Lionel Shriver is the bestselling author of 15 novels, including the Orange Prize-winner We Need to Talk About Kevin, and a prolific journalist currently with a fortnightly column in Britain’s the Spectator. Her work has been translated into 35 languages.
Her new novel MANIA is published April 11th 2024 (Harper Collins).
First of all, I must say I thought MANIA was phenomenal. It’s darkly funny and uncomfortably accurate about the appetite our society seems to have for ideas we would have firmly rejected just a couple of decades ago, such as the idea that women can be men and men can be women. In the ‘ALT’ (alternative) world of MANIA this destructive derangement takes the form of the ‘Mental Parity Movement’ where discrimination based on intelligence is illegal.
The books contains allusions and similarities to manias that people will recognise such as transgender theory, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, critical race theory, the climate catastrophe cult, affirmative action etc. Which of those specifically inspired you to write MANIA? When did you start tracking them and why?
A social mania is so all-encompassing that I hardly needed to ‘keep track’ as one followed the other. All that’s required is to take a step back and recognise: everyone has gone nuts. Everyone is reciting exactly the same thing over and over again. Everyone thinks exactly the same thing and is consumed by exactly the same thing. Any dissent turns people into crazed animals. The media, academia and Government are all disturbingly in accord. Oh, I see. It must be another social mania. One can take some comfort in ‘this too shall pass’, but it will only pass, apparently, to make way for another mania.
I set the novel starting in an alternative 2011, because it was in 2012 when I identified the first of the recent hysterias took off — the rage for transgenderism — and I wanted to get behind them and fashion my own mania. If anything, the mania I invented most resembles our sudden obsession with pretending to change sex, because virtually overnight it becomes holy writ that you mustn’t ever impugn anyone else’s intelligence, much as virtually overnight transgenderism also became ‘the last great civil rights fight’, and to emit a single discouraging word about ‘trans’ would be guaranteed to destroy your career and reputation. But I am passing larger comment on the lot of them: #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, DEI and Covid, which was itself a mania — the infection fatality rate of the disease especially for anyone but the very old did not merit our draconian response — and which gave birth to sub-manias (the love of lockdowns, the cult of the vaccine, the hysterical faith in masks). The climate ’emergency’ or ‘collapse’ or ‘global boiling’ or whatever we’re calling it now shows every sign of being another one.
We like to think we are ‘modern’, as every population in the present has always fancied themselves, and we like to think we’re too rational and scientific to subscribe to lunacies like phrenology or bloodletting with leeches. But we’re the same as we’ve always been, just as vulnerable to getting seized en masse by goofball ideas as we ever were. ‘Some people are born in the wrong body’ is right in there. One of the passages in MANIA I’m most attached to is the one in which the narrator explains that she used to be confounded by mass atrocities of the past, but now they all made sense: Nazi concentration camps, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Stalin’s show trials, Mao’s cultural revolution. That’s what I concluded after Covid, when in the land of the Magna Carta literally overnight people abdicated every civil right that they had the very day before imagined to be their birthright: free speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, free movement, even the right to leave your own home. Obviously people will believe anything, and for something like National Socialism to triumph in the U.K. it would take Adolf Hitler at the most about three weeks.
You quoted Jung at the beginning of the book. As someone who went on the record saying that the U.K. was suffering from a psychic epidemic during lockdown ‘mania’, I revelled in the book’s biting references to the lockdowns, vaccine mandates and money-printing instigated by “the morons in control of the country”. Do you think society is in the grip of a psychic epidemic?
We’re continually in the grip of one psychic epidemic or another — remember the ‘recovered memory’ scandal of the 1990s (which wasn’t perceived as a scandal until much later), or that same decade’s consuming obsession with pedophilia? What’s changed is the rapidity with which people suddenly embrace one prescribed view, and also the ease with which these mind viruses now spread internationally. So you had South Koreans marching down their streets chanting ‘Black Lives Matter!’ when the country basically doesn’t have any black people. Pre-internet, it would have been less likely that Britain would adopt woke ideologies from America wholesale. Now the infection spreads instantaneously. I am trying to call attention to the dangers of our credulity — or, to get fancy, our susceptibility to mass formation psychosis — as well as to examine what it is about some people that makes them immune. The most heartening aspect of the last 15 years for me has been the emergence of a cadre of independent thinkers who have been willing to risk their careers to say the suddenly unsayable. They give me hope for the future. You’re one of them, Laura.
