You should want to be a (modified) normie
Issue #127
He who separates himself seeks his own desire,
He breaks out against all sound wisdom. (Proverbs 18:1)
Last week we mentioned how “hot takes” and “based takes” are calculated to stir up action online—but tend toward the opposite effect at the local level. In other words, social media action rarely produces anything but words—and is often an obstacle to producing anything more than words with people you know in real life.
Often the very reason that people are on social media posting their takes is because of impotence. They have no real influence, and often no real friends, anywhere except on the internet.
A characteristic of such people is that they are willing to separate themselves from anyone over all kinds of issues that, if they were working together in real life, would simply be foolish and impractical to separate over.
In fact, their entire approach to interaction is to create this kind of separation, deliberately provoking those who are less based (or woke) than them to prove to themselves and whatever fans they have that {insert internal narrative here}.
Hence our quotation of Proverbs 18:1.
Usually this narrative involves them versus the normies. It is very important to such people that they are not “normal.”
We have yet to see an internal narrative that is not highly lopsided. And that’s because, in our experience, “normies” are actually right about 80% of the time.
Yes, the 20% they’re wrong really matters. Things like vaccines and face masks and state schools and (often, sadly) abortion are critical errors.
And, there’s no denying that when they are right, it’s not necessarily through any virtue in them. Often they’re just following the script, and the script still works well enough to get the job done.
But…here’s a fact:
Getting the job done actually counts for something. Those normies who are wrong on those 20% of issues…are still almost always more productive in real life than the ones making the based hot takes. Considered by most measures of success, the hot-takers are often losers, and the normies often aren’t.
Sometimes the hot-takers are so defined by trauma, or pure reactive foolishness, that they cannot even deal with the idea of doing normal stuff like providing for a family. If it’s something normies do, they’re against it.
But of course, not only is this effeminate, it is also impotent. Normies make up most of society. If you cannot get along with them, cannot cooperate with them, cannot form good enough relationships to lead them, what use are you?
The internet makes it trivial to hype yourself up like you’re a bigger deal, a better success, and more influential than you are.
It’s not so easy to fake it in real life.
Much of the big talk about influencing change is just online hype from people who mistake chumming social media for making real-world change. It quickly fades back into the zeitgeist.
It’s a lot harder to hype something in real life, because people see you—and how you embody your claims in the day to day.
Of course, no one perfectly embodies all the things he professes. But there should be…
A base functional reality, and…
A growing relationship between profession and function.
By the way, one other thing to consider about the life of social hot takes:
It's very easy to pander for reactions on social media. That is true in any circles, including the Reformed ones that we run in.
People are people, and everyone likes content that confirms their way of life—as opposed to that which confronts aspects of it.
You can build a huge platform telling people what they like.
That platform will become a prison. Your “followers” will be your masters. You’ll be their slave. We have noticed that the fans who have the most zeal are often the ones to turn on you the fastest, if you say something they don’t like. They have a bizarre sense of entitlement over you. They pretend obsequiousness, only to turn around and say they always suspected you were {blue pill/a closet feminist/weak on divorce/pick your poison}. They often spout embarrassing nonsense about how they’re used to this kind of betrayal, and they’ll tell everyone who follows them what a hypocrite you are, etc etc. All to support the internal narrative. They break out against sound wisdom, separating themselves in order to maintain whatever illusion they have about themselves.
If your success is tied up with the perception of such people, you are building on a foundation of sand.
The Christian is a freeman.
This is especially true of pastors.
They must always have that prophetic mindset which asks: “Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?”
Maybe you have. But Jesus commands, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”
C.S. Lewis comments:
The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste your time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. ... The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or ‘likings’ and the Christian has only ‘charity.’ The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them; the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
The biggest factor that drives people to act out online
This is our perception, of course, but probably the biggest problem is this:
We have not only allowed news—which is largely propaganda—to distract or demoralize us…but we have allowed it to de-place and de-locate us.
We have allowed the “space” in which we dwell to become irrelevant.
Neil Postman traces this back to the telegraph.
