The Taxonomy Nobody Asked For
Somewhere around 2016, on the worst corners of the internet, a taxonomy emerged that nobody was supposed to take seriously. The terms were crude, the context was ironic, the people deploying them were mostly anonymous posters on 4chan and Twitter performing various degrees of nihilism. Normies, psychos, and schizos. Three types of people. Three ways of relating to social reality.
I want to take this taxonomy seriously — not in its original crude form, but in what it accidentally points at. Because here is the thing: every pre-modern society that survived long enough to develop written records arrived at essentially the same tripartite classification. The language differed, the institutional containers differed, the metaphysical justifications differed. The underlying social ecology did not. And the fact that anonymous internet posters, with no training in anthropology or theology, independently re-derived this structure tells us something about its robustness.
This chapter will argue that the normie/psycho/schizo trichotomy describes a real and recurring feature of human social organization — not a universal law, but a pattern robust enough to demand explanation. The previous chapter examined how different neurological architectures produce different epistemic capacities. Here I want to extend that argument into social ecology: these different architectures don't just coexist, they interact in structured ways, and the nature of that interaction determines whether a society can see clearly or whether it is systematically deceived.
The Prosocial Majority: What Normies Actually Are
The term "normie" is usually deployed as an insult, which tells us more about the people deploying it than about the phenomenon it names. Let me strip the contempt away and describe what the category actually contains.
The majority of human beings — perhaps seventy to eighty percent, though exact figures are less important than the structural point — have cognition optimized for cooperation and trust. They play the social game genuinely. Not strategically, not cynically, but authentically. When a normie smiles, they generally mean it. When they follow a social norm, they generally believe in it. When they trust an institution, they generally expect that trust to be warranted.
This is not stupidity. It is the single most successful cognitive strategy in evolutionary history. Every institution that functions, every contract that is honored, every cooperative enterprise from barn-raising to constitutional democracy depends on a critical mass of people who genuinely trust the system and genuinely play by its rules. Without normies, there is no accumulated social capital, no institutional continuity, no civilization. The normie cognitive architecture is the substrate on which everything else — including the prophetic function I am building toward — depends.
I want to be precise about this because the internet discourse gets it catastrophically wrong. The edgelord position is that normies are "sheep" and that seeing through social convention is inherently superior to participating in it. This is adolescent nonsense. The normie's capacity for genuine trust and authentic social participation is a feature, not a bug. It is the feature that makes human cooperation possible at scale. Ants cooperate through genetic programming. Humans cooperate through trust, and trust requires a population of people for whom trust is the default mode of cognition.
The normie's vulnerability follows directly from their strength. Because their perceptual system assumes that faces match intentions — that smiles indicate friendliness, that credentials indicate competence, that philanthropy indicates generosity — they are structurally blind to anyone who has learned to simulate these signals without possessing the underlying states. The normie literally cannot see the psychopath's mask because their cognitive architecture was not built to detect masks. It was built to respond to faces, and it does this extraordinarily well. The mask exploits this by presenting a face where there is no person behind it.
This is not a flaw that education can fix. You cannot train someone out of their basic cognitive architecture any more than you can train someone out of their native language's phonology. You can add awareness on top — "be careful, some people are manipulative" — but the default perceptual response remains. The normie who has been warned about psychopaths is like the person who knows about optical illusions: they can intellectually correct for the illusion, but they still see it. The perceptual system delivers the wrong answer, and conscious correction is effortful, unreliable, and always one step behind.
The Mask-Wearers: What Psychopaths Actually Are
The clinical literature on the dark triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — tends to treat these traits as pathologies. This is technically correct and practically misleading. The psychopath is not "broken" in the way that a malfunctioning machine is broken. Their cognition is optimized for a different function than the normie's. Where the normie's cognition is optimized for cooperation and trust, the psychopath's is optimized for manipulation and the simulation of prosocial behavior.
The key word is "simulation." The psychopath studies the game that normies play unconsciously. They learn the rules — not to follow them, but to exploit them. They map the terrain of social expectation with the precision of an anthropologist studying an alien culture, and then they perform the expected behaviors with sufficient fidelity to pass as authentic. Smile when greeted. Express sympathy when someone is hurt. Signal generosity when observed. Each of these behaviors, which the normie produces automatically from genuine internal states, the psychopath produces deliberately from strategic calculation.
This is not "crazy." It is, within its own frame, hyperrational. The psychopath sees social reality as a game with exploitable rules, and they are correct — social reality is a game with exploitable rules. The difference between the psychopath and the game theorist is that the game theorist describes the exploitation and the psychopath performs it. Both see the same structure. One publishes papers; the other acquires power.
