The history of human civilisation is filled with figures who transcended the limits of their time and, for that very reason, were persecuted. From Socrates to Galileo, from Van Gogh to the modern voices that challenge mass thought, the same pattern repeats itself endlessly. Excellence provokes resistance. Today, this conflict no longer manifests through persecution or prohibition, but through something subtler, the quiet, almost invisible revenge of mediocrity.
Mediocrity does not despise excellence because it considers it evil; it despises it because it mirrors it. It reminds everyone of what they might have become, had they dared to move beyond the boundary of safety. Society, for its part, has developed mechanisms that reinforce this conflict, and psychology has provided precise explanations as to why.
In the 1950s, Solomon Asch experimentally demonstrated that people prefer to be wrong with the many than right alone. Even when the correct answer was plain before them, the pressure of the group was enough to distort their judgement. A few years later, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described this phenomenon as the spiral of silence: the fear of social isolation leads individuals to suppress minority or original opinions.
This is the first stage of mediocrity’s revenge, conformity. The more distinctive someone is, the more they threaten the cohesion of the group, and the group reacts. As Kipling Williams showed, social exclusion triggers the same kind of pain in the brain as a physical wound. There is, therefore, no need for persecution or violence; isolation, mockery, or silent contempt are quite sufficient.
Yet mediocrity does not stop there. Within institutions and organisations, it is structurally favoured. Individuals and systems have a natural inclination to preserve the status quo, even at the expense of progress. As Samuelson and Zeckhauser demonstrated, this status quo bias leads decision-makers to choose what is safe and familiar rather than what is innovative or uncertain. Research by Foster, Rzhetsky, and Evans has shown that genuine scientific innovation is often rejected in its early stages because it is deemed too risky to fit within the established framework.
This pattern repeats itself everywhere, in universities, in businesses, in the media. Systems of performance metrics, indicators, and targets all operate within Goodhart’s logic: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to measure what truly matters. Thus, those who learn to play the system, rather than transcend it, are the ones rewarded. Mediocrity becomes the rational choice.
Technology has come to complete this process. Social networks and algorithms do not distinguish the essential from the superficial; they measure only resonance. Experiments such as those of Salganik, Dodds, and Watts demonstrated that social influence amplifies inequality dramatically. When users see what others prefer, they tend to follow the crowd, reinforcing what is already popular. As a result, original content sinks into the long tail of invisibility. Innovation exists, but it remains unseen.
Behind all this lies a deeper psychological mechanism, the need for equality. Social psychologist Norman Feather showed that people often feel satisfaction when a highly capable or successful person fails. The downfall of another restores the balance of their own sense of inadequacy. Excellence, in other words, is not condemned because it is wrong, but because it serves as a reminder.
The same occurs in the realm of knowledge. As early as 1968, Robert Merton described the Matthew Effect: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Established and recognised scientists receive a disproportionately greater share of attention, while younger, often more creative researchers remain in obscurity. The result is the reproduction of the same cycle: innovation lingers at the periphery, while mediocrity occupies the centre.
All this forms a coherent pattern: mediocrity need not conspire against excellence, the system does it on its behalf. Through psychological pressure, institutional inertia, and technological algorithms, society favours the safe and the familiar. Yet progress never arises from safety.
If there is a remedy, it lies not in the pursuit of elitist distinction but in building a culture resilient to difference. Excellence does not require privilege; it requires tolerance, an environment that recognises that dissent, failure, and unconventional thought are not threats but essential conditions for evolution.
Mediocrity will always exist, as it always has. The question is whether we shall allow it to continue avenging all that makes us human, our capacity to surpass ourselves.
The triumph of mediocrity is not merely a psychological or social phenomenon. It gradually gives rise to a new form of power, gentler yet far deeper than classical authoritarian structures. In modern democracies, power no longer needs to be imposed from above; it operates through networks, regulations, systems of evaluation, and technological platforms that diffuse conformity across every layer of social life. What emerges is a distributed dictatorship, a web of control without a tyrant, where obedience is not enforced but internalised.
This idea finds its roots in Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopower and the panopticon. Foucault showed that power does not dwell in a single centre; it circulates through institutions, rules, and everyday practices. In the past, authoritarianism was visible in the faces of rulers and the mechanisms of repression. Today, it manifests in the very structure of systems designed to serve us.
The distributed dictatorship functions as an invisible mesh of mutual surveillance. Citizens, workers, and digital users are simultaneously observers and the observed. Shoshana Zuboff described this phenomenon as surveillance capitalism, an economy in which human experience is turned into data used to predict and guide behaviour. Power no longer needs to say “no”; it merely steers what is deemed normal, acceptable, or socially desirable.
In public discourse, this reveals itself through overinformation and speed. As Byung-Chul Han observed, contemporary society is no longer repressive but hyperproductive. It overwhelms the individual with stimuli, opinions, images, and models of success. Suppression has been replaced by saturation. Those who cannot keep up with its pace simply vanish. The individual feels free but lives in an environment where their choices are already shaped by algorithmic filters, social expectations, and institutional norms.
The same occurs in work and education. Employees and students learn to monitor themselves, to measure, record, and assess their own performance through metrics and targets. Power has become an internal mechanism of self-regulation. Control is no longer imposed from the outside but experienced as duty, a condition Foucault once called discipline without a warden.
Technology magnifies this effect. Social media platforms and rating systems have introduced a new form of social panopticism. Each person is both observer and observed. As Zygmunt Bauman noted, the modern society of transparency does not grant freedom but perpetual exposure. Acceptance, visibility, and social approval function as mechanisms of conformity far stronger than the threat of punishment.
Within this framework, mediocrity becomes a cultural mechanism of stability. Because it is predictable, adaptable, and harmless, it serves as the ideal cell of this new form of power. The excellent, the creative, the different are not treated as enemies but as anomalies in need of correction. The pressure is not institutional but social. Those who fail to conform to the pace and tone of the age are simply excluded.
This distributed dictatorship, therefore, has neither leader nor face. It is a self-regulating system in which mediocrity has found the perfect environment to survive and dominate. The more people learn to censor themselves, to monitor their own behaviour, and to compete for social approval, the less anyone needs to control them. Freedom is not curtailed by force but by behavioural programming.
At this point, sociology and philosophy converge. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck spoke of the risk society, where the demand for safety creates vast structures of control. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned that we live in a world of hyperreality, where representation has replaced experience. And Han, in his more recent writings, argues that psychological exhaustion has become the new instrument of power: people obey not because they are afraid, but because they are depleted.
The distributed dictatorship is, then, the final stage in the revenge of mediocrity. A society that fears difference and excellence ends up designing its institutions so that no one can truly stand out. The result is a kind of courteous slavery, where everyone is free to speak, but only as long as their words fit the collective narrative. Power has become a shared habit.