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.
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.
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 →
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.
