The Blog

2021-

2021-07-28 a
Editor's Note:

In America, unlike in East Asian societies, individuality is prized. Though in the midst of this well-planned pandemic of lies, I should restate that as, "individuality was prized."

The useless masks with pores 1000s of times larger than viral particles effaced us. The erasure of individuality was one of their purposes. Masks filled some with dread, were a comfort garment for the unthinking masses and signaled compliance and submission to astute observers.

How could so many have been led astray?

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA and its constant repetition of THE NARRATIVE.

No one in my immediate family watches television; neither broadcast nor cable. We do not subscribe to any newspaper or news magazine. Yet, we are better-informed than most.

The bellicose braying of pundits, shills for the welfare-warfare state, does not sway us because we don't hear it.

The anguished, pearl-clutching of agenda-driven regime mouthpieces likewise does not sway us because we don't hear it.

The mayhem, death and destruction wrought by state actors masquerading as terrorists, secret-police infiltrated gangs of thugs, Capitol capers orchestrated by the Federal Bureau of Insurrection, and the everyday violence perpetrated by savages in our midst, does not poison us with the hormones of the fight or flight reaction BECAUSE WE DO NOT SEE IT. Hearing about such violence second hand or reading about it does not stress us nor make us anxious.

We befriend and interact with like-minded persons. We have no interest in behaving like the masses, nor in pleasing their masters.

More of you should dissociate yourselves from the crowd gone mad. Just say no to the propaganda spewed by the fear-mongers. Happiness is the reward for the non-compliant.

If being unpopular concerns you, consider this written by Paul Graham:

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

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