Sarah Hoyt explains why it is so important to resist the media mainstream and the stories it is telling:
That wish for normality, that desire to belong to a group is what causes the whole concept of “normal.” I don’t know anymore who I was reading the other day, when a character says “What if nobody really is normal? What if everyone is just pretending?”
I’d say it makes no difference, really. Partly because the concept of normal and people acting externally normal makes it easier for rulers to control you and particularly to hold over you the threat of exclusion form the group; and partly because eventually you internalize what you pretend to be….
In the same way the slow, trickle, trickle, trickle distorts our impression of normal too. It’s become impolite to say in public you’re a Tea Partier, for instance. The slur of sexual innuendo, followed by never substantiated rumors of violence, have stained the name, though there is no truth at all in it. At the same time, unless you are with friends and know them well enough, it is against politeness to refer to Occupiers as “Louse infested would be communists” – though it is true of the vast majority of them.
Because that’s not how the stories present those groups. And people want to belong to the majority – to the “normal.”
Even outliers, people who step out, can break and fall back into the norm. A great example is that blog that shall never be mentioned, but which has turned completely around in the last 5 years or so. I was talking to a friend about that and wondered if it was always a false flag operation, designed to turn before 08 and confuse the issue. He said maybe but – and he’s a right outlier, by virtue of what he is, the same I am – he thought what it actually was just pressure. Because the owner of that blog is an artist in a leftist community. The pressure to “return to normal” just broke him at last.
In my case, of course, the more pressure to return to normal the more I explode in weird directions, but growing up when and where I did with non-pierced ears and wearing pants (for the UK visitors that means trousers) I was sort of like the boy named Sue and learned to fight before I could walk. The shock is not that I won’t return to “normal”; the shock is that I managed to semi-pretend for ten years.
Of course, the most effective strategy would be to pretend to be of them and change it from the inside, but I’m not sure it’s possible. Religions take time to subvert and cultures take time to change, and we’re nearing the end of that time. (No? Look at our economy. Or our feral children.)
Christianity, while it was replacing the old culture, at least was aware of how the world works. The culture the Marxists seek to impose doesn’t fit ANY real world with real people, not even the places where they won. To be “normal” people are going around pretending to believe things that simply aren’t so, like that anyone wanting to look after himself and his is “greedy” and must have stolen what he has; that women are physically stronger than men, and more independent in spirit; that children are wiser than their parents; that everyone must have sex all the time, or they’ll go mad; that every culture in the world is superior to ours.
No one sane can believe any of these even for a minute, if they examine it. But people don’t. They just try to “act normal” – which is bringing down Western civilization. That part might be a feature not a bug, except that communist regimes in the end are like all the old empires: they must feed off healthy societies near them. If they destroy the healthy societies, the world will go down to a long darkness, until the culture changes.
When both a European immigrant to America and an American immigrant to Europe, two writers who have never met, who have never read each other’s books, and who have considerably different opinions on a number of policies and issues provide almost identical warnings concerning the cancerous societal effect of what is presently being pushed as “normal”, even the most enthusiastic supporter of the proposed new normal should be inspired to, at the very least, consider rethinking his enthusiasm.
Because moral degradation is the new normal. Is the nihilism of Martin, Bakker, and Abercrombie truly to be preferred to the humble heroism of Tolkien? Has the progressive and privileged white preachiness of Rapey McRaperson genuinely produced better science fiction than the libertarian idealism of Robert Heinlein? Are the pornographic necro-bestial fantasies of Laurell Hamilton better plotted or more psychologically relevant than the modest Christian piety of Ellis Peters and Agatha Christie? Is the YA work of Stephanie Meyer as thought-provoking or as edifying as the children’s novels of CS Lewis?
And if the stories of this new and progressive normal are so uniformly pallid and cancerous when viewed in comparison with the stories of the old and traditional normal, how can anyone credibly suppose that its reality will not prove equally diseased and devolutionary?
There is power in the old stories. That is why the gatekeepers of progress are so intent on preventing them from being told. This is why it is important to continue telling them, and why I encourage those who hold to the traditions of the civilized, Christian West to give the works of those authors listed on the sidebar as Standout SF Authors and Friends of Narnia a shot.