I think the proof of how scarily spot on MANIA is, is not just how recognisable it is in general, but that some of the things you wrote about have actually manifested. Here are two particular examples. First, it becomes dangerous to get surgery in MANIA’s ALT world, because of the degradation of medical training standards; similarly there have been stories in the past few years about doctors and hospitals refusing care to patients who complain about mixed sex wards or using preferred pronouns. Second, the idea of ‘discrimination’ based on ability being verboten should be ludicrous, but the Russell Group universities recently issued guidance that saying the most qualified person should get the job is a ‘microaggression’. Do you think your dark allegory could actually come to pass? Could we be that stupid as a society?
Yes, the notion that all people are equally intelligent is just a hair away from where we are now, and that’s as I intended. Medical schools in the States are already lowering standards and eliminating test requirements because all they care about is ‘diversity’. Merit is already under attack. It has been under attack in the U.S. for 50 years. Affirmative action was installed in the early 1970s, and I still remember when I first learned about it. I was 16. I was appalled. I couldn’t see how institutionalised unfairness would end well. It hasn’t. For some years now, I’ve been warning the U.K. that if you bring in racial quotas — for that is what ‘affirmative action’ demands — you will never get rid of them. The rot sets in quickly. Nothing gives me the willies like the fact that air traffic control is now consumed with diversity, equity and inclusion. I travel a lot…
You have talked in the past about your religious upbringing. In the novel, Pearson comes from a Jehovah’s Witness family, she has a man’s name, like you, and is prepared to go against the grain. Although her IQ is just 107, how much of you is there in Pearson?
Oh, sure, Pearson (and is that a man’s name? it’s more traditionally been a surname: “The name Pearson is primarily a gender-neutral name of English origin that means Son Of Piers/Peter. Medieval English surname.”) and I have plenty in common. I rejected my Presbyterian upbringing, though Jehovah’s Witnesses are far more oppressive and much scarier to rebel against. Pearson as a kid was dumbfounded (of course, that’s a word that in MANIA will get you cancelled) why her peers raised in the same religious tradition simply went along with a creed that made their lives miserable. Whyever didn’t they declare like Alice, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”? The most central thing Pearson and I have in common is a resistance to conformity. I’ve never been one to get with the programme. But being constitutionally odd man out (or woman out) is dangerous right now, and I’m amazed that so far I’ve got away with being so ornery and uncooperative.
Would you prefer to hang out with Pearson or Emory?
Pearson’s best friend Emory is stylish, socially adept and droll. She’s good company, and she’s actually smarter than Pearson, not to mention savvier, since she realises early on that resisting the Mental Parity Movement would thwart her aspiration to become a television commentator. Pearson is more awkward and less social. She’s stubborn, and she won’t bend to orthodoxy; she’s self-destructive. She may not be academically gifted, but à la Orwell she refuses to say that two plus two equals five. I’m afraid if I hung out with Emory she and I would eventually have a catastrophic falling out. Which funnily enough is what happens in the novel…
What do you think about IQ tests? And do you know what your IQ is?
Ha! Interesting question. IQ tests measure something, though I’d be the first to concede there are different forms of intelligence. I only took an IQ test once when I was very young (maybe nine?) I didn’t know I was taking an IQ test at the time. I think the result was something like 125, which I frankly found insulting. (I still do.) See, my older brother tested as a ‘genius,’ meaning his score was at least 145; again, I think it was over 150. So f**k 125. I wanna take that test over again!
Please assume the role of an Oracle and describe how Great Britain ( ALT-Great Britain perhaps) will look in 20 years’ time.
