Amerika

The term “normie” became popular in the 1980s with the kids who listened to industrial music. It referred to people of a normal morality of being sociable at the cost of all else. A normie just wanted to fit in, have a good job, a pretty wife, and a BMW. Beyond that he was insensate.

This becomes relevant when we consider that “normie” and “normal person” are not the same. A normie is lost in the peer pressure and social accolades, where “normal person” describes a range of people who are functional and may have some normie and some non-normie behaviors.

(A side note for those who enjoy microhistory: industrial music had a brief flare of activity, then faded into being essentially another pop genre with texturing of industrial sounds. By being explicitly anti-normie, it invited them in, and they took over.)

When we look at normal people, we see those who are trying to find the best option possible. They operate by prioritization of immediate consequences: if I do not go to work, I starve; if I do not say pleasant fictions, I get into conflict; if I do not pay taxes, I go to jail.

This naturally leads to domination of the short-term (pragmatic) over the long-term (realistic). They react to the environment, rather than plan ahead, and consequently accept what they get and rationalize it as good.

The normie takes this further by rationalizing whatever is current as good so that he feels he is “living his best life” and that things could not be different. Normies feel a constant sense of oppression by life and turn to individualism as a kind of retaliatory measure.

When a normie goes too far into this abyss, he or she becomes a liberal, meaning the libertarian variety of Leftist that just wants to be left alone and leave others alone. Essentially anarchists, these still want “government as a service” paid for by taxes to solve social problems.

Even the raving Communists express this essentially bourgeois sentiment. They want government to take care of society so that they do not have to, and they want to be able to pay taxes or be good workers and have everything else handled.

Wildly, unlike naturalists, they do not mind spending most of their time on this endeavor. To them there is nothing but themselves and other things like them, namely their social group, and so exploration of inner worlds, knowledge, or nature is as foreign to them as martian leech dumplings.

Humans in general tend toward individualism, which is a “me-first” reaction to a world they see as bad, a condition that comes from their innate egotism, narcissism, and solipsism. They see the world as a threat to their own belief that they are supreme in guiding their own lives.

When a human finds a threat, he often looks for justifications for his belief that he is superior to it in a moral sense and therefore “deserves” to defeat it. If you are a good person, the theory goes, you deserve to escape or destroy all threats.

In order to feel that he is morally safe, the human settles on something like libertarianism: he will tolerate the actions of others as long as they do not intrude on his own. This non-judgmental approach pleases most people in a crowd, but is a fatal error.

Much as anarchy does not work, libertarianism does not work. Mutual tolerance seems like it solves all problems to the individual, but the question of making civilization work remains even though the bourgeois do anything possible to ignore it.

Consequently, the normal person adopts the notion of having government solve everyone else. Mutual tolerance forms the root but then everything else gets handled by “government as a service” to which he pays taxes.

A thousand forms of libertarianism bloom in Late Stage Democracy. Each person wants anarchy subsidized by government but with his personal special interests or favorite issues represented.

At first this seems like it will make that ideal compromise that fans of bipartisanship seek, but as it turns out, this narrows the range of options. People agree on the basics, but the only thing that distinguishes different choices now are the pet issues, and those become fanatical to distinguish themselves.

If we trace this thinking to its root, we find pacifism. People want to avoid conflict, so they adopt mutual tolerance, thinking that if they leave others alone they will be left alone, but then they need to invent a moral backing, so they adopt fanatical issues.

When you find yourself in a society where people fight over abortion instead of whether we need socialism at all, you have reached this final stage. The normies just want whatever makes them feel morally superior, and normal people are all over the place, too disunited to oppose that.

The only way out is to see that libertarianism, while great as an economic system, is a total failure of a social system because like anarchy and communism, it allows the worst to thrive at the expense of the best. It is just another egalitarian experiment, and conservatives oppose egalitarianism:

A few years ago, I wrote, “Woke is a nebulous term stolen from Black American English, repurposed by conservatives as an epithet to express opposition to forms of egalitarianism they find ridiculous or distasteful.” This is what people mean when they refer to “woke banks” or “woke capital,” when they complain that the new Lord of the Rings series or the new Little Mermaid is “woke” because it includes Black actors, or when they argue for a “great unwokening” that would roll back civil-rights laws. Part of the utility of the term is that it can displace the criticism onto white liberals who are insincere about their egalitarianism, rather than appearing to be an attack on egalitarianism itself. In fact, woke has become so popular as a political epithet that providing an exhaustive list of definitions would be difficult. It is a slippery enough term that you can use it to sound like you are criticizing about behavior most people think is silly, even if you are really referring to things most people think of as good or necessary.

To say that traditional hierarchies are just and good, well, that’s simply conservatism. It has been since the 18th century. And to say that those hierarchies do not reflect justice and that people should be equal under the law—all the people, not only propertied white men—well, that’s more or less just liberalism. But if you don’t like it, you’d probably call it woke.

As formulated here many times, conservatism is simply the preservation of order, and liberalism endorses an anarchic order of individualism where the individual is the largest unit, and in groups this becomes egalitarianism, which is essentially just collectivized individualism.

Egalitarianism therefore serves as the method that the Left uses to convert normal people into bots for its agenda, and conservatives oppose it because they see it as irrelevant or worse, contrary, to the process of establishing and preserving order.

In the meantime, normal people continue trying to have it both ways, endorsing an individualistic social order with a complex wealth transfer political system behind it in order to represent all special interests and values, resulting in nothing in common between anyone.

Tags: conservatism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, normal, normies