‘Social manias die quietly’
from spiked:
Lionel Shriver on why elites are rarely held accountable for their most damaging mistakes.
Social manias now arrive as regularly as the seasons. In just the past few years, elites have succumbed to hysteria over everything from Covid-19 to climate change, from so-called systemic racism to the non-existent ‘trans genocide’. In each case, laws have been altered, liberties have been abolished and society has been upended, seemingly in the name of combatting a near-apocalyptic social ill. Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Mania, imagines a world where the next great social contagion is the ‘Mental Parity Movement’, which insists that everyone is equally intelligent. Those who cling to the ‘old, bigoted way of thinking’ about meritocracy soon find that their livelihoods, their relationships and their safety are under threat. Her satire brilliantly captures just how absurd these manias look from the outside. So why do so many people get caught up in them in the first place?
Shriver returned for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss our age of collective madness. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.
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