It's wild that you can learn more about investing from Aldous Huxley than from any of these chumps who follow Powell's every move and record 1 hour podcasts analyzing his body language. For example, this quote is great. image What Huxley is saying: - “Abnormally normal” = perfectly compliant to a sick environment. If a society’s core incentives reward obedience, consumption, and performative virtue over truth and agency, then adjustment is a pathology: you’re healthy-for-the-system, not healthy-for-yourself. - Silenced “human voice” = the self that resists harmful incentives. The child’s curiosity, refusal to lie, intolerance for double standards - trained out early via schooling, media norms, and micro-rewards/punishments until dissent feels wrong. - No symptoms = no alarms. The “neurotic” at least shows friction with false incentives; the “normal” runs without error messages. That’s efficient for rulers and lethal for authenticity. Huxley’s core insight isn’t “future dystopia”, it’s cost curves: pleasure is a cheaper control input than pain, defaults govern better than laws, and language (“safety”, “stability”, “community”) edits reality. If you track incentives, defaults, and word swaps - not ideals - you’ll predict human behavior with embarrassing accuracy.

Replies (13)

This explains many real life situations I have had in recent years. This is of course after taking the red pill. Before that I probably wouldn’t even notice.
BitcoinIsFuture's avatar
BitcoinIsFuture 2 months ago
Your note reminded me of Socrates and the following note: During his time, lies and corruption were spreading to the highest social levels in old Greece. He did not adapt to the abnormal normal. "Those in power in Athens were enormously threatened by the True Power that Socrates lived, by his continual exposure of the ills and corruptions of society, and by the true reflection and inspiration his way of living brought to the greater population. He inspired people to their own knowing, and to ask their own questions of the life around them. Those in power despised him and the unrelenting purity that he freely and unashamedly lived. As with many bearers of Truth throughout the ages, trumped-up charges were finally brought against him and he was sentenced to death by hemlock at the age of 70 – a death that he embraced without cowering, and in Socratic style he continued to teach in joy until the moment of his death."
BitcoinIsFuture's avatar BitcoinIsFuture
About 2500 years ago ... "Socrates placed Truth at the forefront of everything he did and he was unrelenting in his pursuit and expression of this." "Socrates dedicated himself to a life of purity and to truth, in contrast to the corruption, indulgence and excess of Athens." "He brought us courage, strength, humility, purity and an absolute unrelenting commitment to Truth and to living the essential values of Truth in society; of dignity, decency and respect and an equality for all. He called all to a higher standard of lived responsibility in society and he did not waver in that call. He called for society to be founded on true values, not ones of expediency and personal gain. Corruption was anathema to his being and he saw it as a great ill in society." "Socrates taught in a manner of discourse and questioning, encouraging people to always explore the deeper ‘why’ until a unifying truth was reached." https://www.unimedliving.com/ageless-wisdom/students-of-the-ageless-wisdom/socrates-the-unrelenting-pursuit-of-truth.html
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The system is designed to create normies. Unless your parents show you the way, it often takes very painful life experiences to un-normie yourself.
I can't be as 'odd' as I would like to be.... Walking around barefoot smelling of compost with dirty fingernails, living in a treehouse or an earthship. Instead I'm wearing a tie and attending meetings, trying not to argue with my colleagues.
Control-Plane Capital's avatar Control-Plane Capital
It's wild that you can learn more about investing from Aldous Huxley than from any of these chumps who follow Powell's every move and record 1 hour podcasts analyzing his body language. For example, this quote is great. image What Huxley is saying: - “Abnormally normal” = perfectly compliant to a sick environment. If a society’s core incentives reward obedience, consumption, and performative virtue over truth and agency, then adjustment is a pathology: you’re healthy-for-the-system, not healthy-for-yourself. - Silenced “human voice” = the self that resists harmful incentives. The child’s curiosity, refusal to lie, intolerance for double standards - trained out early via schooling, media norms, and micro-rewards/punishments until dissent feels wrong. - No symptoms = no alarms. The “neurotic” at least shows friction with false incentives; the “normal” runs without error messages. That’s efficient for rulers and lethal for authenticity. Huxley’s core insight isn’t “future dystopia”, it’s cost curves: pleasure is a cheaper control input than pain, defaults govern better than laws, and language (“safety”, “stability”, “community”) edits reality. If you track incentives, defaults, and word swaps - not ideals - you’ll predict human behavior with embarrassing accuracy.
View quoted note →
Gale Rush's avatar
Gale Rush 2 months ago
Thank you, this is a great breakdown. My one gripe is: refusal to lie, intolerance for double standards; I don't think either of these things needs to be "trained out" of us, we have all fallen to lies and/or double standards (think hypocrisy) at some point without needing to be taught.
The money is an "abnormal normal". Soon it will not be called "investing", just "survival". A reversion to a norm.