The Normie Conquests

Sing a happy happy happy happy happy happy song!

The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different.

Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. ....But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.

-George Orwell, 1984

As I have noted and repeated, 2020 was for me the point of no return, the big reveal, the moment of truth, the leprous flower of the festering poisons gathering over the decades. This was a traumatic experience – and the final trauma, after receiving the cataclysmic blows to my previous conceptions, was the unbelievable discovery that almost everyone I knew hadn’t experienced any disorientation at all and seemed to be trapped in a bubble of political infancy forever rooted in the 1970s.

Now I’ve never liked the smugness of the “sheeple” accusation. There are few things less attractive than those who appoint themselves as “the intelligentsia” nurturing a presupposition that “the masses” are irredeemably dumb.

Nevertheless, it saddens me to say that I have found that the stereotypically imbecilic really do exist. And in the spirit of Marx’s “Nothing human is alien to me”, I try to comprehend this obtuseness.

For this purpose, I take the tack of using the label “normie” which the internet Wiki defines as:

A normie is a person who has no distinctive personality traits, who adheres to generally accepted, mainstream views, interests, tastes and habits. He usually leads a sedentary lifestyle, is not interested in or well-informed on political and cultural issues, and does not belong to any community. Normies may be despised by members of the counterculture, who consider themselves outcasts, whose habits and interests are not generally accepted. The views of normies do not contradict the majority opinion, and their hobbies and interests are understandable to society.

The sedentary lifestyle is irrelevant. As is “no distinctive personality traits”. And “well informed” is now extremely questionable, considering the phantasmal gunge which is the apparent norm on all mainstream channels. Indeed “majority opinion” is also …ah but why continue? We have already touched on the whole problem. It rests on that word “questionable”. Normies don’t question. Normies are folk for whom the questioning has already been done – or, to be more precise, they are folk for whom the appearance of questioning has been gratifyingly enacted.

So much for Wiki. The urban dictionary is more helpful:

Normies possess a lack of interest in ideas not easily accessible or being outside of their/society’s current range of acceptance. A straight. A follower.

Most normies adopt a “popularity is the only measure of good or bad” mindset at an early age.

Normies typically have a sense of cultural superiority over “counter culture” movements & foreign cultures. They will often try to discredit out cultures or choices falling outside of their majority think claiming those of other dispositions are mentally ill or out of touch with reality.

That’s not bad although once again it gives too much credit to the role of thought in the life of the normie. As far as I can see, normies don’t think at all. Their thinking, like their questioning, is done by the media.

And I’ll have to admit that the word “conquests” in my title is a misnomer. (I can never resist a pun!) Because these normies didn’t conquer anything. They didn’t appear over the hill charging with bloodlust. They had always been here. It’s just that their intransigent blindness in the face of accelerating lunacy revealed how spectacularly dumb they were.

Now for more context.

The Western system of representative democracy dances around two poles – one “Left”, the other “Right”. In America, it’s The Democrats against the Republicans. In the UK it’s Labour against Tory. Since this is a game of illusions intended to convince, the various songs sung by these minstrel factions, will change according to the latest prejudices.

Now the 1970s “Left” were indeed something else. There was a class consciousness afoot then that is nowhere to be found now. Hell, we even had the word “militant”. Imagine! And it is a telling sign that, whilst fondly recalling the old and bitter feuds over working conditions and wages, I stumbled on a current headline about “The Gender Debate”. Such is the cataclysmic decline in political awareness. Such is the successful redirection of thought away from the actual conditions of life towards nothing at all!

It would be a dreary and depressing exercise to chart this conceptual decline. But I do wish to point out one aspect.

The Blair Switch Project

The aforementioned 70s “Left” were indeed bolshy. And this frightfully distasteful mistrust of everything seeping down from the hallowed heights had to be reflected in the actual official Labour Party. It was all a con of course. The last pre-Thatcher Labour leader Jim Callaghan could very well have ushered in the long planned neoliberal plundering of the national wealth. He did after all tell the trade union congress that “The Party is over!”

But for a Labour man to announce the charge of the vampiric vultures would have been a bit of a giveaway. So, the Tories had to do it. And they had to keep doing it for two decades. Until eventually the old entrepreneurial mantra became too stale issuing from the now hated Tories. A major facelift was needed. And so, we were subject to the grand entrance of “New Labour” and Mr. Tony Blair.

Oh, how the media screamed in ecstatic rapturous applause. I still recall those weeping faces drowning in their joy that “Labour were back!” The “New” part didn’t even register.

And even Thatcher’s candid admission that “New Labour” was her “finest achievement” didn’t stop the orgasmic tsunami. Hell, Thatcher even explained why Tony encapsulated her own dreams. There was no difference between Tory and Labour. From this point, you may as well call them Tory 1 and Tory 2.

Did all this tomfoolery make the slightest dent in the craniums of the Normies? Of course not! For they lived in that blessed happy happy land of fox hunting toffs riding on cloth capped proles, each represented by one of the Tory factions!

This Time It’s Personal!

I must now relate my own personal circumstances. For I moved away from the central urban belt of Scotland in the mid-90s, just before phony Tony arrived Gandalf-like over the crest of that hill. And, having relocated in the rural South West, I recall five years of pastoral bliss in which coming to terms with a new job and becoming a parent took up a lot of my attention.

And then came 9/11!

And that marked the beginning of a tortuous personal odyssey. Through David Ray Griffin, Chomsky, Parenti and Pilger. I had the giddy sense of peeling more and more layers off the most rancid onion of all time. I noted how this didn’t agree with that, how one personal hero after another succumbed to irrelevance and worse etc.

For the first time ever, I started to fully comprehend the utter venality of the media. And yet even all that never prepared me for “Labour’s antisemitic problem”. And covid. And transgenderism.

And lo! I was on my own! What was most disturbing wasn’t so much those new ones around me, declaring their prole credentials, getting all sentimental about old warriors like Tony Benn but denouncing that “antisemitic” Corbyn. It was the old ones I recall from the old homestead.

They had learned nothing.

You’d think it was still 1973. Or ‘83. It was “fuckin’ Tories” and “Thatcher the bitch!”. Only now they had hitched their “Leftism” to the vaccine guzzling, trans wanking woke Walpurgis. For Orwell’s dizzying reversal of polarity had indeed taken place. And they hadn’t noticed.

So, the old prophecy has come true after all.

The world ends not with a bang but with a whimper.