The Unsettling Nature of Normies' Self-Deceiving Psychology

In Plato’s famous ‘cave allegory’, prisoners are raised to believe that the shadows projected onto a wall before them represent the real world. Of course, our world’s shadows are the images presented to us by the mainstream media, by our TV-sets, by cinema screens, and by corporate presentations.

The sum of these human-crafted images amounts to a deception and a falsification of reality, no different from what prisoners in Plato’s cave might experience.

Some of us have always been deeply critical of the apparent reality presented to our senses, and we use our thinking mind to sift through the lies and deceptions. To the critical mind, there has to be some hidden logic to it all, and if we begin to reason about our experiences and perceptions, we might find hints of said logic. Each hint then helps us dismantle the charade, until one day we feel we’ve laid the grand thing called ‘our world’ bare.

But it must still come as a shock, then, to those of us who’ve managed to leave Plato’s cave, that the average human being possesses no such mental capabilities to even begin questioning the false truths presented to them. Average people take what they see or hear at face value.

For example: One South African citizen informed me that the farm killings weren’t happening at all because he had seen happy White Afrikaners shopping at a mall one day. He had not seen any farm killings. Though the initial observation is true, the conclusion that farm killings aren’t happening because “one hadn’t seen any” is the modes-operand of a deeply low-IQ, unintelligent mind.

Let’s call it “firsthandism”, although I don’t favor inventing new -isms. Firsthandism is a mental condition that seems to afflict a large range of people to a certain degree, ranging from ‘clinical retard’ to ‘misinformed citizen’. Those afflicted by the condition appear unable to imagine alternative realities.

In a famous experiment once conducted in Africa, a colonial European told African tribesman of the existence of bears with a white fur—polar bears who live on the North Pole. The tribesman unanimously denied the existence of such bears and called the colonial European a liar. They said they had never seen a bear with a white fur, only those with a black or brown fur. Therefore, bears had to be brown or black.

The initial observation was true and correct, but their inability to even imagine the possibility that there might be other bears, ones they hadn’t seen, that did indeed have a white fur, lies at the heart of firsthandism. It is a cognitive impairment. To these tribesmen, their own skull was Plato’s cave, and they’d never escape from it.

The prisoners in Plato’s (imaginary!) cave also suffered from firsthandism. They assumed the shadows projected onto the wall were the only real ones. They dismissed the truths told them by the philosophers who had ventured outside.

I often stumble upon expressions of firsthandism in my TikTok comments section. The people who respond most aggressively and most negatively (and most upset) appear to be the ones with the lowest intelligence.

These upset commenters are low-imaginative, or even non-imaginative people, who simply cannot imagine truths lying outside their immediately observable world. If they hadn’t experienced something firsthand (yet), then it couldn’t possibly be true or real. Plenty of them are White people, but mentally no different from the aforementioned African tribesmen.

Combine that lack of imaginative capability with an inability to regulate one’s emotions, and we have got a recipe for violence and threats. Indeed, I have received many death threats.

The internet, and social media in particular, then appear to be a dangerous experiment in and of itself, since it is the first time in human history that such large groups of both high-cognitive and low-cognitive people mix with each other in public (online) areas. In the past, such wildly different groups of people would have been at least somewhat stratified by class distinctions and dress codes. The ultra stupid found in the wild simply wouldn’t be mingling with the royal courts’ classical composers, for example.

Today, of course, we do still try to separate people by cognitive ability, in classrooms for kids with different abilities, or in different tracks of higher education, or in different kinds of jobs, and so on, and so forth. And this is despite modern equalizing efforts to put the stupid in higher education.

But even this brings along its own kinds of problem: In a modern, reasonably stratified society, with people being sorted by educational rank or experience, our random meetings in online forums and comment sections still reveals a clear lack of mutual understanding.

For one, the low-cognitive person is a prisoner from Plato’s cave but now released outside, yet someone who still believes what he saw in the cave, while wandering around freely. Second, the high-cognitive person is now a philosopher who can’t possibly imagine there are still people walking around with the cave-mentality because he thinks everyone he meets outside was freed from the cave.