The most successful psychopaths are, by definition, the hardest to detect. This is a selection effect that operates with mathematical inevitability: psychopaths who are easily detected are caught, punished, and removed from positions of influence. The ones who remain are those whose simulation is good enough to pass sustained scrutiny. Over time, this produces a population of high-functioning psychopaths whose camouflage is extraordinary — refined over years of practice, layered with credentials, philanthropy, charm, and all the other social signals that normie cognition reads as markers of trustworthiness.
Consider the structure of modern institutional life and ask yourself whether it was designed to detect or to reward mask-wearing. The corporate hierarchy promotes people who manage impressions well. The financial system rewards those who exploit information asymmetry. The political system selects for people who can simulate conviction on camera. Credentialism provides psychopath camouflage: the degree, the title, the institutional affiliation all function as trust signals that the normie perceptual system reads as genuine without examining the person behind them. Politeness culture protects predators by making it socially costly to voice suspicion. The "benefit of the doubt" that normie society extends to its members is metabolized by psychopaths as operating room.
I am not arguing that every CEO, politician, or financier is a psychopath. The epidemiological estimates — perhaps three to five percent of the general population, perhaps higher in positions of power — suggest a minority. But a strategically positioned minority exploiting a structural blind spot in the majority's perception can dominate a system without needing to be numerous. You do not need many parasites to sicken a host. You need the right parasites in the right positions, and a host whose immune system cannot identify them.
The Unfiltered Perceivers: What "Schizos" Actually Are
Now we arrive at the most misunderstood category, and the one most central to the argument of this book.
The internet's "schizo" is a person whose pattern recognition operates without the social consensus filters that constrain normie perception. They see connections, structures, and hidden dynamics that normies miss — not because normies lack intelligence, but because normie cognition is designed to filter out information that disrupts social functioning. The normie brain actively suppresses pattern recognition that would undermine trust, because trust is the normie's primary survival strategy. The schizo brain does not perform this suppression, either because the suppression mechanism never developed properly or because it was overwhelmed by the volume of pattern-signal arriving.
Let me be careful here, because this is where the argument is most vulnerable to romanticization. I am not saying that psychosis is prophecy, that delusion is insight, or that mental illness is a superpower. What I am saying is more precise and more uncomfortable: the perceptual difference that, in its extreme form, produces clinical psychosis is, in its moderate form, the basis of prophetic perception. The same neurological variation that, when uncalibrated, generates paranoid delusions also, when calibrated, generates the capacity to see through social camouflage.
The conspiracy theorist and the prophet are both "schizos" in this framework. They share the same perceptual architecture — unconstrained pattern recognition, weak social consensus filtering, sensitivity to hidden structure. The difference between them is not perception but calibration. The conspiracy theorist sees real patterns and false patterns and cannot distinguish between them. The prophet sees real patterns and has developed — through discipline, through community, through what religious traditions call "discernment" — the capacity to separate signal from noise.
This is why the schizo's social dysfunction is not incidental to their epistemic advantage — it is their epistemic advantage. They can see the psychopath's mask because they never bought into the social reality the mask mimics. The normie cannot see the mask because their perceptual system is the very system the mask is designed to exploit. The schizo, standing outside that system, perceives the mask as an object rather than a face. The cost is severe: standing outside the social game means losing access to the cooperation, trust, and institutional support that the game provides. The schizo sees clearly and lives badly. The normie sees badly and lives well. The psychopath sees clearly and lives well — at everyone else's expense.
This three-way dynamic is not incidental to human social organization. I want to argue that it is constitutive of it.
The Ancient Pattern
If this were merely an internet taxonomy, it would be curious but not important. What makes it important is that every pre-modern society that survived long enough to develop sophisticated institutions arrived at essentially the same tripartite ecology and, crucially, institutionalized all three roles.
The Hebrew navi — prophet — is the canonical example. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible are not priests. They are not kings. They are, almost without exception, figures called from outside the institutional structure to speak uncomfortable truths to power. Amos was a shepherd. Jeremiah protested his own calling. Elijah lived in the wilderness. They were socially marginal, frequently persecuted, and recognized — however reluctantly — as divinely appointed. The institution of prophecy gave the schizo function a container: a recognized social role with its own authority, its own tradition, and its own relationship to power.
