If being normal is so good, why does everything normal suck right now?
Taking credit for being a model citizen while your civilization sucks
Times are tough and the slop cycle is slow. Someone tried to assassinate Trump for the thirty-seventh time this month and I’ve already posted three articles attempting to engagement farm off of Drunk Wisconsin, including doxxing him as an Indian teenager only pretending to be a Midwestern dad, yet his subscriber count continues to rise. I was kind of hoping Hasan Piker would pop up in the news since I’m a little bored of Clav and, for whatever reason, it seems like BTC gets a boner every time Piker drops in at the NYT to explain how Pol Pot got a bad rap. But now that I’ve nobly stuck up for Wisconsin after slandering him to a few thousand people, it’s time to finally explain why so many of us can’t be normal.
While I concede it’s totally possible that most people who can’t get with the adulthood program are just constitutionally incapable. In the same way that most of them can’t dunk a basketball. It doesn’t bother me whether you call this a skill issue or look at it as an immutable fact encoded in the fate of the stars or else by double helix.1 But many of us are chads, gifted with brains, body, and charisma but allergic to lies, sensitivity training, and the never-ending expectation to agree with the less talented people we carry through the workforce that the reason they don’t have more is we took it from them, that it’s a man’s world and white people are disproportionately responsible for everything wrong in it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to do the work of struggling employees I didn’t hire, who come from protected classes who are un-fireable, under the auspices that I was somehow not being a team player by wanting to write all of my sales in my own name rather than sharing commissions with others to make the bosses look helpful and more even-handed. Just typing that sentence, I can already hear people getting ready to say it’s my fault I ever had to work jobs in which I managed minorities instead of spreadsheets. But my gripe isn’t with people who are ambitious beyond their earning potential, it’s with people who offload them on me and call me greedy or racist when they can’t be bothered to help, having already fucked off to happy hour or avoided the kind of job where they would be my boss in the first place.
The normal people Wisconsin describes think of themselves as nice, bourgeois family people, who treat those who wear name tags with dignity while doing everything in their power to distance themselves from wagies as much as possible, to never become one and never let their daughters date one. When challenged on this position, they argue they have more wealth and prestige because they earned it, showing that they think you have less because you are lesser and deserve less. Both positions are fine separately but when combined, you can see how immaterial the products of their empathy are, that their displays of being a good, normal person serve to signal a virtue they can take credit for without having to back up in any substantive or costly way.2 Obviously empathy is deployed to fig-leaf bad (or selfish policies) with good intentions. It’s never occurred to them that many people do make the very normie decisions they’re told to and it just doesn’t work out either due to circumstance, ability, or they just accomplish it and find it wanting. They never account for those who get the spouse and kids and mortgage and stay miserable (although I’ve met thousands throughout my life).
If being normal is so good, why are so many who follow the recipe to a T unhappy?
And if being normal is so good, why don’t normal people necessarily seem like good people to me?
These are the crabs at the top of the bucket who pretend there is no bucket despite greasing the sides after getting to the top.
They are the first people to complain about the poor customer service a business offers, while pretending the people staffing the service industry now are no different from ones who staffed it when service in restaurants, hotels, and airports was inarguably better. They’re all responsible adults, which they’re happy to remind you of, often poking fun at the Disney adults I never manage to meet or see in the wild and yet normies’ responsibilities never extend beyond what they’re already doing. These normies are firmly middle-aged or older but when you ask how things could possibly get to such disrepair on their vigilant, adulting watch, they’re happy to remind you it’s a big system, every system has waste, and you should just chill out. They may support the system at every juncture, from engaging in democracy to voting Democrat to voting “for democracy(?),” with a minority of them eventually taking the bold position of being “against kings,” when no such office nor executive actions exist. They implore you to vote but when you ask them to take any responsibility for the results the very people they voted for got, they explain how they’re just one person and what are they going to do about it anyway? Knowledge is knowing they do this under liberal capitalism, while wisdom is knowing they would have done this under Soviet Communism.
They claim everything’s cool. You should just accept that the guy at the front desk of your hotel is illiterate and the guy who’s going to take your customer service call after you hold for twenty minutes will speak an unintelligible dialect of English in an overcrowded bullpen so loud you can barely hear his voice cutting in and out of the noise suppression in his VOIP software. As long as you can stay on the line or message with an uncaring chatbot for a few hours, you’ll be back to Pluribus and having a normal one in no time.
When they default to apologias for the leadership class or, God forbid, their political party, overseeing the chunk of U.S. history in which toiletries were deemed too dangerous to leave unlocked, they say how it’s not perfect but it’s the best system we have and maybe you should just buy a membership to Costco instead of trying to buy basic goods you could get for most of the 20th century at the nearest location to your house without making someone unlock each of them individually for you. When you push back and ask if things are as good now as they were in the past, you know, within this great system we have, they repeat that it’s the best system we have, not having an answer for why the best system is rotting and getting worse for a larger and larger swath of the population they allegedly care about and want to steward towards normalcy. These are the crabs at the top of the bucket who pretend there is no bucket despite greasing the sides and dusting Old Bay after reaching the top, going along with policies that hurt men, Jews, Asians, and white people, groups they often belong to, as long as it doesn’t personally hurt them. They will insult you or get confrontational if you try to make them care about anything they don’t already care about and aren’t told to care about by their boss or a FAANG stock.
But the main reason many of us can’t be normal is because it’s frequently immoral, and while we have backbone, normal people are terrible at rocking the boat because they lack the balls to do it. They cannot break glass in case of emergency, for their upper body strength is too shy or too limited, with their preferred solution for disparities between men and women relying on making sure men never do anything women can’t, including noticing any truths they care to suppress. Yes, I’m saying that a significant portion of working for The Man basically requires you neuter yourself and pretty much every generation of “normal guy” before you figured out how to negotiate feeding his family without turning himself into a eunuch. It’s this contemporary class of working man who decided he should also humiliate himself in the process, while telling himself, “At least I’ve never been fired.”
