As the deadly black bloc coalition of Islamic and far-left insurrectionists battle it out on the streets of France’s cities, a hapless supermarket owner has emerged as (rightly or wrongly) the poster girl for European useful idiocy.
In a viral video uploaded by the braggadocious rioters, a female shop owner pleads with the looters to stop. “This is not our cause!” she pleads, while the looters boast, “It’s snack time! Grab the glass bottles! Grab some wine! Everything! I’ve got my groceries.” Some have variously tried to link the woman to previous left-wing protests, posted photos supposedly showing her carrying “Refugees welcome here” (without explaining why the signs are in English rather than French) and even claimed she is a ‘left-wing politician’ (without, oddly enough, actually naming her or the party she supposedly belongs to).
Colour me unconvinced in this particular case, but the phenomenon of the Useful Idiot is well attested through modern history. In the most infamous and blackly hilarious example, Iranian communists supported the Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover, assuming they’d control the Islamic fanatics once the Shah was deposed. The IRGC rounded them all up and shot most of them and imprisoned and tortured the rest. Once the Red Guards had dutifully smashed the “Four Olds”, Mao promptly had them shipped off to rural re-education camps.
While it’s certainly grounds for more than a bit of schadenfreude, it’s a big mistake to assume the Useful Idiots are actually stupid. Well, they clearly are in some critical respects, but in fact they are most often highly educated. The problem is that highly educated but moderately intelligent people are as prone, or more so, than actually stupid people to believe really stupid things. As George Orwell famously said, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Why do they fall for such obviously stupid ideas? Because they have learned enough to cleverly rationalise clearly idiotic ideas, but they’ve never learned to think clearly enough to see through their own bullshit.
Polish investor Krzysztof Szczawiński astutely diagnoses the specimen in question is rarely a genuine moron; stupidity, after all, offers a comforting line of defence. No, the clinical classification is rather more precise:
The more precise diagnosis is what we in Poland call pół-inteligent – the half-wit. Not the bottom of the intelligence distribution, which is too obviously lost to be useful. Not the genuine top, which tends to develop the inconvenient habit of following arguments wherever they actually lead. The sweet spot: smart enough to absorb a complex ideological framework, to deploy its vocabulary with confidence, to feel the social rewards of appearing sophisticated – but not quite sharp enough to interrogate the framework itself.
Armed with just enough cognitive horsepower to run the ideological operating system, our university-incubated darlings waltz through NGO boardrooms and faculty lounges, blissfully unaware that they are merely writing the subroutine for their own eventual redundancy. As James Delingpole once wrote, it’s as if, having enrolled in whatever humanities degree they gravitate to, they are handed a big book: THIS IS WHAT YOU THINK – and they dutifully follow it for the rest of their lives. Having discovered ‘The Cause’ during their undergraduate years, whether it be Soviet romanticism, third-worldism or the latest fashionable grievance matrix that meshes it all into an amorphous omnicause, they instantly luxuriate in the warm, ethical narcissism of being on the ‘right side of history’.
What our distressed Parisian shopkeeper and her ideological cousins across the Western world fail utterly to grasp is that sincerity is merely a raw material to be exploited by cynical operators. As Lenin understood with chilling clarity, the true believer is the ultimate infrastructure:
It provides legitimacy laundering: translating raw power-seeking into the language of justice, making the predatory appear compassionate, and doing so with enough genuine conviction to be convincing. The cynics who run the operation cannot do this themselves – cynicism is legible. True believers are required. The useful idiot’s sincerity is its primary value to those who deploy them.
This brings us to the most deliciously tragic act of the useful idiot’s lifecycle. When the revolution succeeds, when the institutions are thoroughly subverted and the Overton window has been dragged firmly into the abyss, the idealist becomes a positively embarrassing liability. They remember the old slogans about tolerance and pluralism and they retain inconvenient principles from an era when principles were supposedly the point. The newly industrialised apparatus has as much time for such sentimental relics as Trotsky had for ice picks.
The revolution, as it industrializes, prefers newer models: fully formed apparatchiks with no memory of idealism to complicate their loyalty. The useful idiot is retired, marginalized, occasionally denounced by the very movement it spent decades building. It dies puzzled. It never quite understands what happened.
And so our terrified grocer stands amidst the wreckage of her boutique, shrieking that the mob is violating the sacred rules of engagement, entirely bewildered that the leopards she so enthusiastically imported are tucking enthusiastically into her face. It’s a harsh cure, requiring contact with reality at an intensity most dinner-party intellectuals simply cannot stomach. Rather than admit their cherished worldview was curated by predators, they will invent labyrinthine rationalisations to explain why the rioters are merely misunderstood.
To the very end, they remain profoundly, pathetically useful.
