Lionel Shriver – equal rights for stupidity

Lionel Shriver has written a bitingly satirical novel about the ‘social contagion’ she says has been raging since 2011, which allows ‘psychic epidemics’ to run riot and wreck society. It focuses on the Mental Parity movement – “the last great civil rights fight” – which maintains that “stupidity is a fiction” and that it’s “discriminatory” to suggest that anyone is more intelligent than anyone else.

 “Smartist” slurs such as “dumb” are banned in all contexts. Uttering any words that suggest otherwise leads to public rebuke – calling something “dumb” can mean losing your job or having your children taken away. There’s a re-education course, in which participants learn never to refer to a room as “dim” and that because people cannot be “thick”, nor can planks of wood. Gooseberry fool is off the menu.’

  As a sharp political dig, Obama is deposed after one term because “by 2012 … having a leader who was outstandingly astute, eloquent, and well informed” was “electoral death”. (Instead, the party picks his vice-president, Joe Biden.)

  The novel is about the phenomenon of cultural revolution rather than an attack on the less intelligent. “If there’s any single social mania that this book is based on, it’s really transgenderism,” she says. “I’m close to a free speech absolutist, and that absolutism is partly reactive. But I would scrap all hate speech legislation.”

 Interestingly she says 2011 is when “things started really going to s—”. Which was precisely when Neptune moved into Pisces, only exiting in 2025/26.

  She was born 18 May 1957 in Gastonia, North Carolina, no birth time, and came to prominence with her best-seller We Need to Talk about Kevin in 2005. She has a late Taurus Sun conjunct Algol in an Earth Grand Trine to Jupiter in Virgo and probably trine a Capricorn Moon; with her Sun in a controlling and determined square to to Pluto. Her Mercury in Taurus opposes Neptune and squares onto Uranus in Leo. Such a Uranus makes for a willfully determined and uncompromisingly individualistic temperament. Hence the no restrictions on free speech.

  Her Pluto sits on the focal point of another T square to the North/South Node axis which will give her penetrating insights into social trends which won’t always make her popular – though she’ll probably be proved right in the end.

 With all that Earth she will be practical, keen on security and comfort, and curiously down-to-earth for a creative writer.

  Neptune in Pisces with its woo woo mental confusion and neurotic trips won’t sit comfortably with her refreshingly no-nonsense personality. Maybe Neptune into Aries next year will see an end to the raft of cultural manias of recent invention.