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.
Thanks! I wonder if there’s a distinction between midwits who know they don’t know shit and midwits who are unself-aware. It’s the latter I’m more concerned with and find more annoying. But you’re right that the intellectual difficulty I advocate for is something that assumes you have a certain quality of time, which the 4HL (to use another midwit’s term—one I’m a little fond of) often precludes, and my post-academia bias probably shines through here.
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?
That final question is a tough one, because my view might simply be one of post-academic regret—a view informed by a pursuit of knowledge that comes from intellectual inquiry rather than experience and so, necessarily, exists at a high level of abstraction. Further learning may be spiritually fulfilling, but it also feels like having a homework mentality for a test that is never going to happen. What is the point of one's learning but to start a Substack and contribute to the ever-expanding shoals of cultural waste—a sort of brain drain? But as I said, that's an incredibly personal response. It's probably worthwhile all the same.
Perhaps closer to your actual question about power, I like what Adorno writes in "Resignation"—a very short but important essay where he thinks about the supposed tension between thinking and praxis. "For the individual, life is made easier through capitulation to the collective with which he identifies. He is spared the cognition of his impotence; within the circle of their own company, the few become many. It is this act—not unconfused thinking—which is resignation. [...] In contrast, the uncompromising critical thinker, who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give up."
I just worry, to use Adorno's term elsewhere in the essay, that thinking itself can become a sort of pseudo-activity. Perhaps one just has to be more curious and learn to find joy in that curiosity.
Nov 15, 2023·edited Nov 15, 2023Liked by Daniel Cult
"Perhaps one just has to be more curious and learn to find joy in that curiosity." That's currently where I land. Trying to basically find that joy in curiosity, rather than the pursuit of FACTS to absorb and repeat, which I am used to.
I take it you're on your own version of that journey, or something like it. In any case, I'm enjoying reading about your journey, so to speak, and look forward to reading more!
As a midwit who has listened to more than a couple of episodes of Modern Wisdom (before finding much more interesting culture commentary in the “heterodox” space), I think their surface level intellectualism is less about culture capital than just another “self improvement” method. Everything they do ultimately has to contribute to the end goal of getting fit, getting rich, getting laid whether they want to say it out right or not.
As someone who shares these people’s background and is on their own autodidact journey (in this case, a budding literary author that doesn’t want to get an MFA), there is always something missing without formal education: I’ll read every major 19th and 20th century “highbrow” novel I get my hands on, but any kind of advanced “theory”, forget about it. You actually do need other people to make you read and analyze stuff you don’t want to read for true intellectual development. Otherwise you spend all your time thinking about cancel culture and how “body count” discourse relates to evolutionary psychology or whatever.
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.
Thanks! I wonder if there’s a distinction between midwits who know they don’t know shit and midwits who are unself-aware. It’s the latter I’m more concerned with and find more annoying. But you’re right that the intellectual difficulty I advocate for is something that assumes you have a certain quality of time, which the 4HL (to use another midwit’s term—one I’m a little fond of) often precludes, and my post-academia bias probably shines through here.
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?
That final question is a tough one, because my view might simply be one of post-academic regret—a view informed by a pursuit of knowledge that comes from intellectual inquiry rather than experience and so, necessarily, exists at a high level of abstraction. Further learning may be spiritually fulfilling, but it also feels like having a homework mentality for a test that is never going to happen. What is the point of one's learning but to start a Substack and contribute to the ever-expanding shoals of cultural waste—a sort of brain drain? But as I said, that's an incredibly personal response. It's probably worthwhile all the same.
Perhaps closer to your actual question about power, I like what Adorno writes in "Resignation"—a very short but important essay where he thinks about the supposed tension between thinking and praxis. "For the individual, life is made easier through capitulation to the collective with which he identifies. He is spared the cognition of his impotence; within the circle of their own company, the few become many. It is this act—not unconfused thinking—which is resignation. [...] In contrast, the uncompromising critical thinker, who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give up."
I just worry, to use Adorno's term elsewhere in the essay, that thinking itself can become a sort of pseudo-activity. Perhaps one just has to be more curious and learn to find joy in that curiosity.
"Perhaps one just has to be more curious and learn to find joy in that curiosity." That's currently where I land. Trying to basically find that joy in curiosity, rather than the pursuit of FACTS to absorb and repeat, which I am used to.
I take it you're on your own version of that journey, or something like it. In any case, I'm enjoying reading about your journey, so to speak, and look forward to reading more!
Also - thanks for the Adorno quote. I will hopefully read that essay, and more of his work, in the future, rather than just repeat that quote. :)
molinos para culos
The vanity of the troll.
As a midwit who has listened to more than a couple of episodes of Modern Wisdom (before finding much more interesting culture commentary in the “heterodox” space), I think their surface level intellectualism is less about culture capital than just another “self improvement” method. Everything they do ultimately has to contribute to the end goal of getting fit, getting rich, getting laid whether they want to say it out right or not.
As someone who shares these people’s background and is on their own autodidact journey (in this case, a budding literary author that doesn’t want to get an MFA), there is always something missing without formal education: I’ll read every major 19th and 20th century “highbrow” novel I get my hands on, but any kind of advanced “theory”, forget about it. You actually do need other people to make you read and analyze stuff you don’t want to read for true intellectual development. Otherwise you spend all your time thinking about cancel culture and how “body count” discourse relates to evolutionary psychology or whatever.