pathology and normalcy

and the road to return

if you want to destroy not only a nation but a society and a people, to damage it in such a way that it not only cannot recover but has lost sight of what “recovery” even means, the war is waged not with guns or bombs or armies marching; it is waged in the inculcation of perception and there is a very simple line along which this attack can be made to make the annihilation irrevocable. this line is neither economic, nor political, nor even moral, this attack is upstream of all these things and, if successful, renders all those spheres polluted and unrecoverable, likely even unrecognizable.

i speak of the war on normalcy.

whoever controls that commanding height controls the rest.

and so the praxis of civilizational dissolution is so simple that it may be refined into one simple chiasmus:

once you see it, you cannot unsee it. it’s the animating principle of so, so much of what is currently going on from DEI to demolition derbies of gender and race and the worship of marginality and malfunction setting it in pride of place to command all others and cancel all opposition.

it starts here with defining the normal as illness and illness as normal, the convincing of people that what they feel means they are sick while telling sick people they are stunning and brave (and normal). it’s nothing short of reaching one’s hand down the throat of social standards and mental health, grabbing it by the entrails, and turning it inside out like a sock then calling that “inclusive civilization” then running the classic catch 22 of “anyone who disagrees proves themselves racist/sexist/phobic or whatever other epithet du jour may be” and then you call them a fascist to grant permission to attack them.

and it’s having profound effects.

and this is not a good place.

and perhaps many who have wandered truly are lost.

what’s going on is more than just the pretense to incomprehension.

it’s colonization and actual war fueled by rage and entitlement against anything functional or beautiful or free precisely because those things are functional and beautiful and free.

that’s why they brand them as toxic and oppressive and demand the worship of the debased.

it’s reality fracture and it is neither accidental nor incidental, it’s pathological, the broken and marginal demanding to destroy anything they would otherwise have to look up to.

this constitutes an incredibly seductive doctrine for those who cannot compete, who fail, who want an excuse to bully those who would otherwise perhaps bully them. the fact that they were downtrodden did not make them good people, it made them mean and envious and malicious. they were always there things, they just lacked a means to express it effectively.

and now they have one and it’s just plain awful to the point of absurdity.

the misfit toys and haters have been invited to burn the toy factory down.

let’s look:

simple, obvious fact:

biological men playing in women's sports is ALL bad faith.

and amusingly the the WNBA is making kanter and white’s point for them and cannot seem to see it.

but even more telling is why they hate these people so much.

i will bet you dollars to donuts that half the evasion here stems from the fact that players like brittney griner who are already in the league are carrying Y chromosomes. you can just look and see it. listen to the voice. i have some serious questions about biological sex there. but let’s not pretend for a minute that if griner were discovered to be “Y positive” that the WNBA would not be rallying around “her” and claiming female identity is dispositive over biology and that he becomes a she the minute they approve.

none of this is about protecting women.

the WNBA leadership do not hate the idea of men beating up on women in their league any more than they hate the idea of certain players beating up on sophie and caitlin. they care about “are you in our tribe of hyper politicized marginalia and do you kowtow to our ideological fixation?”

there is no other question.

and again, once you see it, it’s everywhere.

this was dijonai carrington’s real response to being called for a foul for doing this to sophie. poe’s law wept.

they do not hate kanter and white for being men pretending to be women. were they other weaksauce and politically submissive men pretending to be women, these same people would be falling all over themselves to say “let her play” like they did for william thomas, BDA “lia.”

they hate them for being normal, high status, good looking alpha males, which, alone would make them objects of obvious hate for team marginalia, but for them to “use our own phony baloney rules against us?” well, that becomes intolerable (and likely unsurvivable) for the WNBA because it’s the finger pointing right at the naked emperor. they hate them for the strength, poise, and courage it takes to declare the sovereign starkers. it’s normal to ridicule the absurdity of a league run by women for women and yet unable to tell you what a woman is.

and these are the ways of the war on normalcy.

they hate this because this is and should be normal and should be lauded. they hate it for having no intent to harm but rather to repair. these men are not really going to dunk on and injure women. they know better. they are fighting to protect women and their spaces, they are seeking, through reductio ad absurdum, to defend, a classic and strong male role, exactly that thing that the war on normalcy hates most.

the WNBA demand a right to decide who “is in good faith” and to apply the rules in arbitrary fashion based upon it.

it’s just one more manifestion of “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

and just one more object lesson in why neither a society nor a civilization may be safe while such people are in charge

look around you. you can feel it. it’s palpable.

this pathologizing praxis lies everywhere.

nothing is allowed to be normal or calming or outside of our politics. it’s perfect fascism; just drop “faction” in for “state.”

