Idiots and Geniuses

The Midwit Meme

Dumb people believe in magic.

Very smart, very wise people also believe in magic. Not Harry Potter magic, but miracles and unexplained useful things.

Those who don’t believe in magic are the people in the middle who think they’re too smart for it. Who try to explain in rational words why it can’t possibly exist.

One of my favorite memes that floats around on the internet is the Midwit meme. It’s this thing right here:

The Midwit meme is about IQ, grandeur, and self-confidence. But most of all, it’s about being too clever for one’s own good.

The idea is, the absolute moron on the left pursues the best goals for the simplest reasons. The genius on the right also pursues the best goals for the simplest reasons.

The larger group of people, those who live in the middle, achieve the worst outcomes. They try to outsmart the system at every turn because they think they “get it” more than everyone else does. They are the cloud-screamers, the BMW drivers, the activists, the self-proclaimed heroes. They are the midwits.

The midwit isn’t just one static group of people. It’s all of us.

It's a trap we all fall into, a way of overthinking that we all engage in. No one is immune to overdoing. No one is immune to thinking they have a better answer than the one that can be captured in a simple quote.

Everywhere I look, I see examples of the Midwit meme at work.

The “dumbest” people do things like buy Apple and hold forever. But so do the smartest people.

Everyone in the middle spends their whole life chasing stock tips and telling their friends they can outsmart the market. They are also the people who lose all their money. This is not a coincidence.

My landlord bought Apple and held it for 30 years. I actually can’t tell whether he’s an idiot or a genius, but I can tell you that I wish I had as much money as he.

I spent a couple of years in a small, tight-knit investing group online. We exchanged research, ideas, and feedback about investment opportunities. We looked into small companies to find the next hidden gem.

At least 4 of the companies we invested in, as a group, either went bankrupt or don’t exist anymore. In other words, we were fucking terrible at it. Myself included.

In order to make money picking stocks, you have to be part of approximately 0.1% of people who have a legitimate edge (and/or get insanely lucky, which is always part of the equation no matter which way you slice it). I now know that I am not part of that 0.1%. And that’s fine. I need to find other ways to make money and never try to pick stocks again.

Here are some more examples. Hat tip to George Mack for compiling these for my personal entertainment.

In business and marketing:

In how to manage one’s happiness:

In online growth:

In self-identification:

The thing that idiots and geniuses have in common is that when it comes to the most important and useful things in life, they don’t ask why.

They accept that music is magic. They accept that people have tastes that can’t always be explained by logic. They accept that weird family traditions are better than no family traditions.

Idiots and geniuses accept the world for what it is, and use that information to organize their decisions and live well. Simple. They don’t try to solve the logic of the world, because they know that’s not possible.

Look back before the Enlightenment, at ancient cultures with many gods.

It’s easy to look back at ancient Greeks, or any other polytheistic culture, and think they were insane, knowing what we know now. There was a god or goddess for just about any human affair, complete with rewards and smitings for those who pleased them or didn’t.

And you might think, how ridiculous. What idiots. These people actually thought there was a mountain where immortal beings lived, ever interfering in human affairs based on their moods?

That feels kind of arbitrary. Any human, post-Enlightenment, can see how that’s bullshit.

But what is human life really about? It’s about prioritizing things and making the right sacrifices for what we want. It’s about showing that we know how to live for something. It’s about putting ritual before temptations — we observe what needs to be done, before we observe what we want to do. We observe what does work, not what should work.

And if we don’t, our lives fall apart. If we live out of alignment with what we know we should be doing, our insides will be miserable and unhealthy.

In other words, everything about those ancient gods and how they interact with us is functionally true. Inside us. It doesn’t matter if those gods don’t literally exist — because they might as well. Everything they represent actually does exist.

I have known more people than I can count who started Catholic but abandoned it once they reached the age of reason. I have also known more people than I can count who became more religious with old age.

Everyone in the middle thinks they’re too smart to live at the mercy of intangible, unnamed forces.

What the Enlightenment did for us is give us the ability to systematically doubt. To be hesitant to accept what we see. Which, in terms of science, has been an absolute boon.

But being doubtful is not always a good thing. In fact being doubtful is really only useful when it comes to knowledge itself.

The Enlightenment made us think, “there’s always a better explanation.”

But there isn’t always a better explanation. There are simple ideas, and there are bad ideas. Everything in between is just bad ideas dressed up in good idea costumes.

There are many other aspects of life. Like love, friendship, music, art, society, cooperative games, and enterprise. In those areas of life, doubt is the worst tool you can have in your toolbelt.

The Enlightenment changed the way humans fundamentally approach the world in its entirety, in service of only one aspect of human life. Knowledge. We threw 98% baby out with 2% bathwater. The geniuses and idiots understand this. The geniuses and idiots understand that deep inside us is a goddess of love who needs to be pleased and a goddess of verdure who wants us to appreciate nature.

Because if we don’t, those goddesses smite us with exactly what we deserve: disconnection and dissonance. Anxiety. Self-contempt.

The Enlightenment turned us all into Midwits. We started systematically throwing out old, good ideas for “testable,” “provable” ideas that usually aren’t as good.

There are two kinds of truth:

• Empirical truth (can be tested and proven immediately)

• Non-empirical truth (has to tested and proven by living it out across time — in other words, involves risk, trust, and/or faith)

Empirical truth is where science lives. Non-empirical truth is where stories, heroes, and magic live. Non-empirical truth is where almost everything in our lives takes place.

The midwit knows that physics is empirically true.

The idiot and the genius know that life is about far more than the movement of particles.

The midwit goes on a hero’s journey to solve all the variables of business, builds complex marketing schemes and tries to optimize the business before he even figures out how much people want his product.

The idiot and the genius build something others want and hire excellent people to give it to them.

The midwit comes home and argues with his wife about her needs.

The idiot and the genius come home and meet them.

What you often see, in just about any area of life, is that the idiots start from a good, wise place and never leave. The geniuses, having been through the age of reason and doubt, arrive back at square one because they’re humble enough to stop trying to outsmart the universe. The geniuses arrive back at simple, having seen that complicated and arrogant don’t work. That the Tower of Babel falls.

The midwits are everywhere. They're the folks on Instagram giving you convoluted 13-step guides to make the absolute most of your diet. They're the guys teaching you 21 Strategies to Pick Up Women. They're the people teaching you how to keep your life organized with a slew of apps for note-taking, day-planning, and goal-setting.

The idiot and the genius eat healthy foods, smile at people, and write their notes in the Notes app.

There are simple ideas, and there are bad ideas.

—

Drink some water and don’t be too clever.

JDR

“If in doubt, ask yourself: ‘What simple idea would the idiot and the genius agree upon?’” - George Mack