Counter-Currents
1,346 words
Many people have characterized 2021 as the year when they realized exactly how bovine the public is. While speaking disdainfully of “normies” was always present on the Dissident Right, even before the internet, when the old hats called them “sheeple,” 2021 — with its twentieth month of lockdowns, masks, and now vaccine hysteria, coupled with the sham election in America, the hard-Left swing of the so-called Conservatives in Britain, and the people’s total compliance with it all — proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the public is just as easily led by the nose and incapable of independent thought as we always suspected it to be. Sheeple, cattle, slaves, whatever you want to call them, they have no will outside what they’re told by the authorities to will.
Now that we’ve understood this, the question we need to answer is, what are we gonna do about it? Recently, someone pointed out to me that I have a strong disdain for normies. I indeed stand guilty of such disdain, but I’m not so proud that I can’t admit that such disdain is foundationally wrong. To hold a normie in disdain for not being able to manifest an independent will is like holding a dog in disdain for not being able to drive a car. But irrational though it may be, the disdain I and others on the Dissident Right have towards normies is very real, and deserves exploration.
I look at the average pooch, and it is in all ways that matter an inferior being to myself, and yet I have no contempt for it. It is very good at being a dog, at sniffing, at running, fetching sticks, using emotional blackmail to obtain free meat at the butcher’s, and being a good boy, but unlike me, it cannot drive a car, it cannot write an article for Counter-Currents, or even poop in a toilet. The difference between a dog and a normie, of course, is that I do not expect the dog to be able to do the things I do. Part of it is probably because the dog doesn’t look like me. For all our internal differences, the morphology of my set is very similar to that of the normie. We have all the same bits, all the same parts, and all in the same order. If I have sex with a normie woman, there’s a chance I’ll impregnate her. I can even speak to the normie, if not quite communicate with him. So, what’s to stop a normie from manifesting an independent will? If I can do it . . .
This is the line of reasoning that a libertarian took with me recently when he complained about the public’s lack of skepticism towards various theses that are being put out there without evidence or arguments. If he can do it — if he can rise above his programming, if he can break the conditioning, if he can demand evidence before believing something — then so can the people. I pointed out to him that he is in all likelihood not a normal man, is probably of higher IQ than average, and is very willful and jealous of his independence (hence the libertarianism), as well as most likely being slightly autistic and therefore not easily enthralled by charisma or intimidated by power.
Contrast that to the normie, who is the definition of average: of average IQ, probably not willful or interested in independence, not particularly impressed by evidence, and powerless to resist charisma and cowering before power. Psychologically, the normie and I might as well be different species.
If we are more or less a different species, as is the case with the dog, then why do I hold the normie in disdain, whereas I have infinite patience with the dog? The reason is quite simple. In the West, we are inundated from childhood with the egalitarian ideology. Egalitarian ideology teaches that we’re all equal, especially in mental ability, or as my libertarian friend put it, if I can do it, why not they?
Now, as much as I may reject this way of thinking intellectually, I was born and raised in this egalitarian culture. I was taught that all men are created equal, and that everyone can achieve anything if they apply themselves. And then, having been told that, I crashed headfirst into reality, where men are decidedly unequal — so unequal, in fact, that some of them barely register as human upon closer examination, being more similar in temperament to sheep and cattle than men. If you’re taught that God’s gifts are distributed equally, and that man can do anything he sets his mind to, then you soon learn to consider those who cannot achieve as simply lazy, willfully stupid, and pig ignorant, and if they’re perfectly compliant an authority’s commands, then they’re just slaves and value comfort more than honor. Why not hold them in disdain?