Immigrants and their children will form the majority. You will be something like 30% Muslim. The country will be broke. Public services in future will make today’s seem positively Japanese. Net Zero will have been completely abandoned, but not before doing untold economic damage and leaving the U.K. with insufficient energy sources. There will be blackouts, and typically for Britons everyone will get used to them, just as they once got used to lockdowns. Immigration will start to slow, because there is no reason to pay money to enter another Third World — oh, sorry! developing world — cesspit. It is entirely possible that the pound will have collapsed, on the heels of the American dollar having collapsed, since both countries will have accumulated so much debt that no one will loan them money anymore, so they will both have resorted to money printing, with the usual consequences. Want me to go on? No? Didn’t think so.
For me, a depressing take away from the book is simply that people can be so ‘stupid’, as a catch-all term. As a society, we are subject to destructive hysterical cycles which undermine what we should be capable of. Groupthink (a.k.a. social conformity) has sound evolutionary purposes but in large societies connected in real-time by the internet and social media, appears to be warping into something dangerous. I’ve been rolling this around my mind since the first horrific lockdown. The power of the totalitarian mindset can tear apart even the most important connection between parent and child. Lucy turns on Pearson, just as children have turned against their parents in communist regimes over and over. Big question: what do you think of people?
Some of my best friends are people.
That said, during the last 12 years I’ve been very disappointed in our species. Covid profoundly changed what I think of people, as it also changed my estimation of so-called liberal democracy. As for the latter, there is apparently little difference between our system of government and autocracies, because we collapsed to autocracy all over the West in a heartbeat. And here’s the thing: we don’t know what’s around the corner. It’s not always possible to recognise an irrational social mania when it’s first taking off. We have no idea what barmy idea will take hold next.
Which book have you most enjoyed writing?
Hmm, hard to say just one. But the process of writing the following was especially fun: Kevin: The Mandibles (see: the collapse of the dollar), Should We Stay Or Should We Go, and this one. With each of those, I kept laughing out loud over my keyboard.
What is your proudest and most important achievement? And if that achievement is not your writing, which of your writings are you most proud of?
Oh, the writing is all I’ve achieved, aside from a solid marriage, a great relationship with my younger brother and a passably mediocre tennis game. The novels are of more enduring importance (assuming anything I’ve written is of enduring importance) than the journalism, though I am proud of having stuck my neck out in non-fiction early on in relation to issues that were dangerous to tackle. I was one of the first to oppose lockdowns. I was one of the first to express dubiety about transgenderism. I was virtually the only person in my London social set who backed Brexit, though that was operating on the absurd assumption that the British establishment would take advantage of it; no such luck. As for which books I’m proudest of, I’d probably list all those novels that were the most fun to write. But I would also add so much for that — because while there’s always something to be said for novels that make you laugh, there’s also something to be said for the ones that make you cry.
What is the aspect of your work that people most disagree with and why?
I do not pander. I will not shovel a lot of horseshit about how ‘diversity is our strength’ and I will not use fashionable but idiotic formulations such as ‘people of colour’ (when saying ‘coloured people’ will get you sacked) or ‘LGBTQIA+’. Especially since I fiercely oppose racial quotas and uncontrolled mass immigration, my detractors believe I am a racist. That used to smart, and now does not affect me in the slightest.
Describe your biggest epiphany and how it shaped you?
It wasn’t a single moment, but coming to the conclusion that the IRA were the bad guys all by myself in my early 30s was my first genuine exercise of independent thought. (You would think this conclusion would be self-evident.) I lived for a dozen years in Belfast, and when I arrived I had no opinions about the Troubles whatsoever. So I was a blank slate. In time, I came to loathe Republicans and Nationalists in general. Nationalists were really the originators of identity politics, and having spent all that time in Northern Ireland may be one reason that today’s progressives get my goat. But Democrats in the U.S. were largely all in with the IRA back then, so this independent positioning of mine also broke my allegiance to liberal Democrats in my own country (that would include my parents). Ever since, I have spurned factionalism, and I try to make up my mind about matters one by one and not because ‘my side’ thinks a certain way.
If you could rewind a few of decades, would you choose a new career, or would you do something differently?
Nah. This career has worked out swell for me. Only one point of wistfulness: I used to be heavily involved in visual art, and I wasn’t a half bad ceramic figure sculptor. That side of my life has withered, because there isn’t enough time in the day to pursue visual art and still write journalism and book-length fiction.
