Midwit

The word "mid-witted" was popularized by far-right activist and writer Vox Day. On February 17th, 2012, Vox Day[1] published the blog post "The tragedy of the mid-witted" in which he commented on a life story article "Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume" by Jennifer Wright... The term "midwit," meaning a person of average intelligence, saw use on 4chan starting in late 2013... On January 1st, 2017, an anonymous 4chan[6] user made the earliest found post which used the IQ bell curve diagram to argue about the similarity of political views of groups with low and high intelligence... On June 24th, 2019, an anonymous /pol/[11] user posted a Manlet meme referencing the horseshoe theory interpretation of the IQ bell curve... The viral popularity of the format began on March 10th, 2010, when an anonymous 4chan[15] user posted a meme about Ted Kaczynski and the anarcho-primitivistic ideology. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

Vox Popoli: The tragedy of the mid-witted. While having an IQ between one and two standard deviations above the norm is unusual, it is hardly rare, and in historical terms it is distinctly pedestrian.

If this erstwhile pirate wench had simply noted that Mensa, with its 130/132 IQ floor, potentially represents the top 2 percent of the population, she would have known that there are some 6.2 MILLION Americans who are significantly above the "read a book" level that she sets as a significant benchmark.

Intelligence doesn't concern name-checking authors nor does it consist of being literate or even well-read. And even if one has been granted unusual cognitive capacity by the grace of God or the roll of the genetic dice, it remains little more than potential until one proves that one can actually do something, preferably something worthwhile, with it. Just as the mere fact of height doesn't make one a basketball player, the mere fact of high intelligence doesn't make one a genius, a philosopher, or anything else except a statistical oddity.

Genius is neither a state of being nor the possession of potential, it is the completion of material intellectual accomplishment.

I suggest that before you can reach a place that requires effort, you must first realize that you are not already there.

Wesley Yang: The Midwit Meme and the Rittenhouse Affair

The midwit meme template depicts a graph of a Bell Curve IQ distribution. At the center of the distribution is a caricature of the midwit, typically one of several variations of “Crying Wojak”, a crude but strangely evocative sketch of a person of slightly better than average intellect who is emotionally invested in the conformist babble of today’s right-thinking striver class. This figure is smart enough to rationalize himself into a cultivated pseudo-intelligent idiocy that the natal idiot, shown at the left edge of the curve, is too dumb to understand — and that the sage, depicted on the right is wise enough to regard with contempt precisely because he does understand.

The amusing convergence of the figures at opposing tails of the distribution

All of us on social media over the last half-decade witnessed the extent to which our celebrities, our media, and our political, corporate, and even military leadership have been absorbed into the manufactured frenzies of the midwit mind.