Kill All Normies

As part of my stated goal to try and write in a more serious academic tone, I read Angela Nagle's appropriately-titled book 'Kill All Normies' recently-- it's a very brief read, not much more than 100 pages, but a very interesting book. I highly recommend it.

She does a much better job of explaining some of the ideas I've been obsessing / seething about recently, which is why you should read her. Her subject is comparing the Tumblr identity politics left of the 2010s with the 4Chan alt-right of the same period, who both highly resemble each other.

There are many aspects of these alternate sub-cultures worth discussing, but the most interesting or salient to me is the endless smug hostility they have for the mainstream of their societies and, as I said in a previous post, the 'normies' and normality in general. It's almost like a slur for them, and in fact they treat being a normie like a kind of sin (which it is, in a sense, for people who make deviance central to their identities).

A point I made earlier is that what they all have in common, setting aside tribalism and appearances, is their shared rejection by society: they are the weirdos, misfits, pariahs, anti-social types, deviants, etc, essentially the embodiment of everything you do not want to be in life.

They Internet offers them an opportunity to bond over that common feeling of alienation and outsiderness. One of the ways they do that is by trying to shock and offend as much as possible, not in order to reveal some truth or expose hypocrisy, but purely for the sake of being as offensive and tasteless as possible, which is a kind of driving motivation for them: ugliness for its own sake.

There's a narcissistic and self-worshiping 'victim-aggressor' complex running throughout both of these cultures too (I'm not sure of a better term for it, and if I had one I would use it): the more they portray themselves as the ultimate pathetic unjust victims, the easier it is for them to lash out and get revenge in increasingly sadistic ways.

They both do this: the alt-righters make being a 'beta' a central part of their identity (distinct from the dominant jocks and alphas and whatnot), while the leftists blame toxic masculinity / patriarchy / whiteness / ableism and add more and more new categories of oppression.

Ironically enough, or rather naturally enough, this climate of endless victimhood resulted in a decade of endless school shootings and assassinations, the BLM / ANTIFA riots (all going after random bystanders, in some cases literal teenagers), witch-hunts and cancellations, unhinged violence in general, and all kinds of other cruel and sadistic behaviors. 

It never took the form of a collective and organized confrontation with anyone or anything, in the service of a larger goal, the way a team would do things-- but rather it was simply indulging in revenge fantasies and blood lust, lashing out at random, and being so desperate and pathetic that you pick on innocent people in order to get your fix: psychologically closer to a serial killer (and in fact many of them openly worship these types, again on both the Tumblr and the 4Chan side).

A natural comparison, which Nagle makes, is to the New Left of the violent 1960s and 70s: rebels against sOcIEty and 'the man', disdainful of and superior to the social order and the entire concept of society, dirty and disheveled and disgusting in appearance, into strange substances / drugs as well as bizarre sexual fetishes, against the entire concept of monogamy, self-indulgent and self-obsessed, and so on and so forth.

The central goal wasn't creating a new society through collective action (like the revolutionary communists) or protecting the working classes from exploitation (like the labor unions and democratic socialists), but instead destroying the entire natural order, in order to create a brave new world that would allow for as much insane anti-social behavior as possible: in other words, the opposite of collectivism, solidarity, teamwork, the common good-- nihilistic, individualistic, and degenerate.

As far as I can tell, both sides of the current Millennial culture war also have that fundamental hostility to society. Every aspect of normal existence (eating meat, monogamy, belonging, traditions and nostalgia and cultural inheritance, and so on and so forth) is problematic.

The propaganda or rationale may be different depending on the group, but the fundamental goal is waging a war to destroy society, on behalf of weirdos and deviants: it's a shame we don't have actual communists and fascists around, to execute these people.