There are many different kinds of people. We hear about and from suburban professional Americans ("normies") a lot because a lot of our shared stories about what is going on are about them.

Microeconomically rational agents with similar beliefs and preferences will usually act similarly, and a statistical normal can emerge from this. But sometimes the details of a situation mean that the best thing to do looks very unusual.

Normies aren't microeconomically rational. Their main motivation is that they feel safe if they resemble some shared idea of normality, and scared otherwise. This is a cybernetic perceptual-control process. Normies will often justify their own actions, and reward and punish others', on the basis of what is normal. This leads to ganging up on people who aren't trying to follow the herd, even if they aren't hurting anyone.

If you're holding onto an autonomous perspective, you're alienated from opposition to autonomous perspectives. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It just means you're in a conflict. It's helpful to be able to understand and predict the actions of people who are trying to hurt you, but it's not helpful to misinterpret a conflict as a disagreement you ought to try to reconcile.

Normies claim to be a larger and more powerful coalition than they actually are by conflating their conformity target with statistical normality. This can make it seem more dangerous or surprising than it is to be out of sync with normies.

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