They’ll tell you differently but when it counted, normal people kept their mouths shut about the overreaches of covid lockdowns, social distancing, the consistency of masking protocols and lack thereof, the George Floyd/BLM 2020 extravaganza, and transgender ideology, along with any other topic that might get them yeeted. They’re correctly very touchy about the grifter allegations, knowing full well their income is tied to not saying certain things, which is arguably better than getting paid to affirmatively state things they don’t believe, but many will do it anyway.
All of the most careerist people, the white picket fence people, not only kept their mouths shut when it was time to speak up but many openly called for people’s termination for not wanting to shoot up with a novel technology resembling no vaccine they’d ever taken nor the public had ever known. They shrugged their shoulders when innocent people had valid questions, when others got deplatformed, shadowbanned, and otherwise censored for airing opinions and truths that ran counter to official narratives emanating from corporate press outlets functioning no differently than Soviet politburos. And when normies maintained their jobs, being able to work from home while many other able-bodied, working-age men had to coast off of unemployment because they were not “essential employees,” because they ended up in jobs more desirable than Amazon warehouse employee but not as vital to the economy as people who can stop showing up to work in the first place(?) and they were told that, even if indemnified of the risks, they weren’t allowed to make a choice that would have, in fact, probably kept them alive, on the normie path, gainfully employed and able to find a spouse, skinnier, richer and more normal than they are now.
The same people who stood behind the “my body, my choice” slogan evaporated overnight, when it became apparent they would have to take that pharmaceutical cock and roll it around in their mouth a few times, that the people telling you to make choices are often incapable of making any kind of choice or sticking out at all. Once you realize that they are constitutionally incapable of speaking up, in the same way their opposites are constitutionally incapable of staying silent, you don’t have to judge them for what they do as much for seeking credit for it when they couldn’t be nonconformist if they tried.
“Unessential workers” with spouses and kids were forced to make it work under duress while many single men and women had their economic and sexual prospects dashed, which is the one-two combo that traditionally creates jihadis, men with nothing to live for, who take revenge out on society. See all the men literally shooting at Trump and the many BLM and Antifa terrorists running around with the full force of every legal fund they can muster. Take notice of the temperature of gender relations and the battle of the sexes—do the people who supported those lockdowns have any responsibility here or should we let them continue to judge every child of divorce who watched two-and-a-half manosphere videos while he was disconnected from school, friends, girls, and facial expressions?
So tied to comfort and materialism as they are, you realize they would sell you out for a one-time discount on their auto premium while lecturing you that you should also sell someone out if it means you’ll stop bitching. It’s them against you if you make it so and questioning their morals or actions just makes you an abnormal loser.
I can’t help but notice so many of these normal people who will do literally anything to maintain healthcare and a 401(k), are the same people getting annoyed at all the jihadis and manosphere acolytes whose creation they tacitly cosigned by kneecapping them while telling them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s one thing to tell someone to be self-reliant but it is another to do so while you continuously side with discriminatory policies and people who make it harder to live the dream, while walking around asking why everyone is so tight when they fall short of having your life? Why not throw on that tie, sit through a land acknowledgement, don a pink shirt for breast cancer awareness in October, celebrate gay men in June, Black people for all of February but also again in June, and die in a fire as multiple prediabetic female firefighters make press releases explaining that you shouldn’t have made the mistake of being in a burning building? Why are you being weird?
While Wisconsin, could have written an equally compelling post about how you should just check out and not care whether people see you as normal or antisocial, he chooses to ask why you can’t just be more conformist—and say, shop at Costco like him—going so far as to claim that the State School Upper Middle Class are this massively powerful but simultaneously underestimated demographic (despite most sitcoms targeting them for their consumption habits). So I look forward to normal people and members of the State School Upper Middle Class stepping up to take all the credit they deserve for the state of the country and all the norms they’ve enforced by telling everyone to do as they do: denying crime, litter, fraud, waste, and abuse, along with selective instances of biology, while going along with insane policies that worsen racial and gender relations for everyone they avoid. They very occasionally do it to themselves too because they cannot handle anything that disassociates normal from good since it might jeopardize their lifestyles. Everything has to be for society, going along to get along, not rocking the boat. It’s never an effort to make them feel good about making their lives better while forsaking anyone they don’t personally count as normal. I could understand a world in which you have to quit drugs to get entitlements but normal adults have created a situation in which you can do extra drugs for extra benefits.
But the thing is, if you complain about any of these items or any of the aesthetic Millennial Salad Spot/gray architecture/Marvel Universe they’re nominally excited to welcome you to, any attempt to hold them as accountable for the civil society they pretend to be so proud of and normal in, they’ll call you bitter, say you’re complaining and ask, why you, yourself, can’t just be normal?3
For anyone who believes in blank slatism or how you can do anything if you put your mind to it, I encourage you to pay someone a few thousand dollars to teach you how to dunk a basketball and let me know how it goes for you. For the same reason, you can’t jump high enough to clear the rim, many just can’t sustain the habits that result in a stable job or gf mami.
You can see similar hypocrisy at play when alleged empaths go out of their way to valorize atypical forms of masculinity and then insult straight men for being incels, gay, or otherwise sissified.
The status quo is good, actually.
Wow, way to make it political
Usually you sit back and casually snipe at the culture war but here you are going after the Normie Shmormies directly. This anti normie article puts you firmly in edgelord territory