However, once we internalize an alternative hypothesis with regard to the nature of man and the nature of society, the need for disdain evaporates. When we speak of an organic, or corporate (meaning body-like) society, we speak of a society of specialized human beings, with the human body serving as a metaphor. Just as the human body has specialized cells and tissues which form organs, organ systems, and in turn the body, thus society has specialized people forming specialized institutions. By specialized, we do not merely mean specially trained, but specially born, with a position in the great chain of being determined by biology, IQ, the capacity for decision-making through rationality or emotionality, a tendency towards fear and hedonism or a lack thereof, and by the degree of connection to the transcendent and one’s capacity for spiritual life. In such a conception of life, every man, no matter how humble, has a role to play, and will be judged on how well he performs his role. In the egalitarian society, we are all expected to be everything and we’re all judged against the best, against the highest, because we’re all deemed to have the capacity to be the highest. In the egalitarian society, we form not a body, but an amorphous mass whose goal is to expand, cancer-like, and a neuron is expected to perform the functions of a muscle cell.
With that in mind, it would seem my disdain for normies is irrational. Maybe it’ll be with me forever, as I developed it early enough in life that it forms a sizeable chunk of what is now my adult personality. I suspect it developed during the course of my state-mandated education, where I was surrounded by peers and teachers who were normies. Had I been given an opportunity to be educated alongside my own kind and hadn’t been forced to interact with normies on a daily basis, I probably would have developed the paternalistic attitude towards the normies’ outlook that characterized the historical aristocrats. But I suppose that part of the reason why we’re crammed together in schools regardless of temperament and cognitive ability is so that the disruption of the normal, healthy functioning of the societal body is a desired end for the egalitarians.
Regardless of this, I’ll do my utmost — and indeed, so should you — to shed this vestige of egalitarianism in your outlook. I’m not saying love the normie, I’m not saying agree with him, and God knows I’ll never try to speak to him about subjects way above his paygrade, but we need to stop hating the normie simply for being a normie. As for yourself, you’re reading this text on Counter-Currents because you’re different. You’re probably higher than average in IQ, possibly even gifted, but more importantly, you have a dissident temperament. You are a willful person, willing to question arguments from authority figures and somewhat immune to the effects of charisma. Accept that and act accordingly.
I’m not giving you license to strut arrogantly and remind everyone constantly of your superiority, but rather I’m giving you a mission to become a leader of your people and take your position in the great chain of being. Godspeed.
* * *
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43 comments
What an incredibly timely article. I find myself really having to hold back my utter disdain for the normie. On the bright side, I’m having conversations with people about topics that I never thought I’d be having and doing my best to guide them along. The powers that be have really crossed into “can’t help but notice” territory with their behavior.
Unfortunately, “I sing the song of they whose bread I eat” is the mantra of most post-1945 Westerners, and will remain so until enough of them are reduced to buying bread with wheelbarrows of worthless money. It has happened before.
The influence of economic conditions on behavior and allegiance is a force that people on the Right have never understood or acknowledged, to their extreme peril.
Affluence rots and atomizes the character of men; hunger and mortal threat awaken and unite him. Never in history have men been so affluent as Westerners. Observe the connection.
A narcosis of affluence will continue to anesthetize Western populations to their impending demise, until this whole post-1945 global politico-economy collapses under the dead weight of its parasites. Thus we must act toward that result.
Juvenal: “Luxury is more ruthless than war.”
The trick is to live at the time of the “first softening”, after your vigorous fathers have won territory, tamed or destroyed savages, and hewed out civilization, but before the weaknesses associated with easy living take hold, and undermine your people’s grip on reality and their land. Alas, we are living in the “final softening”, the age of complete reality-denial, and aren’t too far from a hard landing or rude awakening.
“proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the public is just as easily led by the nose and incapable of independent thought as we always suspected it to be.”
Yo, double entendre check?
Nice catch, legate Maximus.
“They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.”
G. K. Chesterton, “The Secret People”
Was G. K. Referring to THE secretive people? Hmmm…
Yes, sometimes it is difficult not to despise “normies”, or not to feel despair about them. But they are what they are and no amount of “reeducation” can change that. I estimate that no more than 10% of the population is capable of intelligent and critical thinking, and here I am only talking about the developed world. For the Third World it will be no more than 1% (hence most of their countries are misruled by crazy dictators).
