Et Tu, Normie?

Intro to the Normie

Are you a normie? This refers to a person with mainstream tastes, viewpoints, and behaviors. Normies believe things are as they appear. It’s easy to spot a normie based on the depth of their political analysis (or lack thereof). Are they interested in politics at all? Or only insofar as it affects this week's sports-betting?

Most normies are mindless consumers, fewer are interested in politics. The ones who do approach politics as yet another form of consumption. A normie is someone who has very low situational awareness regarding history. Low situational awareness means vulnerability to danger. Normies take for granted that what we’ve been told about history is fair, accurate, and objective. They frame what they see in terms of fictional universes: good guys always win because, well, haven’t you watched Harry Potter? But not all normies are the same– they exist in increasing stages of awareness. 

The Illusion of “Centrism” and Solomon’s Baby

There are some who think they can escape having conviction about something by mediating between the Left and Right: this is the “centra-normie.”

The centra-normie is marginally involved with politics, but still so braindead they believe they’re smarter than everyone else because they fancy themselves “centrists.” You often hear people say “I’m fiscally conservative, socially liberal.” What’s funny is you almost never hear the reverse. “I’m socially conservative, fiscally liberal.” That should fly over real well at parties…

But this sentiment betrays something crucial. Centrists are, in our 21st century US, far from rational moderates, but rather just another flavor of liberal. Their whole platform is based on what can be considered “common ground.” They think this makes them forward-thinking, and even sometimes rebels. You can see this in the smug phrase “I’m hated by both parties!” which is really a way of saying “I deeply desire to be loved by everyone.”

The unfortunate reason centrism doesn’t quite work is because a compromise between a solution and the opposite of that solution is lukewarmness: to do nothing at all, or worse yet to do something actively fueling the problem. Cold water freezes bacteria, and boiling water destroys it, but a lukewarm solution is perfect for breeding.

Here’s centrism in action: two women come to King Solomon and claim to be the mother of a child. It’s hard to tell who’s lying. Solomon proposes to cut the baby in half, so that each may have one half of the child. The fake mother is fine with this because she doesn’t really care– the real mother can’t stand to see this and relents. Solomon declares the one who relents to be the real mother, because she couldn’t stand to see this happen to her baby. The purpose of the story is not “sometimes you have to compromise with evil in order to get what you want.” The purpose of the story is of course manifold, but one of the lessons is that there can be no real compromise with evil. Unfortunately, there are some who may hear this story and for fear of offending the fake mother’s feelings restate: “But are you sure we can’t cut the baby in half?”

Unfortunately for the normie, we’re going to have to be a bit more clever than the cop out “the answer must be somewhere in the middle.” That would be to fall into a serious case of recency bias. Tell me, normie, how do we know that the two present parties are not actually extremely radical in one direction, and by historical standards we are all horribly, insanely radical? Wouldn’t the center, then– at least from a universal standpoint– be somewhere so extremely far outside the current discourse that no one is even thinking about it in our current point of history? This is a high possibility if you misunderstand the undercurrents of popular thought (aka ideology). If you misunderstand this, you will never understand politics. You’re setting sail with the belief that wind is an old wives tale. 

The question isn’t “how exactly would we like to cut this baby in half?” but rather, “who is the real mother, how can we discover her, and how can we get her baby back to her?” In the realm of politics, this is akin to asking “what is ideology, how can we identify one, and can a given ideology be carried out successfully?”

The Life Cycle of Ideologies

Ideology simply means “a system of ideals,” specifically forming the basis for political or economic policy. In its most negative connotation, ideology often means a preconceived set of ideals, handed to one ready-made. Here is your package of thoughts, sir. Imagine it like you were a baby bird receiving pre-digested sustenance from its mother. The upside is you don’t have to chew. The downside is there’s no telling what mama will spit up. In other words: you don’t have to think, but once you open wide, you don’t get a say in what comes next. 

For example, communism’s proposed purpose is a totally classless society. In practice, however, this inevitably means the eradication of everyone. If you divorce the theory from the real world application, the 60 million massacred under Soviet communism gets waved off as an oopsie and “not real communism,” rather than a de facto disqualifier for any repeat attempt at such an ideology. (Luckily, Mao’s communism killed another 75 million, in case there was a question of the experiment’s reproducibility. Sorry, baby bird, them’s the brakes!) How an idea will play out is somewhat unpredictable, because thought evolves over time as it fuels different peoples and movements– this is the ideological connection in history and politics. To give another example, if you have no idea what the Protestant Reformation is, how can you understand the modern American liberal?

Most people believe they understand these ideologies well enough to navigate the modern landscape. The problem is our willingness to accept a ready-made explanation even in our understanding of ideologies. What am I supposed to believe about how all of these systems of thought interact? Quick, someone tell me! 

We don’t like unfinished puzzles, and we’re willing to cram pieces where they don’t fit if it means we can have a finished (albeit wrong) picture. Is trying to figure out everything for yourself the way to escape? No, because you can’t possibly parse out all the information. The idea that you could be the one to figure it all out independent of any system for help is just falling into another ideology called individualism. Which we know to be at the very least incomplete in its view of the individual: you are, after all, by virtue of being an individual, at the intersection of a multitude of collective identities. Puerto-Rican, queer, disabled, furry, etc. As a result of this, you are the inheritor of a variety of viewpoints which all vie for primacy, with varying degrees of internal compatibility. How can you know which one(s) will lead to flourishing, and which to disaster? 

Ideological Amnesia and the Modern West

And so we have to be conscious of the fact that it takes a lot longer than you may think for an idea to run its course. 