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”

this video and others like it seem to be making waves with folks claiming they go too far or are somehow inappropriate. but they are losing. in years past, cancel culture successfully came for videos like these and the winged monkeys pulled them down.

now they are going massively viral and parents are paying “rush consultants” to get their daughters into sororities like these.

this is not making team “everything normal is toxic” happy.

here, watch for yourself.

i struggle to see the big deal here. i mean, it’s attractive young women doing attractive young women things. if you want to get the vapors about “this is too racy” and stumble toward the fainting couch, i mean, sure, go ahead, but this is not the issue the left is taking and i suspect everyone knows it. you’ll see lewder dance videos on the regular come out of any given waffle house or carnival cruise much less a taylor swift concert.

the whole thing seems like tactical ethics.

here’s the tell:

these same "liberals" would be gushing to say "how stunning! how brave!" if these were a bunch of dudes in drag dancing for kindergartners.

pretty much the whole story in a nutshell, no?

how much of this alleged "liberal pluralism" is just hating attractive (or even just normal) women?

i’d wager a helluva lot.

this is having the wild effect of the “super progressive feminist pluralist diversity complex” becoming one of the most anti-women movements in history. they’re supporting islamists who advocate sharia and “dudes who tuck” who demand the right to get lady boners in female locker rooms after injuring your daughter on the volleyball court. they send male rapists to women’s prisons where they wind up raping more women and they welcome and defend mass immigration that’s leading to mass rape.

obesity is healthy, anyone who says it isn’t is the problem.

it’s a wild level of demand to be the sole arbiter of reality. (which, of course, is a wildly pathological idea. you have to be pretty unbalanced to think that you can build a life that way.)

the whole point here is to demolish and stigmatize anything that once looked like a high standard and to replace it with “our people.”

it’s like they don’t care what they destroy so long as the pretty girls take the damage.

seriously, what is one supposed to do with such people?

those elevated by the normalization of pathology are not good people and this seems to be having a disproportionate effect on women.

they are generating cancel culture consensus covens with aposematic signaling schemas to validate “this is ugly and i am committing to it” and to make tribal membership clear.

i’m fascinated by how many millennial and gen Z women seem to go out of their way to look horrible, even disfigured. massive tattoos, bad clothing, worse posture, hair dye, and everything piercing. they aspire to marginalization and seem determined to find some way to achieve it. they wear it like a uniform.

none of this is a coincidence.

they have been weaned on “beauty is oppression” and granted license if they show themselves on the outside of some imagined privilege wheel, itself an idea wholly grounded in inversion.

and the ones who fell for it are exactly the ones you’d expect.

nothing beautiful or functional need apply.

that’s not what this is about.

and (to further pummel a deceased equid), it’s everywhere you look.

anything that would have looked normal or aspirational or emulation-worthy in the 80’s is now “toxic” and “problematic” and everything you would have called ugly and stupid and ridiculous, well, that’s virtue and bravery. anyone who notices is evil.

arday, a complete fraud, serial plagiarist, and fabulist whose whole life story was a “made for woke social media fiction myopic” to normalize putting morally and intellectually unfit people into academia because they are “our faction,” provides yet another example as do all the “you killed him by noticing this” accusers.

you just cannot make this up.

arday was not about merit or equity, he was about taking the obviously wrong and pathological and calling it progress.

it’s no accident that academia has been such a fertile field for this derangement.

teaching is the place you target, the 5th column that wins this war for “normal.”

we left children alone with this, with bad people and worse ideas in a place that attacked the idea of family and achievement and demanded fealty to the opposite.

and they set about robbing everything, especially childhood, of its normalcy and its innocence.

and they were thorough.

again, ask: is it normal to inculcate this into children or is it pathological?

you cast every normal experience or desire as pathology and illness.

sad sometimes? ill.

worried by this unrelenting barrage of accusation and fear porn? ill.