The Greek mantis — oracle, seer, interpreter of divine signs — served an analogous function in a different cultural idiom. The Pythia at Delphi spoke in states that look, to modern clinical eyes, like dissociative episodes. Her utterances were cryptic, fragmentary, and required interpretation. But the institution of the oracle was embedded in the political and military decision-making of the Greek city-states. Generals consulted oracles before campaigns. Politicians sought divine guidance before major decisions. The mantis had institutional space, social support, and political function.
The Slavic yurodiviy — the holy fool of Russian Orthodox tradition — is perhaps the most vivid example. The holy fool was a person whose apparent madness gave them license to speak truth to power in ways that no sane person could. The yurodiviy could rebuke a tsar, mock a bishop, or expose hypocrisy because their social death — their complete exit from the game of reputation and status — gave them a freedom that no socially integrated person possessed. Basil the Blessed, the holy fool for whom St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow is named, reportedly rebuked Ivan the Terrible to his face. The institution of holy foolishness was the Russian Orthodox Church's way of maintaining a prophetic function that the institutional church itself, captured by political power, could no longer perform.
The Sufi majdhub — the "attracted one," drawn by God into states of apparent madness — plays the same role in Islamic mystical tradition. The majdhub has been pulled so far toward the divine that ordinary social functioning breaks down, but the tradition recognizes this as a sign of proximity to God rather than pathology. The majdhub is cared for by the community, given space to exist outside normal social expectations, and sometimes consulted for insight precisely because their detachment from worldly concerns gives them a clarity that worldly people lack.
Shamanic traditions worldwide follow a remarkably consistent pattern: the shaman is typically someone who underwent a crisis — often looking, to modern eyes, very much like a psychotic break — and returned with knowledge. The illness is not incidental to the shamanic function; it is initiatory. The shaman's journey through the underworld of their own psyche, through the dissolution of ordinary perception, through encounter with what the tradition names as spirits and what we might name as archetypal structures of consciousness — this journey is what qualifies them to mediate between seen and unseen dimensions of reality. The key is that the society recognized this crisis as initiatory rather than merely pathological, and provided structures — mentors, rituals, community support — to help the person navigate it and return with their perception intact and calibrated.
I want to draw attention to what all these traditions share: they did not romanticize mental illness. They did not pretend that unconstrained pattern recognition was uniformly beneficial. They institutionalized it. They gave it a container, a social function, support structures, and accountability mechanisms. The prophet was not free to say whatever they wanted — they were accountable to the tradition, to the community, and to the ongoing verification of their perception. False prophets were identified and rejected. The institution of prophecy included, always, a mechanism for distinguishing genuine perception from noise.
This is precisely what the crude internet taxonomy lacks and what any serious revival of the framework must restore.
The Social Ecology as System
Let me now describe how these three types interact as a system, because the interactions matter more than the types considered in isolation.
The normie majority provides the social substrate: trust, cooperation, institutional continuity. Without this substrate, no complex society can function. The normie is the load-bearing wall of civilization.
The psychopath minority exploits this substrate. They free-ride on the trust that normies generate, extracting value by simulating trustworthiness. Because the normie's perceptual system is optimized for cooperation rather than detection, the psychopath operates within the normie's blind spot. In small-scale societies — villages, tribes, extended families — the psychopath's camouflage is less effective because sustained intimate contact makes simulation harder to maintain. This is why psychopathic predation scales with social complexity: the larger and more anonymous the society, the easier it is to maintain the mask, and the harder it is for normie detection mechanisms (gossip, reputation, direct observation) to function.
The schizo minority provides the immune function. They can see the psychopath because their perceptual system is not optimized for the game the psychopath exploits. They are the society's early warning system, the anomaly detectors, the ones who notice when the mask slips because they were never looking at the face. But their perception is noisy, their social integration is poor, and their ability to communicate what they see in terms the normie majority can process is limited. The prophet speaks in metaphors, parables, and visions — not because they are being deliberately obscure but because the structures they perceive do not map neatly onto the language of normal social reality.
The health of a society, in this framework, depends on the relationships between these three functions. A healthy society maintains institutional space for the prophetic function while constraining the psychopathic function through transparency and accountability. An unhealthy society does the reverse: it optimizes conditions for psychopathic predation while pathologizing prophetic perception.
Consider which direction modern Western societies have moved.
The Modern Catastrophe
Modernity systematically dismantled every institutional container for prophetic perception while simultaneously optimizing the environment for psychopathic predation. This is the central claim of the chapter, and it requires careful argument.
