I promised to tell you about this book I loved the other day, and now here we are. The book in question is "Mania", the latest from (possibly my favorite) author Lionel Shriver. A long-time Shriver fan, I was thrilled when I heard a new one was scheduled for release this April, and while in London, I couldn't resist picking it up.
Set in an alternate reality though it doesn't feel like it in the slightest, "Mania" chronicles the rise of the so-called Mental Parity Movement. Far too long, universities, companies and our society in general has bullied the "otherwise", those who "process differently". AKA the stupid. Of course, you're no longer allowed to say that and characters in the book are pilloried for using words like dumb much like we would be for... well, for saying things like dumb.
The wholesale embrace of a flagrant lie by an entire population has inevitably opened the gateway for other lies. We have severed our connection to truth, thereby losing faith in the very existence of truth. That means our representatives can say anything, espouse anything. Everyone is beautiful: the assertion alone makes it so. In throwing in our lot with what we will to be true, rather than what is true, we break with the scientific method through which all advanced economies have achieved their prosperity - a method whose previous practitioners were willing to brave the discovery of the ideologically inconvenient.
Several times throughout the book, I found myself doing a double-take when talking to people, checking my language. It didn't come as difficult at all, replacing one set of no-no words for a supposedly imaginary one. At first, you might think *oh, she's taken our real-world idiotic censorship movements and replaced them with this Mental Parity thing, taken to an extreme to prove a point.
Except not really. While it may still be allowed (for now) to call something stupid, the Mental Parity Movement isn't an invention from an alternate reality in the slightest. You realize, as the book wears on, that this is our world. Even if the author chooses to focus on some comical exaggerations at time, this is no alteration. It's us.
Or rather, it's the West. As the MP mania takes over the U.S. and its vassals, the West plunges into a well of idiocy - universities go from being sanctuaries of culture to politically correct kindergartens, since turning away the "otherwise" would be brainist (sound familiar?). With the protagonist employed as a university teacher, Shriver captures the depressing injustice of being a hard-working and smart student in the 21st century.
She also takes it a step further, inviting us to look at the consequences of promoting idiocy in the name of not offending - American cars are bursting into flames, American hospitals become a hotbed for malpraxis, while American scientists... well, they churn out murderous "cures" to a so-called health crisis.
Donning the robes of a social pariah through the pandemic thanks to her anti-lockdown remarks, Shriver does not hesitate tearing down into that globally shared madness as a prime example of mass idiocy.
Should we even care? I'll speak for myself, though I doubt this recalibration is unique to me. Watching an entire population swallow whole a transparently lunatic proposition and then jubilantly embrace a raft of ruinous new social conventions has profoundly lowered my estimation of people in general.
I almost cried, reading the above passage. Recognizing the glimmer of sanity and kinship in a world that seems to have shrugged off the lunacy of the past 4 years. Far too many in our midst seem to have taken what happened in stride, and I find myself wondering... how could you?
Me, if I had even half an inkling I might have injected myself with poison, that my heart might stop tomorrow for it, I wouldn't be waiting in line for an overpriced Starbucks drink or whatever. But then, embracing one such truth would kinda force you to also embrace your own complicity in what has been one of the gravest, most sadistic and worrisome breaches of human rights in our lifetime.
I highly recommend "Mania". And pretty much any other Shriver book, for that matter.