The reality of the herd mentality of “normies” became once more apparent to me by pictures of crowds of (mostly white) people “taking the knee” for a criminal black thug who died of an overdosis of drugs while resisting arrest by the police. To these “normies” that thug was an innocent saint, victim of wide spread “systemic racism”, as they were told by the media, which they of course believed.
Dear Franklin: Why should not despise them? To be honest, since this “plandemic” I learned to hate them. They richly deserved our hatred because thanks to them we are in this horrendous mess. Without their support (a by-product of their stupidity and cowardice) our enemies couldn’t have achieved what they have. Anyway, they will get their just desserts. When the black/brown savages become a majority (and it will be very soon) these useless creatures will learn the hard way the meaning and value of Race, but then, it will be too late. I hope I will live to see the demise of these hateful cowards and traitors. The White race is on its way to a well-deserved culling.
You’re probably right, but I’m not sure we will be any better off than the Normies.
God, thank you, I hate normies too. The way they sit there so arrogant and self satisfied, spouting inane woke platitudes. But they’re not all dumb, far from it, and most of the ones I work with are beyond me on the objective IQ scale I wouldn’t doubt, making it trebly hard to swallow. I despise normies, but guess what, that includes virtually everyone I see, so I suppose that also makes me a misanthrope/misogynist.
The people who’ve matriculated through the system are pretty fucking clever. Don’t underestimate the double dealing forked tongues. They know what we know.
Dark Plato: You are not alone my friend. I share your feelings wholeheartedly. Even friends who share my political views let me down by behaving like sheep in the face of this colossal scam known as “Covid-19” wearing masks 24/7 and getting vaccinated. I am practically a hermit since I cannot stand their company anymore.
Uh, oo, sorry but I would strongly advise you to wear a mask and get vaccinated with the moderna or Pfizer. Those are not the issues I was referring to.
We live in a world full of normies or morons to use a little more blunt a term. The levels of intelligence in people range from idiots (incapable of functioning in society without constant guidance and doesn’t understand consequences of actions), imbeciles (operates at a higher level but still requires help to get by and only understands very obvious things), moron (can function normally in society and understands immediate consequences but not delayed ones further out on the time horizon and doesn’t look for counter arguments to hone in on the truth of a particular matter. Still though I don’t put it all down to IQ either. There’s a fear of uncomfortable thoughts e.g. maybe the people running society don’t want us to be free, healthy etc.
I have formed a notion of the ‘intelligent idiot’ to describe the phenomenon of people being capable of easily dealing with complex problems, while holding as their stance with complete earnestness all the slogans TV, newspapers and the sea of conformist public opinion demand to be, and remain, an accepted member of the society they believe is always observing, evaluating and grading their behavior. As an example, being a highly capable mathematician does not mean that one can or is willing to detect the underlying meaning or longterm consequences of measures our overlords subject the world to.
In my experience, it’s not a question of IQ, but a question of character, specifically of personality. Some of the highest IQ people I know are complete normies, but they instinctively trust authority.
I know quite a number of people who have their intelligence certified by advanced academic degrees, yet make me wonder about the things they are saying and the opinions they have. I also have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to change someone’s opinion by argument. Such change is only possible through circumstances, the whip of Nature as it were.
It seems that the determining majority is existing in accord with a generalized ‘ubi bene ibi patria’, perhaps more aptly stated nowadays with ‘as long as the shelves are stocked in the super market, I’ll keep quiet’.
I had just been wondering how to describe my sister (a respected academic with several books to her name), and you have done so. Thanks!
You’re one wise Irish man
Are you a fan of my favourite Irish social commentator Dave Cullen?
Thanks for the compliment J. Yes I am a fan of Dave Cullen too. For ages there was hardly any or no dissident Irish voices but at last Dave Cullen came on the scene and now there are several – it was an alleluia moment!
