they cut against liberal narratives, but they also are an exercise in gender performance for him. By talking about manhood, he becomes a man. By listening to him, you’re also a man. It’s a good bargain.
Enter the Midwitsphere
Joe Rogan is obviously the nucleus of what we could call the “midwitsphere,” but I think a better entry point is one step removed from Rogan, Chris Williamson’s podcast, Modern Wisdom. The title alone drips with midwittery, connecting a grand intellectual legacy with contemporary life. Modern wisdom is—and certainly Modern Wisdom is—the bro science equivalent of social criticism. It’s like stepping into a graduate seminar, but instead of misconstrued references to Marx, Freud, and Foucault, your intellectual foundation is made up of decontextualized behavioral economics concepts, evolutionary psych narratives, and Jordan Peterson’s guest appearances on Rogan. You can play fast and loose with history, culture, and social dynamics, because what you’re drawing on is nature. The truth is that he prefers nature because it’s far easier to understand.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Williamson is an exemplary midwit. Forgive me for getting into aesthetic analysis, but the aesthetics of midwittery are important because they both convey and put into reach the mimetic manhood always floating around this space. Williamson’s face is on the cover of Modern Wisdom. However cliché, one can only describe it as “chiseled”—indisputably masculine. One might also throw out the word “stoic,” the midwit’s favorite branch of philosophy, as it is the most conventionally masculine tradition. Williamson looks lean and young but still old enough to be taken seriously by his wise interlocutors and his yearning listeners alike. His squint conveys discernment—the pursuit of truth always in his line of sight. Equally relevant: he radiates a 90 IQ.
A quick glance at his background also makes clear why he is the exemplar. Williamson, 35, was a private school boy in England who went on to study business at a university, worked in nightclub promotion and modeling, and made his public debut on the reality show Love Island. But of course, he didn’t fit into the fuckboy box and ached for deeper meaning. In one episode of Modern Wisdom—which created and now runs full-time to pursue this deeper meaning—Williamson quite tellingly recounts how his current journey into the midwitsphere began was when he heard Jordan Peterson on Rogan’s show enjoin listeners to Tell the Truth. Indeed, the midwit is not totally cynical; he can be aggressively sincere, to the extent that his limited self-knowledge permits.
Williamson’s show is a collection of interviews with numerous guests. His voice is deep and collected; his accent impeccably British—the sort that comes off to American listeners as serious, manly, and smart. The guests feature academics, athletes, and entrepreneurs—“the greatest thinkers on the planet,” the podcast description declares. He has a preference for people who are conventionally successful, but more importantly, people who, after reaching the peak of success in their careers and personal lives, realize that noble cliché that something is still missing. That something is a philosophical truth, which is what the midwit is convinced he pursues. A podcast is a good form for conveying this sort of philosophical truth. It is the midwit form par excellence. It delivers intellectualism but without difficulty. You don’t have to earn philosophical truth or wrestle with it. You don’t have to do the reading. You don’t even have to think for yourself. You can be intellectually passive.
Equally notable among Williamson’s guests are the dregs of different online movements, most notably the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (Weinstein, Harris, Peterson, et al.). The affiliation with the IDW isn’t surprising, both because the IDW were all notorious midwits and because the IDW provided an intellectual or at least empathetic approach to the manosphere and its audience of mainly straight, white men, jaded by the ham-fisted threat of Tumblr-academic feminism. Williamson, though he derides the manosphere, hits some of the same notes and likely appeals to the same audience. Quickly looking through the descriptions of his episodes reveals a presiding concern with young boys, boys, young men, men, masculinity. Yet the derision of the manosphere is strategic. What better way to establish oneself as a true man than to call out other men as childish, on the one hand, or buffoonish, on the other? The midwit must be able to identify a charlatan—only not in the mirror and not among his friends.
This strategy informs the politics of both Williamson’s show and the midwitsphere in general. The midwit is necessarily a sort of centrist. He might be right-leaning; he might hold some left-wing beliefs too. But his intellectual vanity requires him to avoid any neat categorization. He, after all, is rational. He isn’t stupid. He isn’t a sheep. He can look at both sides and see for himself what is wrong. This means that he despises activist types (who are actual dimwits and graciously allow him to distinguish himself above them). He also despises mainstream institutions, which have been captured or corrupted by liberal narratives and concerns. As such, COVID, particularly the vaccine mandates, was a moment of “radicalization” for him. He looked at the data himself. He heard the risks of mRNA vaccines the mainstream media didn’t want to report. He did his own research. He trusts his own judgment and hates that others can oppose their will on his autonomy. This, after all, is key to manhood.
It’s unclear what you learn from Modern Wisdom. Much of the intellectual architecture is built around the usual culture war flashpoints: cancel culture, victimhood, dating, single-parent families, ad nauseam. This isn’t to say that you learn nothing or that the show is entirely vacuous. But the appeal of the show is a parasocial bonding experience: to feel included in the greatness and the profundity of its guests.