Curtis Yarvin makes the very astute case that the Protestant Reformation is the predecessor for the modern day “woke” Left. I would venture to say that it actually extends further back to the Great Schism of 1054. This sounds unfounded, until you trace the suppositions of then to today. The Roman Catholic Church seceded from the Orthodox Catholic Church in order to assert the Pope’s absolute universal jurisdiction, a departure from the historical understanding of the Church’s governance. In this way it set itself up as a sort of humanist institution: attempts to consolidate the Papacy’s divine and political power, devoid of the Church’s grace, lead to evolving abuses and overreaches. The Reformers posited the idea that the individual’s conscience could not be bound by the dogma of a religious institution, but only by the Scripture alone. The Enlightenment, furthermore, posited that we could come to truth by reason apart from revelation. The American Revolutionaries, inspired by Enlightenment ideas, asserted a constitutional republic with separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Their example later inspired the French Revolution, which rejected monarchy and divine-right rule. The revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and citizenship inspired 19th- and early-20th-century reform movements, including abolitionism, suffrage, and labor rights, laying the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights movement onward scooped the ball, championing social justice and progress as the purest virtue– there’s no telling where it may end– now anything standing between man and the fulfillment of his desire is considered tyranny. Some may argue this is a stretch, but the principle of self-determination, individual conscience, and equality-at-any-cost has gradually expanded, from schism to social reform. 

But who would ever have assumed that a little change to the Nicene Creed would lead to all of this? The normie certainly would never– but in the slurred, albeit wise words of philosopher Kamala Harris: “You think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context.” Ideological amnesia is a hell of a drug. We’ve overdosed so frequently there’s no hope of getting custody of our baby back– maybe at best we could clean up, get a nice apartment, and maybe a small dog.

There is a joke that American conservatives are just liberals from 15 years ago. Caitlin Jenner, after transitioning from a man to a woman, went on record against same-sex marriage saying “I’m a traditionalist.” American patriots decry constitutional infringements, citing the need for another 1776. Few, however, possess the stones to call any of the founding fathers libtard. But I want to stress that merely being reactionary is not an automatic solution, either. 

Escaping the Dialectical Horseshoe

And so what do we do now? Is the solution to yield to the extreme opposite of whatever we’re facing? I don’t think that would be wise, much less popular. I only want to make you wonderful normies aware of the Overton Window. Very few people, and almost no normies, have ever heard this term. 

The Overton Window defines the narrow spectrum of ideas considered “acceptable” in one’s own time. By historical standards, even our conservatives are exceptionally liberal. In a previous essay I spoke about the heroic nature of creativity, specifically with regard to moral conduct and thought, and how this is a very polarizing venture. To transcend normiedom, you’ve got to be brave and creative enough to consider ideas currently considered “unpopular”. We are seconds away from the part where they cut the baby in half. Of course no one wants to risk being wrong– or worse, unpopular(!)– but it may be necessary.

The mistake here is for people to assume that anything outside the Overton Window immediately means violence. Political violence is already well within the Overton Window, as evidenced by the recent Charlie Kirk event. People are already resorting to that, and lib normies are rationalizing it by saying incredibly stupid things like “well, he had it coming because of XYZ…”

There’s a theory centered around horseshoes which goes something like: “you are bound to become what you hate most.” Ironically, the National Socialists and Communists both really embrace violence, and really hate Christianity. Swinging to one or the other side of the horseshoe would mean becoming very, very identical to your enemy in order to overcome them. But again, I’m saying you should become so radical in your heroic renunciation that you escape the horseshoe entirely. If you fail to do this, you will swing violently between each side of the horseshoe, trapped in what is called dialectics. 

Dialectics is merely the two poles that the centrist thinks he has transcended. We are creatures of extremes and so we naturally assume “the opposite of the worst thing is the best thing” instead of assuming it’s just another slightly less bad thing. For example, the normie, trapped in dialectics, will say “If communism is bad, capitalism is totally good.” Transcending that dialectic would be to realize it’s a false either/or, which arises from historical and ideological awareness of both systems. Monopoly capitalists have historically funded a great deal of communist revolutions, and communist fat cats have looked deceptively indiscriminate from monopoly capitalists. Both economic systems are merely man-made, and the possibility of an earthly utopia, prevalent in theory, seems deceptively difficult to actualize in history. What if all man-made structures are necessarily flawed, because existence is too complex for man to codify? This is almost certainly true. It would mean the only survivable system would be one revealed from outside man. Er, I mean, ¿viva la revolución?

The Future and Abyss

Listen, normie: I appreciate your willingness to slog through this. We’ll make an individual out of you yet. If I can leave you with one final thing, I want you to know this: true belief is willingness to risk doubt. An atheist refusing to question his atheism is worried it won’t stand– but the same goes for any ideology. A person unwilling to critique their own way is unlikely to learn a better one. You don’t have to think very deeply on politics for very long to realize how meaningless the whole thing is, divorced from some objective theory of the truth. It shifts, continually, like a sand castle built on… sand.

 If you’re conservative, why don’t we go all the way back? Why only 15 years back? With that sort of model, what are we conserving? If you’re progressive, you’re frankly a bigot not to think very, very far ahead. How far ahead? At least 2000 years, minimum. After all, we look back on slavery and say “that’s so obviously wrong, the people back then should have known– they should be held responsible. They are so to-be-held-responsible, we are going to hold their far removed descendents responsible.” So let’s not be lazy, and let’s not be hypocrites! Let us plunge ourselves into the abyss of the future! Do not, dear progressive, give rest to your eyes until you have asked and found an answer: what current attitude, in the year 4025, will cause them to look back at us and view us as not forward-thinking enough? If I may offer my two cents, having pondered the question a great deal for fear of being found bigoted, I feel confident they would look to us and say: 

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