the midwit industrial complex
how credentialism, consensus, and performative expertise undermine real progress
There is a certain class of people who are not stupid, but who are deeply unserious. They attend the right schools, memorize the right frameworks, speak in the right cadence, and rise through the ranks of large, slow-moving institutions by never saying anything that hasn’t already been pre-approved. They are not builders. They are not explorers. They are not thinkers in the true sense. They are the operators of the midwit industrial complex: a cultural engine designed to reward simulated intelligence and punish real insight.
To be clear, this isn’t about IQ. Midwits aren’t dumb. In fact, their danger lies in their apparent intelligence. They say all the right things. They know how to cite sources. They often sound impressive. But peel back a layer and you’ll find something hollow: a mind optimized for conformity rather than clarity.
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." — William James
The midwit industrial complex is not just a social class. It’s a system. A distributed set of cultural, academic, and corporate feedback loops that select for performative intelligence and filter out the kind that threatens the status quo. It's the reason why institutions rot from the inside while claiming to be more "thoughtful" than ever.
the system that rewards nothingness—
Here’s what the midwit industrial complex rewards:
Speaking in abstractions that sound intelligent but never lead anywhere
Citing credentials instead of showing proof of work
Avoiding real stakes while accumulating symbols of expertise
Smiling politely while saying nothing controversial
It punishes:
Directness
Builders who operate outside the academic pipeline
Visionaries who get to the right answer too early
Anyone who threatens the illusion of group consensus
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." — Gandhi (frequently misattributed, but still relevant)
The key to understanding midwit behavior is this: they don’t want to be right. They want to be seen as reasonable. And in a culture where truth has become socially dangerous, reasonableness is a survival strategy.
credentialism as religion—
Midwits worship credentials the way earlier generations worshipped the church. Degrees are the new sacraments. Tenure is the new sainthood. Institutional affiliation is proof of virtue. And questioning someone who’s been "approved" by the system is treated as blasphemy.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." — Richard Feynman
This is why people like Elon Musk are seen as threats. Not because they’re dangerous in any concrete way, but because they bypassed the climb. They didn't wait for permission. They didn't genuflect at the altar of credentialed mediocrity. They just built.
And nothing offends a midwit more than someone who creates without first being approved.
Think about the reaction to Elon’s takeover of Twitter. It wasn't just ideological—it was existential. He made their gatekeeping irrelevant. Suddenly, a system that depended on slow-moving, highly curated narratives was being rewired in real time by someone who simply acted. That level of agency terrifies the midwit class. It destabilizes their illusion of control.
Or take the COVID response. Bureaucratic midwits flooded the zone with contradictions: masks don’t work, masks are mandatory; schools are dangerous, but protests are fine. Experts spoke with confidence while ignoring data that didn’t fit their preferred narrative. Meanwhile, decentralized communities of non-institutional thinkers were comparing studies, running their own models, and often reaching better conclusions—months ahead of the official bodies. But they were dismissed. Why? Because they weren’t credentialed.
Even look at the response to AI. The leading voices in innovation are rarely the ones with the most academic prestige. It’s independent researchers, rogue founders, outsiders who never finished their PhDs. The academic gatekeepers, meanwhile, are busy writing think pieces warning about risk while building nothing. Because building would require a confrontation with reality—something the midwit class is trained to avoid.
midwits as narrative managers—
The true role of the midwit in society is to manage the narrative on behalf of institutions. They don’t invent. They don’t pioneer. They translate complexity into status-preserving talking points. They ensure the edges are sanded down, the implications are softened, and the real visionaries are labeled as dangerous extremists.
"The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next." — Helen Keller
Midwits don't spread ideas. They throttle them. They gatekeep the Overton window to ensure nothing too true slips through too fast.
They are the reason paradigm shifts feel like battles rather than births.
You see this in academia with the rejection of radical thinkers who later get canonized. Think of how Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was initially met with resistance because it challenged the idea that science progresses linearly. Or how Marshall McLuhan was dismissed by many of his contemporaries, only to be retroactively hailed as a visionary. Midwits hate anything nonlinear. Anything that skips steps. Anything that asks: "What if the whole framework is wrong?"
when simulated intelligence collapses—
The most damning thing about the midwit industrial complex is that it doesn’t produce anything that lasts. It can only survive under the illusion that it is necessary. But as soon as a real problem emerges—a pandemic, an engineering challenge, a market crash—its fragility is exposed.
You can't credential your way out of a supply chain collapse. You can't DEI panel your way to orbital launch capability. You can't thesis-paper your way to fusion energy.
You have to build. You have to experiment. You have to act.
And when the moment demands courage, the midwit class always defaults to caution.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." — Yogi Berra
midwits are memetic deadends—
Here’s what I find most hilarious: midwit ideas don’t spread. They don’t inspire. They don’t scale. Because they aren’t generative—they’re compliance-based.
No one is building anything real based on midwit philosophy
They’re NPCs in the memeplex, not architects of it
Their frameworks are verbose, brittle, and terrified of contact with reality
Turns out performative intelligence doesn’t scale. It just stalls—until someone braver shows up and moves the world forward.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." — Buckminster Fuller
build anyway—
If you are someone who thinks clearly, speaks plainly, and creates things that work—they will hate you. That is the system working as designed.
Ignore them. Build anyway.
In the long run, truth compounds. Systems decay. And the midwit industrial complex will collapse under the weight of its own uselessness.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw
This isn’t just a critique of a class—it’s a reminder that clarity is a threat to systems built on performance. That’s why you’ll always feel friction when you speak plainly in rooms full of people who rely on abstraction to survive.
But you don’t have to play their game.
You don’t need to speak in citations to know something is true.
You don’t need permission to start building something that works.
You don’t need to “win” arguments with midwits—because they aren’t playing to build, they’re playing to belong.
What you need is a bias for clarity, a tolerance for ridicule, and the ability to stand still in your own signal long enough to outlast the noise.
You won’t get applause for this. Not at first. But over time, the pattern becomes obvious: the world gets built by unreasonable people. The ones who move early. The ones who simplify. The ones who trust what works over what sounds smart.
So if you feel like your ideas don’t fit, or your clarity makes people uncomfortable, good.
That means you’re not one of them.
Keep building.
I frequently find myself being a midwit by striving to avoid direct confrontation and the risk of offending a friend or associate, tempering my words and opinions in an effort to be ‘reasonable.’ I’m getting over it. When confronted with opinions or judgements with which I vehemently disagree, I am unabashedly voicing my dissent and refusing to censor my opinions for fear of ruffling someone’s feathers.
TL:DR — I’m calling BULLSHIT! when I see it.
Good piece!
I wrote a couple years back about how "Credentialism can also be very easily taken to absurd extremes. Two recent examples were diversity-hire Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson saying she could not determine what a woman is without first consulting a biologist, and Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz saying she would need to defer to an “Education Expert™” on whether gay porn is appropriate in kindergarten classrooms...Where the Laptop Class believes that credentialism is the sole path to wisdom, the Physical Class gives much greater weight to what Nassim Taleb calls Skin In The Game. "
https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/embrace-your-inner-barbarian