Evil hypersocial normies

Sometimes I have to think back to the autistic Swedish teenager, who said:

“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.”

And that’s a question worth pondering. Are we ruled by evil people?

This of course, requires us to ask ourselves, what it means to be evil. I’m fond of Augustinus definition of evil, as the absence of good. Looked at from this perspective, you could argue that all of us are to some degree evil. We’re all just missing aspects, of what it means to be a good human being.

I think what we call evil, is just a lack of understanding of the suffering caused by our actions. From the perspective of an observer, it seems clear that your actions are evil. But your own mind has so derealized the ones who suffer the consequences of your actions, has shielded itself from understanding the implications of what you’re doing, that you don’t think of yourself as evil.

Humans tend to be very good at this with animals. They deny them all sorts of traits that humans themselves clearly have. Dog breeders for example will pretend it’s inconceivable that a dog could be raped. In the past this was also done with black slaves. The concept of rape was just seen as not being applicable to them.

One of the consequences of autism is that this in-group/out-group mechanism humans have just doesn’t function properly. You genuinely tend to look at everyone equally. One effect this has is that autistic boys tend to be very racist. Whereas most white people have internalized the fact that they are socially subordinate in their society towards other ethnic groups, that they are being phased out by Western society as if they were an old operating system, the autistic boys can not go along with this and so they have to spend their days trolling. They just can’t go gently into that good night, in contrast to most white people who happily go along with everything if it means they get to spend their brief time on Earth as senior manager at some government department or corporation.

Similarly, what you notice in the autistic girls is that they just haven’t internalized the idea of animals as subordinate to humans. And in some autists you notice both tendencies: They refuse to behave in a subordinate manner towards other ethnic groups, yet harbor great empathy towards animals and even to abstract concepts like ecosystems.

What happens to the autists is that they become aware of all sorts of things a human being’s psychological immune system is supposed to shield them against. As an example, the white European autistic boys will realize that by the time they’re old, the country they grew up in will be primarily populated by Muslims from the Middle East. The neurotypical boys in their IQ range also realize this, but it just doesn’t mean anything to them. They adjust to their group context, which tells them: “Hey forget about that, just get your degree and go work for Unilever.”

It’s not that the normies, care so much about sodomites, or about brown people. Normies just adjust to whatever makes their own lives easier. If that means you have to cheer along and wave your rainbow flag when some toddler sits on the lap of a lunatic dressed like a woman, then that’s what you do. If it means you have to turn your country into a giant refugee camp for people fleeing third world hellholes, then that’s what you do. You can even get extremely hypersocial normies to go along with having their own children surgically mutilated.

And again, I have to emphasize that they don’t care about any of these people. It’s not as if the governor of California lies awake at night about the plight of some clinically depressed girl who wants to grow a moustache and have her tits cut off to fit in with her friends on Tumblr. No, they just adjust like chameleons to their social context. It’s the autists who have some basic innate empathy for other people. And because they genuinely have empathy, they don’t bother faking it.

Similarly, it’s not as if Justin Trudeau is so concerned with the plight of sodomites and brown people. Here’s what Trudeau had to say in regards to the Canadian tar sands: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”

And I wish the low IQ low status white males would understand this: You don’t want climate change policies to interfere with your standard of living? Well congratulations, neither does any democratically elected leader in the Western world. They just pay lip service. When forced to choose, they always choose to maximize their GDP.

The tar sands of course, are a little holocaust against the Africans. Once released into the atmosphere, those 173 billion barrels of oil will mean the Africans will be stuck that much sooner with a continent unable to feed them, where fertile soils flush into the ocean and droughts and heatwaves cause failing harvests.

And so when Greta wonders whether all these people making our planet uninhabitable are evil, or when low status white males wonder whether all these politicians encouraging children to have their bodies mutilated so they can look like the other gender are evil, the answer is that evil is just a loaded term that doesn’t help us understand what’s really going on. The term you’re looking for is something like: “Hypersocial normies who adjust instinctively in a self-serving manner to the worldview of socially dominant people who shape our societal narrative.”

That last part is worth emphasizing. It’s not as if they just adjust to the opinion of everyone. If Barack Obama went to a pub in rural Alabama and listened to a bunch of low IQ low status white males complain about how their nieces now have moustaches and their nephews now have tits, Obama wouldn’t walk out of there convinced he has to do something about it. No, Obama adjusts to the opinions of the sort of people who write newspaper articles, the people he meets at fundraising events, the people at conferences, etc. When he goes to a pub in rural Alabama, his mind doesn’t even register your racist uncle Bob who’s sitting there as human. His brain goes on acting mode, long before he even opens the door. He doesn’t hate you, you’re just an object to him.

A normal brain has mechanisms that allow it to recognize who matters, who you need to keep on friendly terms with, who you need to placate and who you can look down on and exploit. This then allows you to climb a social ladder, or at least maintain whatever petty position you have. In autists all of this stuff is malfunctioning. The girls may dress up in cat ears, the boys identify themselves with whatever force seems to be most socially taboo (Hitler, Satan etc). And often they end up living more in fantasy worlds than the real world. Their status within their online Hey Arnold! shipping community matters more to them than their relationship with their classmates does.

When your brain’s mechanisms that help you adjust to human absurdity cease to function, humans start to look evil to you. Drugs like cannabis can have this effect, severe trauma can have this effect as well, but autists generally don’t need drugs and trauma to notice this. It tends to be obvious to them from early age that something is fundamentally wrong with our society, although they’re not all as good at articulating it as Greta happened to be.

Autism is a spectrum, so the areas of social deficit tend to differ. Greta seems perfectly able to adjust to all sorts of social absurdities that other autists can’t stomach. Of course Greta also received positive feedback from her environment whenever she applied her autistic perception in one area. The effect that these social deficits tend to have is that autists have to apply their rational mind in aspects of relating to the world, where normies can just use autopilot. The normie celebrates the King’s birthday, because that’s what he sees others doing. The autist either rejects the whole notion of monarchy, or convinces himself that it’s fantastic because of “tradition”. He can’t just go along on autopilot with what his peers are doing

So when it comes to Greta, the simple fact is that normies just don’t have brains that are oriented towards the question of how the whole planet will look fifty years from now based on actions that we take or don’t take today. Politicians look about four years ahead at best. Normies are empathic, but only in the sense that they apply their empathy in a manner that serves their own interest as Darwinian agents. The black man at work receives their empathy, because he may pose a threat to them if he were to grow convinced they’re “racist”. A million black men dying of hunger in Uganda mean nothing to them.

So are the normies evil? Only insofar as ignorance is evil. And they’re ignorant because they don’t have to understand how the world works, because they can operate on instincts that broke down in autists.