If you were an absolute monarch for a day, what law would you introduce?
I would outlaw the use of the word ‘space’ unless you are talking about the night sky.
What is the most interesting thing you have learned in the last year?
That both major American parties have a death wish. If either party ran any other candidate for president other than the one it is in fact running, it would win. That is documented in the polls. This is the freakiest American election in my lifetime, and I am trying really, really hard to simply find it riveting, since otherwise I subside into misanthropic depression. That death wish, alas, appears to extend to the country itself. I am hard-pressed to say whether four more years of Trump or Biden will be more disastrous.
What is next for you?
I’m halfway through the first draft of a novel that takes on mass immigration, which is certain to destroy my career. Oh, well. Might as well go out with a bang!
MANIA is published in the U.K. April 11th 2024.
MANIA: What if calling someone stupid was illegal? In a reality not too distant from our own, where the so-called Mental Parity Movement has taken hold, the worst thing you can call someone is ‘stupid’.
Everyone is equally clever, and discrimination based on intelligence is “the last great civil rights fight”.
Exams and grades are all discarded, and smart phones are rebranded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word and encouraged to report parents for using it. You don’t need a qualification to be a doctor.
Best friends since adolescence, Pearson and Emory find themselves on opposing sides of this new culture war. Radio personality Emory – who has built her career riding the tide of popular thought – makes increasingly hard-line statements while, for her part, Pearson believes the whole thing is ludicrous.
As their friendship fractures, Pearson’s determination to cling onto the “old, bigoted way of thinking” begins to endanger her job, her safety and even her family.
Lionel Shriver turns her piercing gaze on the policing of opinion and intellect, and imagines a world in which intellectual meritocracy is heresy.
This article was first published on Laura’s Substack page the Free Mind. Subscribe here.
Stop Press: Toby Young will be interviewing Lionel Shriver on stage at the Hippodrome at the Free Speech Union’s launch party for her new book on April 15th. You can purchase tickets here – and it’s cheap as chips! £10 for FSU Members and £15 for non-members.
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Good article.
But it seems to me that what the relative failure of Brexit showed is that the EU was just one symptom of the globalism that is deeply entrenched in the whole of the West, with its centre not in Europe, but in the USA.
In fact, from many sources it appears that Britain’s Establishment was, and is, the primary European agent of globalism. Hence the concerted opposition to Brexit, the cheerleading of Britain above all the EU nations for a war against Russia and/or China, and of course the lockstep response to COVID.
Even the claim that Britain was the US “mole” in the EU does not seem implausible to me.
None of this alters the message of the article that “we” need to fight for our liberties, but the “we” needs to be carefully defined as the common people of Britain, rather than the political system, which represents them no more than the EU did.
Britain is indeed the primary agent of globalism, and a lot else I may add.. managed through its ‘good offices’ (sarc) in the City of London. Dare I mention the Rottenchilds et al. There’s a very good reason Britain was called Perfidious Albion..
What is missing here is leadership. It’s not leave or remain, it is the ability to take decisive action rather than politically correct action. One of the few politicians I see with it today is Ron DeSantis. Structures can affect ability to deliver but I do not see any conviction other than to how a message is received in the polls.
Ah.! The rise of the focus group.! People who have no clue, trying to find one in what know-nowts think. Its a poor substitute, but I think we saw during Covid that Government policy was pretty much led by public opinion polls…
Yes and when politicians pander to popularity, playing both sides as circumstance dictates, you get this mess.
But they are not pandering to popularity, they are pandering to the margins.
How popular is grooming and sexualisation of our children, Pride flags, parades, reducing the electricity supply and higher electricity prices, inflation, mass immigration… well a long list?
Public opinion was created by government policy: if the government had been honest about the trivial threat posed by the disease there would have been little support for the extreme policies put in place.
Ron DeSantis is most definitely not his own man despite giving the appearance of being one. No, just like so many others, including Robert Kennedy, he’s firmly under the control of the Zionist lobby..
