That’s the sub-title of a recently published novel called Mania, summarised there at Amazon:

In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is “the last great civil rights fight.” Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (“stupid”) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.

One or two decades ago this satire would have been a lot stronger than it is now in the wake of some of the incredible things we are supposed to believe and say (or not say) on pain of actual legal action against us, depending on where you live in the world. The author, Lionel Shriver, who has published fifteen best-selling novels acknowledges that recent events have inspired this story, which she discusses here in this interview about Mania:

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 recognize: 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.

That last is a disturbing thought. Whether it was Pet Rocks, The Macarena, Heroin Chic Models, or Gangsta Rap, all fads not only passed but there was some interval of time before the next one arrived.

Not now. As Shriver observes our world of Social Media means that one follows the other almost instantly, and that they are far more all-encompassing than the fads of the past, hence her term of “social mania”. She also points out that we humans have always been vulnerable to such things, with one of her characters opining in the novel that she now understands how the atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler could happen. But again, Shriver is talking as much about our reality as her fictional world:

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 UK it would take Adolf Hitler at the most about three weeks.

Well I don’t know about that: perhaps if he had big, dreamy eyes, nice hair and a really pink uniform it could work.

… 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.

I think I’ll but the book, but do read the whole interview.