He writes:
For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make “one neighborhood of the whole country.” It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate… We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
Postman argues that the telegraph redefined discourse, introducing “large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence…”
He continues:
These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.
And:
Within months of Morse’s first public demonstration, the local and the timeless had lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed. In fact, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred one day after Morse gave his historic demonstration of telegraphy’s workability. Using the “same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had constructed, the Baltimore Patriot gave its readers information about action taken by the House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. The paper concluded its report by noting: ‘…we are thus enabled to give our readers information from Washington up to two o’clock. This is indeed the annihilation of space.’”
Our thoughts are everywhere—but nowhere in particular.
Our knowledge is abundant—but irrelevant to our day-to-day existence.
In place of action, there is instead an unending awareness campaign where, whether in-person or online, we share news that is practically pointless.
Space—and place with it—has been annihilated.
Postman observed that “most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.”
One good filter or rule of thumb for news is to ask: “Does this information require or demand that I take some action today, this month, or this year?”
If the answer is no, ignore it. Invest your “mental energy” elsewhere.
If the answer is yes, then prioritize the action according to the immediacy of the need. Spend your “mental energy” wisely.
Your “attention” is a precious and limited resource. Invest it primarily on the place God put you. This the basic premise of biblical localism.
There is a common complaint in these latter days that there is a lack of power in modern Christianity, and that the true church of Christ, the body of which He is the Head, does not shake the world in the nineteenth century as it used to do in former years.
Shall I tell you in plain words what is the reason?
It is the low tone of life which is so sadly prevalent among professing believers. We need more men and women who walk with God and before God, like Enoch and Abraham. Though our numbers at this date far exceed those of our evangelical forefathers, I believe we fall far short of them in our standard of Christian practice.
Where is…
the self-denial,
the redemption of time,
the absence of luxury and self-indulgence,
the unmistakable separation from earthly things,
the manifest air of being always about our Master's business,
the singleness of eye,
the simplicity of home life,
the high tone of conversation in society,
the patience, the humility, the universal love —
which marked Christians seventy or eighty years ago?
Yes, where is it indeed? We have inherited their principles and we wear their armor, but I fear we have not inherited their practice!
—J.C. Ryle
For the women in your life:
Notable:
Aaron Renn issues an excellent summary of the problem we have talked about today, and at times in the past. We’d like to say this is limited to younger men, but unfortunately it isn’t. Aaron puts a catchy name and analogy to it in a way that is very helpful:
In professional wrestling story lines, the main characters are the “face” and the “heel.” The face is the good guy or hero, and the heel is the bad buy or villain. The heel is not necessarily an all evil person, but the audience is supposed to boo him and root against him and for the face…
The same storylines play out in real life too. In our society of mass media and heavily staged managed social media platforms, political, social, and cultural events are portrayed similarly to a pro wrestling storyline. These powerful institutions are able to write the story of how events are to be understood. This lets them create the drama, and critically to define which people are faces and which are heels.
As we know, the media is overwhelmingly establishment leftist in orientation. Thus they are almost always going to portray the person on the left as the good guy and the person on the right at the bad guy.
The conservative heel plays a key role in this drama, undertaking the actions that cause the average person, or the “normie,” and the major institutions of society to actively side with the left hero in the story…
…When you voluntarily play the heel role, you are often actually furthering the narrative the media wants to create.
Read the whole thing here:
One money quote:
We have shifted this idea from “I’m going to honor you and allow you to be of service to me, which is a gift, and I’m going to allow my needs to be heard out loud...” we think we are a burden to our friends and neighbors, and perceived burdensomeness, the idea that people are better off without me—that’s one of the pillars of suicidal ideation, and our entire civilization has run that way… You want to be crazy in our current culture? Ask someone to help you with something. What a gift.
The comments about doing the dishes are pretty interesting. It sounds like choreplay, but if you listen with care, something deeper is going on related to the wife’s desire to please her husband, rather than vice versa. Compare to last week’s paid subscriber article, But who does the dishes?
Despite the title, the majority of the discussion is practical advice for simple ways to create better marriages and better lives, setting shared visions, and the like.
