Steve Sailer, over at Unz.com, has a thing about “noticing.” Even though his biggest noticing quote is about “not noticing.” That was in a post at Taki’s titled “World War T” — back in 2014 he was predicting the “trans” thing!
Political correctness is a war on noticing.
You think?
But his ideas on “noticing” really started to make me think. Because, I decided, the critical thing for all animal life is to notice the things that need to be noticed. So for some weeks I have been thinking about writing a piece on “noticing.”
Guess what: this morning I was taking a walk along a sidewalk thinking about writing about noticing when I walked right into the spray from a lawn sprinkler. Without noticing.
Dear me! But, hey, God. I appreciate your sense of humor!
What I was thinking, as I walking blindly down the street was: suppose that pebble that you pass by without noticing is in fact tied to a golden chain with a golden key on the end that can unlock all the mysteries of the Universe? Yeah! Well, why not?
Because the thing about life is that, every moment, your eyes take in billions of bits of information and your mind, conscious and unconscious, ignores almost all of it. And yet, it is also programmed to notice: perhaps some unusual movement recorded in the corner of your eye.
Obviously, noticing has a vitally important survival role. It really helps to notice a tiger jumping at you out of a bush before it is too late. Wait. It really helps to notice a tiger mysteriously crouched behind a bush before you get close enough for the tiger to jump out at you.
But typically you don’t notice anything until it moves. We often go to watch the ring-tail lemurs at the zoo. But lemurs are often up in the trees, so it’s hard to locate them unless they move that black-and-white ring tail.
Then there’s the “tell” in poker: the inadvertant facial expression that advertises the playér’s card value.
And there’s the politician’s “tell” that he’s losing, when he decides to change the definition of a recession. Or the “tell” of Russian collusion and the January 6 investigation. Why, after all, would any confident ruling class bother to neutralize a dumb real-estate promoter or punish a bunch of yahoos rioting at the Capitol unless it felt the foundations of its rule shaking?
Notice that the Chinese of old did not regard invasion — as by the Mongols — as the end of everything, because they felt that Chinese culture would always win out against the backward culture of the invader.
One of the ways in which I try to use “noticing” is with unanswered questions I have about life, the universe, everything. Such as: what is George Soros’ problem? I am always on the lookout for some article to explain everything. I can understand stupid liberals and their release-on-no-bail policy: vast numbers of black aspiring rappers are going to jail so it must be police brutality and racist prosecutors. But Soros the billionaire? Especially as Soros is a follower of philosopher Karl Popper, who is not crazy. This week I found a reason from David Cole at Taki’s. It’s revenge for the Holocaust. Soros just wants to demolish the world that killed the Jews and watch the rubble bounce. Trouble is, the agents of revenge, black criminals, may be playing Soros for a chump. They might end up making him bounce.
But, I suppose, the most important things to notice are the things that our liberal friends tell you not to notice, as Steve Sailer wrote back in 2014.
Because when liberals tell you Not to Notice, it’s a “tell.”