(Our living rooms with TV-sets, and our cinemas, theaters, and corporate presentation rooms, of course, are still very much Plato’s caves.)

Here, the doctrine of equality has caused us all severe damage. Equality made smart people believe that stupid people were now their equals. Equality made stupid people believe their boxed-in stupidity was now equally valuable as someone else’s genius.

But it’s not. Without a proper social arrangement separating the various cognitive groups, with the high priests (the cognitive elite) in charge of everyone else, societies are simply doomed to crash into the wall at the end of progress.

We cannot operate a society when the least cognitively skilled people get to drag people to court over their own misunderstandings. Hate speech, for example, isn’t speech you hate, nor is it hateful speech, nor speech about hateful things, nor speech spoken while feeling hate.

Hate speech is a legal category meant to protect people from being insulted or discriminated against on the basis of inalterable personal qualities, such as race or sex or nationality of birth. But such a hate speech law precisely does allow for speaking the truth about differences between sexes, races, and national averages.

The fact you hate hearing about such differences doesn’t make the speech ‘hate speech’. Yet firsthanders will insist otherwise, namely that they felt ‘hated’ and, therefore, the speech was ‘hate speech’. It’s like offering children legal protection from their parents when their parents tell them to eat their vegetables. (Though denying children animal protein is another story.)

A society that bows down to the lowest common denominator is like a parent ruled by its child. By making everything equal, we’ve diminished the distinctions between parent and child, and we’ve made it impossible for parents to provide guidance to their children, resulting in a debilitated society full of immature people.

And then there’s the problem of monetary incentives. An example from The Netherlands best elucidates it:

The Dutch government wants to build 1-2 million new homes, even though the existing population (without immigration) is set to shrink by 3-4 million people. Who, then, are the new homes being built for? They are being built for 6-10 million immigrants the government secretly (without consulting the democracy) plans to bring in before 2050. It would reduce native Whites to a small 20-25% minority in their own country.

And yet, a majority of native Dutch White architects, landscapers, construction companies, planners, government bureaucrats, and so on, are totally on board with the program. Why? Because they never get to see the bigger picture.

The government never informs people working downstream about the intended replacement immigration. Instead, the skilled class are fed feel-good propaganda about ‘bio-based construction’ and ‘durable energy solutions’. They are shown images of happy neighborhoods with lots of green and light. Progress!

Fooled by the images added to their own PowerPoint presentations, the educated class is willfully marching their people toward genocidal minority-status. The false imagery is a carrot-on-a-stick meant to keep the working-skilled both ignorant about their fate and motivated enough to keep working toward said fate.

The dangerous truth is that most people, even educated ones, live out their whole lives never catching a single glimpse of the big picture. They go along with the program, collect their salaries, and dream of their holidays, because thinking of the consequences of their actions is simply too painful.

If construction companies in the West would show sketches of future neighborhoods populated full of black Africans and Muslim women with headscarves, with obligatory local mosques in the backgrounds, perhaps then, finally, the articulate educated White crowds might wake up to see the end goal?

Would they “get it” if they saw their taxes being spent on housing foreign populations while excluding their own White children from housing? Well, they’d just get angry at the presenter telling them that! Maybe they’d even throw death threats at the truth-teller.

But they would never see it (the big picture). Because they can’t imagine it.

Normies just work for money toward goals mandated by the government. The whole society is a hierarchical act of ignorance. Each rank has its own feel-good visuals to motivate obedience.

Instead of escaping Plato’s cave, humanity has decided to build bigger caves. Big enough to swallow the heavens and the skies.

Still, I wouldn’t want to end on this pessimistic note. The obvious optimism is that a new, aggressive class of high priests, should they take over society, should have no trouble directing the entire normie hierarchy toward different goals. It should be as easy as supplying normie management with new PowerPoint presentations.