Too smart for school
I saw an Instagram Reel once—I’ll never find it again—of a job recruiter who explained to an interviewer that he automatically throws out all résumés from applicants with a 3.7 GPA or above. These applicants, he said, can’t think for themselves. They are hoop-jumpers, not creatives or risk takers. School only measured and rewarded their conformity.
The irony of this argument is that its audience, or at least the ones who approve of it, also can’t think for themselves. They look for someone they deem successful or qualified to flatter their self-conception in place of their teachers, who wrongly overlooked them and instead praised the “smart kids,” who were actually inferior. Hence, they can explain their lackluster performance in school as, perhaps, boredom because they were too smart or because they could see through the “meta” of school and found it useless and unconvincing. Or perhaps they will defer instead to studies that show how young boys’ innate wildness is incompatible with the disciplinary strictures of the school, which rewards girls. All of this may be true, but there’s a convenient scapegoat in all this. They weren’t dumb. They were failed.
This flippant disregard for formal education doesn’t stop them from admiring credentialed academics like Peterson and Steven Pinker. This also doesn’t stop them from elevating discipline into a religious virtue. Schools were anti-male because they exacted discipline from innately wild boys, but, ironically, the paramount male virtue to them is also discipline. As Peterson tweets (incoherently), “You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it.” On GymTok and other such online male communities dedicated to fitness and men’s health—always a petri dish of midwithood—you hear the bromide that discipline is more important than motivation. Motivation is fleeting and flimsy; discipline shows that you are not only an adult but a man.
But discipline without motivation is, in some ways, obedience without meaning. The midwit is someone who is, above all his pretensions, incredibly obedient. His fetish for optimization—which leads him to respect elite credentials and dumbass entrepreneurs and to routinize every aspect of his life—allows him to escape actual difficulty and rigor. What he seeks, after all, isn’t actual intelligence, which is earned, but the appearance of intelligence, which is learned. “The more one becomes a slave the more ardently one defends slavery,” René Girard writes. The midwit requires the recognition of others for his manhood, his intelligence, and his success. He hurts for their respect. And so he will do anything.
The appeal of the midwit
Midwits appeal not because they offer truth but because they flatter everyone’s vanity—those who look up to them, those who look down on them. As educational institutions flounder and dimwits gain in prominence, this adjunct educational space of podcasts, Substacks, and YouTube channels will continue to grow as they attract the intellectually curious but poorly educated and those who are hungry for intellectual capital to paper over their mediocrity. The hard truth of the American education system is that it’s increasingly delegitimated—more than likely the precondition for an extraordinary wave of privatization we’re going to see during the rest of the decade. And yet there are human needs—for knowledge, for recognition—that will seek some way of being addressed.
The midwit is also the most recognizable alternative to masculinity to the nu-male, soyboy, male feminist, or whatever you want to call it. As I have stressed, masculinity is mimetic, and young men, without the usual material or institutional markers of manhood (or at least their universal valuation), position themselves within a discourse of masculinity to build and affirm their own identities. The midwit preserves the male virtues supposedly lost in the feminist upheaval: self-discipline, religiosity, free thought, self-assertion, respect, and merit. That these virtues are laughably hollow isn’t something they perceive. They don’t have to. They’ve already bought in.
The midwit presents an important question: What does genuine intelligence mean? I’ve suggested throughout that it deals with difficulty, not mere vanity. But I also worry that intelligence, sans power, has no real purpose. Perhaps the midwit reveals that what is left of intelligence is mere vanity.
Good post. Charitable of you to offer a path to redemption to midwits who seek knowledge beyond the appearance of intelligence. As a midwit my greatest insecurity is being called out as a midwit. A key feature of the midwit style, as you’ve alluded to, results from being self taught. Once you’re deep in a job, especially if you have huge expenses (family, debt, house), it becomes difficult to spend the time and energy required to actually engage with new subjects. So you try to teach yourself, or more likely, adopt pre-formed opinions from podcasters and Twitter posters. Midwits know that we don’t know shit. The comforting delusion is in the promise that maybe, had things gone differently, we could have known something.
I definitely see a lot of myself and others in a new light. My personal experience of midwittery came from a place of studying the humanities at a big state university and feeling cheated and let down by the experience rather than studying something practical over the humanities. I probably envied people who studied the Humanities at better colleges the way many STEM guys envy people who studied Humanities in general.
My version of re-educating myself (hah) was more Chapo Trap House than Joe Rogan. Digestible marxism was the thing that made me feel "I'm getting the knowlege I missed out on in college."
Anyway, this feels very accurate, and I'm intrigued by the question you pose at the end. Do we begin collecting facts, knowledge, and authority figures because we associate it with power? And if it doesn't bring us power, just self-satisfaction, is it worthwhile?