The Useful Idiot. By Krzysztof Szczawinski.
Specimen: Western, educated, well-meaning.
Habitat: universities, NGOs, quality newspapers, dinner parties where the wine is good and the opinions are better.
Status: abundant.
Skewered so accurately:
The useful idiot is not exactly stupid. This is the first and most important thing to understand. Stupidity would be a defense. The more precise diagnosis is what we in Poland call pół-inteligent — the half-wit [not a good translation from French, we would say “midwit”]. 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. Enough horsepower to run the program. Not enough to question who wrote it. …
The specimen is typically convinced — this is crucial — that it is among the most independent thinkers in the room. The delusion is important. Remove it and the whole architecture collapses.
Environmental pressures:
The species emerges in conditions of comfort and safety, which is why it proliferates in precisely the societies it works to undermine. It requires a baseline of security — enough that the consequences of being wrong about power remain abstract, theoretical, someone else’s problem. … Not innocence. Culpable ignorance dressed as virtue.
Observe the specimen in its natural habitat. It discovers The Cause sometime between the ages of 18 and 24, usually at an institution of higher education, usually through social contagion rather than solitary reasoning. The Cause varies by generation — Soviet sympathies, third-worldism, postcolonial theory, current-year identity grievance — but the structure is invariant: a clean division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, a designated villain class, and a role for the specimen as enlightened ally. The emotional reward is immediate and substantial. Belonging. The claim of moral clarity. The warm superiority of the awake among the sleeping. …
Job description:
The useful idiot is not a partner in the project. It is 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. And so Lenin used them — and so does Islam now.
Discarded:
The specimen’s lifecycle has a melancholy third act that it rarely anticipates. When the project advances far enough — when the institutions are captured, when the Overton window has moved sufficiently — the useful idiot becomes inconvenient. It knows too much about the earlier, more honest phase. It has friendships across the new fault lines. It retains, sometimes, inconvenient principles from when principles were the point.
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. We’ve all seen the very surprised lady in Paris…
History is littered with these figures. Western intellectuals who defended the Soviet project through the show trials, the Holodomor, the Gulag — and who spent the rest of their lives in various stages of retrospective rationalization. … Their counterparts today are producing content, signing letters, and occupying endowed chairs.
Disarming the idiot:
The useful idiot is not the enemy. It is the weapon. Understanding the difference matters — because the weapon can, in principle, be disarmed. It requires only one thing: contact with reality at sufficient intensity and duration to override the social rewards of the delusion. This happens. Some recover. Eastern European experience — the unignorable, undeniable, lived reality of what the project actually produces — has cured more than a few.
The cure is not pleasant. It requires admitting that one’s most cherished moral identity was constructed by people who found it useful. That the independence one prided oneself on was curated. That the dinner party consensus was not wisdom but a lie. Most cannot make this admission. The identity investment is too great. They double down instead — find new framings, new rationalisations, new ways to explain why this time is different, why the critics are the real problem.
Net zero is a classic result of our ruling class being a herd of useful idiots. Smart enough to understand that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so our emissions must some warming, and well-informed enough to know that physicists have completely understood radiation since 1900, so they have correctly calculated the effect of extra carbon dioxide on radiation escaping to space. That’s basic physics. Case closed they said, and anyone who disagrees with them surely must be an idiot!
But they are not smart enough to question Al Gore’s graph. Changes in temperature preceded the corresponding changes in carbon dioxide in the historical record. Al Gore knew that when he made his movie, but he cleverly suggested the carbon dioxide caused the warming without ever quite saying so. Like Lenin, he is a user.
Nor are they smart enough to wonder how human emissions can be significant in raising the carbon dioxide level so much, when they are only 8 Gt per year — dwarfed by the total emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere of 200 Gt each year, the rest from natural sources. (The bulk of it is from decomposing plant matter, mostly in the northern hemisphere, where decomposition increases strongly with temperature because bacteria and microbes — not being warm blooded — become more active with more heat.)
Or smart enough to wonder how increasing carbon dioxide affects convection, which is responsible for about 10% of the movement of heat around the atmosphere. Do they think modelers can simulate all the updrafts, downdrafts, clouds, and the wind? Really? Or that it’s not important?
They are not knowledgeable enough to know that it is very important, crucial even. Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas, responsible for over 50% of the heat emitted by Earth to space, compared only to about 13% for carbon dioxide (the rest is emitted to space from the surface and clouds, with an almost insignificant sliver for methane). What if the increasing carbon dioxide changes the convection patterns, such that the distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere changes? Which changes the radiation emitted to space? Turns out it does. And, as the climate scientists readily admit, this is the most important factor! More than the direct warming effect of carbon dioxide. Hmmm.
Are the useful idiots aware that the climate scientists took a completely wild a_ guess in 1963 about the changes in the distribution of water vapor as carbon dioxide increases? They knew about radiation but not about convection (and still don’t, because they still cannot simulate it accurately on any scale). As it happens, their guess got it backward, as decades of data from weather balloons subsequently proved. That guess is locked into the climate models by political forces, because it is responsible for the ridiculously large warming predictions of the climate models — that keep not coming true. Reverse the guess to bring it in line with the measured reality of water vapor, and the warming predictions collapse to a quarter of their current values, much more in line with the warming of the last few decades.
The carbon dioxide theory of global warming is wrong, but our ruling class doesn’t want to know. They only employ climate scientists who will tell them they were right, gloriously clever, and virtuous for “caring” about climate. So, net zero and Chris Bowen it is then.
The world has been in a warming trend since 1650. It’s caused by indirect solar factors, which the climate models completely omit. (Because we have only a vague idea of what they are and no one is allowed to research them. Sad but essentially true.)
