Culture War Battlefronts Part 4: Normies Versus Weirdos
Tomorrow’s event:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. February 9th to 12th @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 3 hours.
Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp w/ A.J. Bond. Every Thursday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Vulvantine’s Day Party w/ Jote Lamar and Lara Catone. February 14th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shadowplay: Memes and the Digital Shadow w/ Chris Gabriel (MemeAnalysis). February 17th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Side View: Attention Is an Art Form: The Roots of TSV w/ Adam Robbert and David Collins. February 23rd @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Situation: Sensemaking the Pluriverse between Design and Dasein w/ Peter Jones. March 8th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shadowplay: Technocracy and Synthetic Shadow Culture w/ Lubomir Arsov. March 10th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Regenerative Movement: Rise of Doomer Optimism w/ Jason Snyder. March 11th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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February 10th, 2021
This will be the last entry exploring the culture war battlefronts ...
NORMIES VERSUS WEIRDOS
According to our friends at Know Your Meme (whose editor-in-chief will visit The Stoa this Sunday) the phrase normie is defined as: a slang, pejorative label for an individual who is deemed to be boringly conventional or mainstream by those who identify themselves as nonconformists.
Apparently the first mention of the term is from The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and like most dankish memes, it first emerged and started spreading on 4chan, and soon was frequently used by reactionary tribes. It seems to have spread to all memetic tribes however, as postrationalists such as Venkatesh Rao are using it, and I see people on both the progressivist and socialist/Marxist left using it as well.
Even though it contains a judgemental energy, the term normie does seem useful to describe certain people who are only plugged into consuming the spectacle via television shows, music, sports, and legacy news, all of which is brought to us by multinational media conglomerates, who profit from the normies' consumption habits.
Consumption shapes the norms, and normies got to norm. A term I coined before called “norm fundamentalists” might be more useful to use here. The norms that normies are adopting and supporting are unexamined in a fundamentalist way, meaning that the “state of feeling normal” is a state that people fundamentally desire to stay in, usually due to fear of judgement by those whom they deem to be their peers.
Most people are normies at least sometimes, myself included. This is partly what makes this an interesting battlefront, as it is a war that is happening on the ontological borders between the normal and the weird, and we are all oscillating between these ontological states. This oscillation is amplified thanks to our being situated in “the great weirding,” which is Venkatesh Rao’s term to describe the moment in time we currently live in, defined by a wildly disorienting, rapidly changing world.
What makes this battlefront interesting is that the weirdos (aka non-normies) have a judgemental energy towards the normies, due to not feeling accepted by them. This partly explains the seductiveness of memetic tribes, as they offer a sense of intellectual superiority over normies, while serving as what Cass Sunstein describes as “norm entrepreneurs,” those who engage in changing social norms.
Seen through this lens, the current culture war is both an enacted revenge fantasy against the normies from the weirdos, due to unprocessed feelings of rejection, while also being a competition in the “memetic marketplace” to win the precious resource of normies' minds.
Legacy media (or the “Blue Church”)—and its presentation of an ideological duopoly—once firmly had the monopoly on the normies’ minds. Many things are up for grabs now though, including the normies, and the memetic tribes know this. Like barbarians at the gates—and the gates in this case is the Overton window itself—the memetic tribes are attempting a hostile take-over of the “metanarrative,” the unifying narrative that has the most explanatory power.
The woke tribes have been most successful in laying claim to the metanarrative in recent years, successfully infusing itself with institutional knowledge. That claim to power is shaky though, and requires the blunt tool of cancel culture to maintain its epistemic authority, and as I have argued before, cancel culture has become a runaway weapon that has even turned on those originally using it.
All this culture warring is disorienting for the normies, and escaping into entertainment can only push back the meaning crisis for so long. We are all a mini-crisis away from haunting existential questions, and with religion largely being a non-factor for most people these days, memetic tribes are waiting to recruit the normies, and replicate their memes in the ones who are in crisis.
Possible synthesis: Weird Stoics or Weird “Whatever Thing You Vibe With”
The trick is not to judge the normies or view them as hopelessly benighted, nor is it the right move to unconsciously view them as recruits to your way of viewing things. Besides, not all norms unconsciously enacted are bad, and probably the vast majority of them are good. The problem happens when one becomes imprisoned by norms and lacks the agency to reconsider them.
A synthesis here would require developing the capacity to “yes and” the norms needed to vibe with normies, along with the capacity to lead in such a way that leads them to their own leadership, and view them as the beautiful transcontextual beings that they are. The ability to take on multiple perspectives without capitulating to any one is required for this, and the capacity to surf the great weirding without losing one’s shit. I find Stoicism helps one be weird in the right way, but perhaps there are other spiritual and philosophical traditions that do it better.
There are other battlefronts I could write about. Here are some that come to mind ...
White privilege versus white identity
Masculinities versus reactionary masculinity or “neomasculinity”
Transfeminism versus trans-exclusionary radical feminism
Anti-antisemitism versus the return of the "Jewish Question" (from both the political left and right)
Techno-optimism versus ecological realists (Hat tip to Jason Snyder and Jared Janes for this one)
Pro-guns versus anti-guns (Hat tip to BJ Campbell for this one)
Those with daddy issues versus those with mommy issues
The first four on the above list run parallel to the “woke versus anti-woke” battlefront, and they are very dangerous to engage with, even from a meta-perspective. The “thesis” views the “antithesis” as an existential threat that needs to be eliminated completely. It is not only benighted, but it is also deemed to be evil, containing no truth value, and it is considered a legitimate move to censor them and shame them out of existence.
I may write about these battlefronts at a later date, as they are indeed happening, and the “what you shame stays the same” thing also applies in the culture war. These things are not going away, and they will only fester and amplify if the Blue Church tightens the Overton window, which might result in a “long night” scenario, which will not be good for anyone.
I am sure there are many other battlefronts to discuss, and I do think knowing the contours of the “theater of war” in our culture, along with the “theater of operations,” will provide us culture heisters wise optionality in stealing the culture.
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