Today, that transgressive and inventive type is very rare. This is simply because the education and labor systems do everything they possibly can to stymie the development of that type of individual.

Modern society — with its emphasis on formal education, credentialism, “collaborative” research, slaving away in PhD programs until you’re thirty, and wagecucking until you’re an old graybeard to pay back your student loans — is a production line for dull normies, and it deadens the inventive and adventuresome spirit.

When rare people come to possess that spirit, they tend to come from unusual backgrounds, and from outside the common education system. (Hence the recent debates on what alternative educational methods might produce such people, e.g. with “aristocratic tutoring.”)

120 years ago, it’s not hard to see where Luckey would have fit in: Somewhere alongside George Westinghouse. Today, though, the man is almost entirely unique.

For sure. Normies maintain, it’s ingrained in their psychology, and Weirdos transgress, almost by instinct. I’m sure there’s some way to calculate what sorts of errors a society will make based on where the power is at any given moment, between the Normies and the Weirdos.

And then there’s the interplay between the two; does the dominance of one precipitate or even create the other?