So far Brexit has brought us COVID jabs a month before other EU countries… and nothing else,
So I would say Brexit so far has been a massive con perpetrated by a bunch of salesmen completely incapable of delivering what they sold.
The economic impact of Brexit has been virtually nothing. Despite the IMF, the World Bank & indeed our very own OBR & BofE consistently predicting that we’ll underperform our peer countries we’ve, slightly surprisingly, had the highest or 2nd highest growth over the past couple of years (admittedly, from a lockdown induced low).
EU peers, such as Germany, are in recession, we’re a nano % above it.
None of it’s made much difference. Of course, we’ve spent far more than the promised £350m a week on the NHS & look where that got us.
Covid was an accelerant, we’ve got to the economic state we’re in 10 years earlier than we would otherwise have done. The vaccines accelerate heart problems & possibly cancers. The authoritarian tendency heralded in by Covid nonsense accelerated the imposition of net zero, CBDC & WHO pandemic treaty & the panoply of global restrictions coming down the line.
Brexit has, so far, been a sideshow.
“we’ve, slightly surprisingly, had the highest or 2nd highest growth over the past couple of years (admittedly, from a lockdown induced low)”
The chart “G7 real GDP % change compared to pre-pandemic level” in the publication linked below shows a different picture. Comparing Q1 2023 with Q4 2019, UK is -0.5%, Eurozone is +2.2% and USA is +5.4%.
I guess it depends on the start and end dates chosen for comparison. And, as you imply, with the massive intervention of the covid policy measures, it is pretty much impossible to identify cause and effect as regards impact on economic performance.
GDP – International Comparisons: Key Economic Indicators – House of Commons Library (parliament.uk)
Its called BRINO Stewart.. Brexit in name only, they’re still all ‘in it together’ against us plebs.
Well that is true, except that does not devalue Brexit.
Brexit has been a massive con because it has not been enacted. End of.
Except we don’t actually have Brexit yet. So all of the squirming leftists blaming every bit of bad news on Brexit are WRONG. (as usual)
What we do have is many of the negative consequences of Brexit, such as lost trading opportunities with the EU due to being outside the single market.
What we don’t have of course is Ursula Von der Liar.. not that that makes a difference, they’re all equal on the corruption stakes..
The EU is a protectionist Customs Union – it is mercantilist by nature.
You confuse free movement of goods with free market trading.
When a central authority fixes the conditions of trade to exclude market disruptive innovation and technology, to stifle competition internally and exclude it externally, forcing consumers to shop only within it, a near autarkical ‘single market’ exists. That carries no benefit for consumers who have to pay more for ‘access’ to this wundermart, have less choice than otherwise if they were able to trade freely outside it.
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production. The interest of producers is to be considered only as much as it benefits consumers. – Adam Smith.
The EU is the exact opposite of that truism. Only those who are bonkers can imagine this is desirable.
I don’t understand people who think paying more to consume goods and thus making themselves poorer just in order to be part of an ideological Fascistic club is a benefit to them.
Funny old World.
Absolutely..
That’s not really true.
Selling goods to the EU is now harder as it requires customs procedures and duties that weren’t required before.
Also, British nationals can’t spend more than 3 months every 6 months in an EU country without having to go through some immigration process.
Also, the reverse is true for EU nationals in the UK.
That’s just the ones I’m aware of.
So actually, “Brexit” has happened. I think what you mean is that it has been a gigantic flop, which I would agree with.
We could debate the reasons for that, but I would put somewhere near the top of the list, if not at the very top, is that those that sold us the tale aren’t delivering. I don’t want to hear excuses about the EU not cooperating, or international organisations undermining us, the the globalist elite infiltrating our political system.
They sold us something and they haven’t delivered, They should have had a better plan for delivering. What did they think, that they wouldn’t face some resistance? That everyone would go – oh, ok, off you go then..
It’s been a giant scam by a bunch of stupid, amateurish tossers.
We’ve been governed and administered by remainers since the referendum.
Boris Johnson is not a Remainer. He’s an incompetent twat and a giant bullshitter whose bullshit eventually caught up with him.
Gove is a serpent who stands for nothing but himself as demonstrated by the way he weasels his way into positions with every government, regardless of its policies.
