Who Are "The Normies?"
In Search of a Mythical Beast.
There is a concept that underpins much of online political discourse, especially what is considered alternative political discourse, that we take for granted: the concept of the Political Normie. It is taken as rote that there is a mass of people who all hold the same political opinions for the same reasons and are unaware or afraid of alternative political theories. They are the theoretical political equivalent of people who just listen to chart music or just consume hollywood films—but the issue with this concept is that, in my experience, The Political Normie may not exist in the way we think he does. But first, some background:
The term Normie has been around online since the 1990s but found its highest level of traction on 4Chan, the history of which is rather important to understanding much of the esoterica of the current internet, being a staple of certain boards from its inception and becoming general parlance in many other related communities by the 2010s. As a political term it became associated with Frog Politics, being used in Pepe’s famous cry of “REEEEEEEE NORMIES!” but has mutated—in much the same way as the term Based—to simply mean a group of people who do not share the interests you do to the same degree. Rather ironically, what was once a niche insider term has become almost ubiquitous online—it has become a normified term.
As one of the relatively small number of people who grew up using 4Chan in my teens, pretty much from its creation, it is bizarre to see how much of imageboard culture and language has taken over the internet—albeit in a watered down form. Outsider culture becoming mass culture is a common trend, but seeing The Spectator write an article declaring “Bring back normies!” is very surreal to me. The idea it espouses has a seed of truth within it: in modernity, everyone is their own personal scrapbook, everyone thinks—much like with the NPC meme—=someone else is The Normie. This is because monoculture in the west has broken down fully, outside of a thin layer of ubiquitous slop many people tolerate, but no one really has enthusiasm for.
In her essay The Masses Are Redpilled, Evelyn laid out that we already know supposedly heterodox ideas are very common amongst the UK and US population:
“I believe it to already be clear that an unorganised mass of red pilled people gets us nowhere. If anything they are a detriment to our efforts by providing the political-media complex with numerous examples of ill-organised and frankly embarrassing affairs, such as January 6th, that are used to demarcate The Right as perpetual losers. This isn’t even half of the issue, for if we are not the ones who move and give directions to the red pilled masses then someone else will. Qanon being a textbook example of this. Not only is such a mass used against our wishes, its potential built up by years of dissident content and information is turned round and used against the very dissidents themselves.”
The Normie, in political terms, is a fiction. The current ‘average person’ is quite likely to be skeptical of some aspect of the Lockdowns or Covid narrative for example—much as in the 1990s many Americans were allowed to indulge in unofficial JFK narratives as a safe form of conspiracy culture. The X Files is a great example of how the supposed fringe of yesteryear becomes passe cultural background noise. What is no longer revelation is normalisation. Unfocused and unorganised noise does nothing; it does not matter if the masses believe the The Official Story or not, what matters is if they do something about it. This was outlined in the twin essays Stop Demanding Free Speech and its sequel, The Internet and Its Consequences.
Political focus on The Normie as an idea has been disastrous—especially when it comes to Redpilling the Normies or Shifting the Overton Window as worthwhile action. If the mission of online politics is to de-normify the masses, then we need to adjust our goals.
Q-Anon, and its near ubiquity amongst Republican American boomers, shows us the breakdown of what we think of as normative politics. Theories of bottom up change tell us that what the masses believe changes political reality; when a sizeable percentage of the most politically active and wealthy demographic in America believes vehemently that a US election was stolen by a coalition of shadowy forces that should create change—but it hasn’t. The Boomer Normie is, by mainstream standards, a hardcore conspiracy theorist now, but that hasn’t altered political reality in the way it was supposed to.
Appealing to The Normie won’t work because he is a thought exercise more than a reality, he is what we imagine when we conglomerate all of the ‘official’ political narratives together and invent a person who would believe them. In the same way economists abstract the ‘average person’ into Homo Economicus, political commentators reduce him to Homo Politicus—the model Political Man. The Normie.
But, supposing you DO somehow reach this mythical mass group of apathetic middle-of-the-roaders, then… what are they going to do for you? How are you going to mobilise them if they are simply a passive group of political narrative consumers? To put it bluntly: most people are boring and useless, they just happen to be boring and useless in quirky and unique ways—even more so absent a monoculture. One point we try and hammer home in all of our content is that substantive action that you undertake personally is the only way you can effect change, chasing and taming the mythical Normie beast—who may or may not even exist—is not high on my list of priorities because I live in reality.
If we are to break out of the framework of our enemies then we must abandon their myths; and no myth looms larger than that of The Silent Majority, from whom Public Opinion as an entity is divined through the mystic art of polling. I will leave you with one of the most concise and devastating videos on the topic of public opinion I have seen, from the ever shrewd Academic Agent:
Donate: https://ko-fi.com/scrumpmonkey
Our Telegram: https://t.me/EvScr123
Another underrated post. But perhaps that is a good thing.
A change from looking for a leader to becoming one, with no reliance on the crutch of status granted by grasping at the crumbling existing edifice.
Klaus Schwab, or rather his ‘guru’ Noah Yuval Harari, is right - most people are ‘useless eaters’. It’s a bitter pill. One day you wake up and realise that the people are never going to rise up and overthrow their evil overlords. It reminds me of the scene in ‘Withnail and I’ when Uncle Monty reflects ‘it’s the most devastating moment in a young man’s life,when he quite reasonably says to himself “I shall never play the Dane”. It is at that moment that all ambition ceases to exist’.