Not sure I agree, but I enjoy your distinctions between idiot, imbecile and moron!
I think we’d like to have a position of authority over normies, but we don’t. The egalitarians do. That’s the source of frustration. We are not in power.
Yeah, this!
It’s the five-monkey problem again:
https://www.heretical.com/sgs-2018/5monkeys.html
Influence counts for much, but nothing alters what Eric Hoffer noted was the real problem in The True Believer: Propaganda and information can do so much, but in the end the use of force is required to turn a normie into something else.
As the article notes, we all benefit from conformity even as it infuriates us that people are difficult to influence in ordinary times:
High conformity accounts, for example, for the scarcity of road accidents. In Britain currently there is one fatality about every 180 million miles travelled, an astonishingly low rate. Without people’s innate tendency to conform, our civilisation would be very different. The problem today is that mass conditioning has been established which has set our civilisation on a path to collapse.
I was a data collector for one of these behavioral tests (no monkeys) and it’s astonishing how much most humans are, as G.I.Gurdjieff noted, asleep at the wheel all their lives.
One colleague noted that our problem is looking for answers of persuasion in politics or psychology, when the real mind-changer among humans is theology. Religious conversion even has physical effects. But how to apply this to normies is problematic.
What’s Greg Johnson’s take on the Covid vaccines and all the various mitigation strategies?
It exactly mirrors my in-laws, who are total Normies.
Listen to the latest Brains Trust podcast.
I wouldn’t despise normies so much if they at least acknowledged our superiority. But then, I would say that . . .
A normie would acknowledge us as superior beings if he weren’t himself poisoned with egalitarian ideology. He’d stop resenting us as well.
Ironically normies, who believe that “all men are equal”, consider themselves as morally and intellectually superior to those who don’t hold that belief.
Ha! That’s a simple but quite brilliant observation.
SPOT ON with respect to all the white Phd “Progressives” I’ve worked with.
Dunning-Kruger effect again. More intelligent people always fail to understand how much stupider others really are, and become baffled and disillusioned with their ovine credulity. But the solution is also in this fine article too – ‘charisma’, which most of us surrender to every time, and especially Normies. If you want to lead the people out of darkness, forget arguments. You need style, style and more style – great art, great music and supreme confidence.
Eton teaches confidence above all else.
Great article, yet again, Mr. Jeelvy. I made just such a point to someone elsewhere in a comment a few days ago, that most are not capable of independent comprehension so why be angry with them? They are undergoing 24/7 brainwashing propaganda. What other outcome is to be expected?
In my early school years I was placed in a gifted program, so was surrounded by others as equally atypical. In high school years my parents moved and I was placed in normie classes in a small rural school – what a shock! But it properly prepared me for the real world where normie is the norm.
I like your dog analogy. I’m sure they can be taught some tricks we’d like them to have, if only we had control of the propaganda machinery.
Normal people — at least normal white people — simply want sufficient order and prosperity to bring up their families without excessive anxiety and hardship.
Presently this is still possible, so there is no incentive to embrace disruption even if it would lead to a better future.
When chaos is thrust upon them, and I believe that time is coming, then they will be open to — or at least acquiescent in — radical measures.
There are two strands in America that seem to create the ‘misnormalist’ attitude Mr. Jeevy describes.
In America we have Puritanism. They contribute the vacuous idea that perfection, however impossible, is the only thing worth failing at and that all failure is, at some level, sin.
The other is snobbery.
Egalitarianism isn’t about universal sameness. It’s about an acceptance of the essential worth of your countryman/tribesman no matter what position in the hiearchy they occupy.
Such an attitude is most easily accomplished through deterrence, the ability for the different orders and classed to immiserate one another when needed.