The British public was scammed by those two tossers who in reality couldn’t organise a piss up in a brothel.
And Farage has just washed his hands of the whole thing, He’s given up.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsscotland/brexit-is-biggest-act-of-self-harm-in-history-of-uk-and-it-will-take-decades-to-recover/ar-AA1cUUv9
Not the COVID response? Not the policies of successive governments?
The main achievement of Brexit was highlighting that a) the public cannot always be nudged and b) there will be an endless push to ‘correct’ the public thinking.
The combination of Net Zero, lockdowns/jabbings and population replacement makes Brexit seem like a paper cut in comparison.
Speaking with my Francophile hat on.. many of my French friends are actually envious of Brexit and want Frexit.They say they were stuffed by Sarkozy and the Lisbon Treaty, and as an aside.. absolutely detest Ursula Von de Liar..
Why keep pushing this wretched ‘covid’ thing, you’re inferring there was actually a pandemic. There wasn’t.. it was a hoax, carried on the back of fake PCR testing. Fake like everything else spewed forth by governments, WEF, WHO, UN, and every other Tom-Dick or Mohammed worldwide..
There was no pandemic. Posted yet again the graph below to prove it..
Is that chart for the UK? Please clarify…
Yes.. compiled by the BMJ – British Medical Journal using ONS statistics, and first published here by our own Will Jones..
thanks
Bang on Will.
Britain is suffering from Long EU.
Symptoms: continued authoritarianism; erosion of the Common Law; protectionism; indentured servitude for its citizens; corrupt Uni-Party State; State direction of the economy to benefit cronies; alliance with global vested interests moving toward global governance.
I think we need a vaccine.
I tried to read this. But I’m tired of Brexels with no clue about the actual workings of the EU flaunting their ignorance. Apparently, they don’t have any other properties. Hence again: The EU is a confederation of states and not a federal state and it doesn’t have a government of its own. EU-wide policy decisions are made by the council of representatives of the elected governments of the EU member states and the EU commission is just the head of the EU administration which is responsible for the implementation of these policy decisions. This EU adminstration is also small enough that one could comfortably loose it in a corner of Whitehall and would need to spend some time searching in order to find it again.
What on earth has Brexit got to do with the covid pantomime?
C1984 was magicked up in order to pave the way for the initial wave of cull injections. With that undertaking out of the way the Davos Deviants could move on to Digital ID’s and CBDC and once those are in place the gates can be banged shut and the real depopulation process can begin.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Exactly.. well said Hux..
Thanks Will.
While we’re at that: The other fairy tale.
There are no German ambitions for European unification. The German ruling caste, which was forcibly installed by foreign powers who had fought to more-or-less avoidable world wars solely for being able to do that has ambitions to get rid of Germans as people and Germany as their nation state. This is meant to be accomplised by funneling loads and loads of German money into the EU (among other things) with the goal to reduce Germany to nothing but an EU region predominantly populated by a random selection of outcasts from all over the globe.
From my reading of history, not the stuff we get rammed down our throats from school age in the UK, I’d say you make a very valid point. Maybe one day the truth will out. I for one hope it does, and hope again that I’m still around to witness it..
I think the Brexit vote was a rare occasion on which a large number of voters ignored the advice of the establishment. Sadly that didn’t carry through to Covid. We need to be less trusting and more sceptical of the motives of each and every organisation, public, private, national, global. The larger and more global the less trusting we should be.
tof – I thought you accepted that the C1984 was a Scamdemic and if that is the case why are people rambling on about how the pantomime was run?
Definitely a scam, yes, which I think could have been thwarted if people had been more truculent.
Excellent article but……
”Boris Johnson would undoubtedly point to his vaccination programme as the prime example. He moved swiftly ahead while the EU was mired in internal processes” and no mention that it was in fact one of the most unmitigated disasters inflicted upon the British people since WW2. 2,300 plus deaths thousands upon thousands of adverse reactions causing many many life changing injuries including amputations and no proof anywhere (oh except of “the models”) of any life saved. The elephant is still very much in the room even in TDS.