“do you find adolescence confusing?” you must have a mental illness. let’s medicate. maybe you need a new gender.

they assualt you nonstop with “you and everything will die unless you do as we say!” even as they pile the damage onto you.

and then they act surprised about this:

but it’s all the same damn thing: pathologize everything normal and normalize everything pathological.

they are jamming up kids and teaching them to be anti-resilient. the “soaring rates of mental illness” are a two pronged attack: first through endless provocation and anxiety cultivation and second through the ever more inclusive definition of illness that captures ever more of what used to be considered normal and, you guessed it, pathologizes it so that the pathological people can call themselves normal.

how broken and denormalized must a world be for this to seem supportive?

this has been a relentless war on children and it’s devasting the girls in particular, likely because female humans tend to be more consensus driven than men and so once this stuff takes hold, the pressures are more severe. men may have traditionally been the enforcers of laws, but women have been the enforcers of social norms, and this has not changed.

so what the hell does one do about this?

again, it’s simple.

you normalize normalizing normalcy.

and, as is so often the case, there seems to be a lesson here in which groups have been less affected and there’s one that jumps out like an air horn in vatican vespers: gen X women.

they alone did not fall for this. they seem to be built different. and perhaps asking why may be the key to the puzzle:

the girls of the boomers were raised in the post ww2 hysteria about nature vs nurture and the endless behavioralist denials of “genes” and their presumptions that “everything is socialization and if we tinker with that, we can make all humans the same.” this is obvious, anti-science garbage that emerged not due to data or sense but sociology and the fear of events like those in 1930’s germany and its ideas of “solutions,” final or otherwise. dishonest (or deluded) lessons were imposed out of quite reasonable and well intentioned desires to “not let this happen again.” people argue about this, but whatever the reason, this made the boomer babies highly vulnerable to notions like “disparate impact is proof of discrimination” and such ideas, of necessity, always require “the state” to come and fix it and prevent an idea like “normal” from meaning “meritocracy.” this seems to have really slid the burger off of the boomer generation bun leaving them presuming that anyone who is not doing well must be being oppressed.

the millennials got a big dose of this too and gen Z (at least on the female side) looks to be hitting truly toxic levels of “all bad outcomes are structural ism and need intervention.” they came of age in DEI and work and critical theory.

but why is gen X different? why are the ladies of X not buying a bit of this?

i have a theory, and it all reaches back to lawn darts, benign neglect, and the unstructured young lives that not only teach but force children to learn resilience and the skills (like settling their own disputes and making their own plans) that allow them to grow up to be civilized.

i wrote a long think piece on this years ago. it’s still one of my favorite things that i have written.

if you tried to impose a gen Z childhood on a gen X kid, they’d have eaten you alive.

it’s not because we were magic or made of some sterner stuff, it’s because we were allowed (and forced) to create structures run by our best rather than subjugated to those run by our worst. it was results driven meritocracy, not compulsory crybully coercion.

parents tossed you out of the house and said “go figure it out. be home for dinner.”

the idea that they would help pick our friends or our games or settle our disputes was absurd. the word “play date” did not even exist. we got left in cars while errands were run. tattling to mom was the one true and unforgivable sin.

this was normal.

it’s more than normal, it’s healthy.

it’s vital.

perhaps this seems like “neglect” to the parents today who schedule and plan every moment of their children’s lives with appointments and lessons and classes and structured activity while swaddling them in helmets and supervision and safetyism.

and perhaps it was, but it was “benign neglect” and the tigermoms (oddly named as no tiger would raise their young in such fashion) and safetydads of today are missing the things that they themselves are neglecting:

they are neglecting neglect and that is raising weak, authority dependent children.

helicopter and bulldozer parenting, themselves pathologies, were normalized. a normal childhood of risk and self-reliance and growth was pathologized and in many cases criminalized. that which was healthy was called dangerous and fretting about it like a weaponized pollyanna was mistaken for caring.

none of this was normal or healthy.

people do not become resilient without stressors. it’s like expecting to build quads of steel without tearing muscle fibers in workouts.

maybe bullying actually mattered and was a sort of wolves of yellowstone effect.

maybe having to do it yourself is what made you into a self worth being.