I too despise normies: despite my very high IQ, the abuse I suffered under them has made it very difficult for me to have a normal job
We need a better understanding of what makes a normie. IQ plays some role but is neither necessary nor sufficient – I work with many very high IQ normies who deeply accept the Covid, BLM and immigration narratives. They internalize the mainstream arguments for these to an impressive degree – they put effort into reading the ‘expert’ studies and ‘clever’ opinion pieces and are able to defend their position quite well based on mainstream sources and mainstream information. The mainstream offers such people everything they need intellectually to defend their position. They are impervious to dissident opinion and rhetoric precisely because it lies outside the mainstream.
Egalitarianism is not exactly right either. A fundamental feature of the middle class high -IQ normie is their contempt for the low-IQ non-metropolitan who he regards as low-IQ, unprogressive, and controlled by misinformation from ‘Fox News’ and Republicans. Note the mainstream (e.g. The Comedy Channel, NPR, Young Turks etc.) characterizes all dissenters in exactly this was and high-IQ normies build separateness from the low-IQ republican voter into their core identity.
So its not essentially about IQ or even egalitarianism, but something else, perhaps trust, conformity and credulity. This was a good article, and over the target, but not quite getting to that incredible phenomenon that is the NORMIE.
“A fundamental feature of the middle class high -IQ normie is their contempt for the low-IQ non-metropolitan who he regards as low-IQ, unprogressive, and controlled by misinformation from ‘Fox News’ and Republicans. Note the mainstream (e.g. The Comedy Channel, NPR, Young Turks etc.) characterizes all dissenters in exactly this was and high-IQ normies build separateness from the low-IQ republican voter into their core identity.”
Also the high-IQ urban bourgeois bohemian’s contempt for all the unsophisticated slobs who populate flyover country. I used to like City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, until he started to publish Tim Wise (City Lights published no less than five books by Wise) and similar “anti-racist” sewage. Such hip rebels. So cutting-edge. So original and daring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYoV1Vc1e-M
The reasoning behind the claim that feeling contempt for normies is a vestige of egalitarianism makes little sense. According to that standard, no one is allowed to despise anyone else for his or her moral failings: the warrior is allowed to despise neither the sniveling coward nor the grimy slut. Being a normie, like being a coward or a slut, is a moral failing. Despite the claims of mainstream society teaches being obviously false and destructive, normies prefer the lie because believing something other than what is conventional is stressful.
Normies are not worth the energy it takes to hate them, but the more passive feeling of contempt is entirely appropriate for them.
This is a very interesting article, but might I offer a contrarian view, as a contribution to the debate?
While I also often feel contempt for the “sheeple” (a more accurate description than “normies” IMHO) we need to reflect on why it is that most of humanity (not only the white race, far from it) is so constituted. After all, why would our species have evolved in this fashion if unthinking conformity to groupthink did not have important evolutionary advantages?
A clue, I think, can be found in an anecdote related to the “savage” by one of the controllers in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, where, my readers will recall, humanity is bred with five different levels of intelligence from Alphas to Epsilons and each caste is indoctrinated from infancy to think itself the most fortunate, so that everyone is happy.
The controllers, who are by no means so deliberately malign as their counterparts, the “inner party” in Orwell’s rival dystopia, 1984, carry out an experiment by populating an island entirely with Alphas. It is a complete disaster, and ends with most of the group dead of starvation or eaten by the survivors, who regress to cannibalism in order to survive.
The moral of the story is clear: it is a good thing if the leadership class in society is fairly small and the followers numerous, for who will do the many dull, repetitive, backbreaking chores that have to be performed if all have an IQ above 130 and think such things beneath them, not without reason? Why would or should a man or woman with an IQ above 130 spend the day in stoop labour in the rice fields or cleaning privies?
I also counsel anyone with an exaggerated contempt for normies to reflect on what a society consisting only of movement people would be like. If you doubt that it would end up much like the experiment described in “Brave New World”, read an account of Elizabeth Förster Nietzsche’s attempt to create an Aryan commune in Paraguay, which was not exactly an unadulterated success, or else spend a fortnight in the company of a cross-section of movement people yourself, and see whether you do not then love normies after all!
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