maybe having to solve your own problems and find your own fun is the mother of resilience and self-reliance.

was it easy? no. but maybe childhood is not supposed to be easy.

maybe the hard part is the important part.

and so too is the focus.

this is sort of a tenuous idea and i’m still working it through, but see what you think:

the boomers were a “counter culture” and identified themselves against the generations before.

the millennials were too. everyhting they got fed was DEI and diversity drivel to make them aggrieved about all the systems in which they live and gen Z is getting a nasty brew of same about “the system is rigged against you and the american dream is dead.” they were taught to fight each other and their society.

but gen X came of age in a hopeful time. the 80’s and 90’s were times of real optimism. it was not about fighting american systems, it was a triumph over communism and leading the free world.

we had ways forward.

benignly neglected in an optimistic time, gen X grew up raw and resilient and confident that it could go and make its way. it grew up building its own systems just like it built its own janky skateboard ramps and made up its own games and standards.

there was no cancel culture. the “free to be you and me” idea flourished without the oppressive “or else” that came to characterize the millennials who so aggressively turned “accept me?” into “accept me!”

don’t like what we’re up to? cool. bye.

i’m not sure any other generation ever quite got this.

but it’s what we need.

the real, deep war here is for internalized identity and the normalization of normalcy.

so long as people believe that “the deck is stacked and you cannot win without help from the authorities,” that feeling bad is illness, that every pathological conceit, obsession, and fetish must be lionized and every evidencing of beauty or capacity or morality be vilified as privilege while denial of such pathologized in a sort of kafka trap where “anyone who does not submit to the struggle session proves they need a struggle session,” there is no way out. so long as everyone is afraid of everything, afraid of words, there is no way out.

this does not work on resilient people.

this is why those who seek to indoctrinate seek to destroy resilience most of all.

and you do it by pathologizing it.

“you’re ill, you need help, you need special treatment, you need safety nets and preferencing.”

this is how you trap a generation in crab-pot helplessness, assuming all challenges need outside help, collectivist help, the application of authority and force to resolve. this is how you get them to keep digging the hole in which you will force them to live.

this is going to set up an interesting war for reality.

and the way out is not to engage with this upon its own terms but rather to say “get bent you hopeless crybully frails. you’re neither ill nor oppressed, you’re entitled.”

the problem is that they have been raised precisely not to hear this. they were raised to wield their affected marginalization (and the mascotting thereof) like a scythe, cutting down any who oppose it.

but it only works if you let it.

so let’s not lose to a bunch of losers.

this is going to be a contest of wills and will require a serious lack of sympathy on the part of whoever wins.

the frame is “what is normal?” and which way that goes is basically the whole rest of the story. lose that and you have zero hope of generating or supporting sound economics or politics or morality. you will live in the crybully clown zoo.

fix it, and the world begins to heal.

it’s already happening. the images and memes and ideas that would have resulted in instant cancellation 5 years ago now spread virally amidst sputtering and rending of poison frog colored hair and garner ever more support.

minds are being spoken.

the backlash is building and it will win.

but making omelets requires breaking eggs.

this is going to involve inverting the emergent memetic zeitgeist and doing things that seem mean on a first order basis but that wind up being kind and productive on second and third order bases.

tough love is like that.

and this will be a test of whether we love our civilization enough to do so.

this is not a test you want to fail.

and sides must be chosen.

you want the truth?

the truth is that we live in a world that has pathologized normalcy and that we have, through apathy, cowardice, and misplaced sympathy, given the pathologizers run of the roost.

the truth is that deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you’d really like someone to do something about it but are afraid of being called mean by the very people who so relentlessly bully you.

the front line of this conflict lies across the very definition of “what is normal?” and the actions whereby one reclaims it, while perhaps grotesque and incomprehensible to you, save societies.

we use words like “gay” and “retarded” as the backbone of a life spent calling things by their names. you quail before them in defense of theater kid oppression fantasy.

i have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to someone dedicated to the aiding and abetting of broken people as they inhabit self-indulgent hallucinations.

and if you will not lead or follow, i ask that at least you have the decency to get out of the way.

i will proudly meme them until they cry and then make memes about them crying because i do not give a damn what you (or they) think they’re entitled to.

and civilization is worth defending.