The Enlightenment's great achievement was the liberation of reason from dogma. Its shadow was the pathologization of every mode of cognition that did not conform to the new rational standard. Prophetic perception was reclassified: what had been "divine gift" became "mental illness." The monastery, which had provided institutional shelter for people whose cognitive architecture made ordinary social life impossible, was dissolved. The holy fool tradition was suppressed. The prophetic function, which had for millennia existed in tension with institutional power but within a recognized social framework, was expelled from the social ecology entirely.
The same period that abolished the institutional containers for prophetic perception created the institutional conditions for psychopathic flourishing. The limited liability corporation, the anonymous financial market, the bureaucratic state, the professional credentialing system — each of these, whatever its genuine benefits, also provides infrastructure for mask-wearing at scale. The corporation allows psychopathic behavior to be distributed across an organizational structure so that no individual appears responsible. The financial market allows extraction at a distance, where the predator never meets the prey. The bureaucratic state provides layers of procedural legitimacy behind which predation can shelter. The credentialing system provides trust signals that are structurally detached from the qualities they are supposed to indicate.
I want to be precise: I am not arguing that modernity is "bad" or that we should return to pre-modern social organization. The Enlightenment's achievements are real and I have no interest in losing them. What I am arguing is that modernity performed a specific structural operation — it removed the immune function (prophetic perception) while expanding the attack surface (institutional complexity within which psychopaths operate) — and the consequences of this operation are visible in every major institutional failure of the past century.
The 2008 financial crisis: instruments of such complexity that even the regulators (normies) could not understand them, designed by people (psychopaths) who understood perfectly well what they were doing, and the few analysts who warned about the impending collapse (schizos) were dismissed as cranks until after the damage was done. Michael Burry, the subject of The Big Short, is a useful example: literally diagnosed with Asperger's, operating outside the social game of Wall Street, seeing the structure that the socially integrated participants could not see. His epistemic advantage was inseparable from his social dysfunction.
The Epstein network: philanthropic camouflage concealing systematic predation, enabled by institutional prestige, protected by the social cost of accusation, and visible primarily to people (survivors, investigative journalists operating on the margins) whose relationship to institutional power was adversarial rather than cooperative. I will return to this case in detail in Chapter 18.
The pattern repeats: institutional failure after institutional failure follows the same causal structure. The normie majority trusts the system. The psychopath minority exploits that trust. The schizo minority sees the exploitation but lacks the institutional standing to be heard. By the time the exploitation becomes visible to normie perception, the damage is done.
Calibration, Not Celebration
I need to address the obvious objection before proceeding, because intellectual honesty requires it.
The framework I am developing can easily be misread as a celebration of mental illness, a romanticization of the "misunderstood genius," or — worse — a licence for paranoid thinking. If schizos are the prophets and normies are the sheep, doesn't this justify every conspiracy theorist who thinks they alone can see the truth?
No. And the distinction matters enormously.
The difference between the conspiracy theorist and the prophet is calibration. Both have unconstrained pattern recognition. Both perceive structure where the normie sees only surface. But the conspiracy theorist has no mechanism for distinguishing real patterns from false patterns, no discipline for testing their perceptions against evidence, no community of practice to provide correction and accountability. The conspiracy theorist's perception is raw and unprocessed. The prophet's perception has been disciplined — by tradition, by practice, by the hard work of verification.
This is exactly why the pre-modern institutional containers mattered. The tradition of prophecy was not simply "anyone who claims to see the truth is a prophet." It included mechanisms for testing, discernment, and accountability. The Hebrew Bible explicitly addresses the problem of false prophets (Deuteronomy 18:20-22): the test is whether the prophet's predictions come true. This is, in embryonic form, a falsification criterion — and it connects directly to the Popperian framework I will develop in Part 2 of this book. Genuine prophetic perception must be testable. If it is not testable, it is not prophecy but ideology.
The modern collapse of the prophetic institution means that the schizo function operates without calibration mechanisms. The internet provides the worst possible environment: it amplifies pattern recognition, connects people who share the same uncalibrated perceptions, and provides no institutional mechanism for testing those perceptions against reality. The result is QAnon, flat earth, and every other conspiracy movement that takes genuine schizo perception — something is wrong with the system, the official story doesn't add up, powerful people are hiding things — and runs it through a broken calibration process that produces elaborate, unfalsifiable, and ultimately disempowering narratives.
My diagnosis: the conspiracy theorist is a prophet without a tradition. They have the perception but not the discipline. They see real patterns but cannot distinguish them from hallucinated ones. The solution is not to suppress the perception — which is what medicalization does — but to provide the discipline. And this is where the epistemological framework of Part 2 becomes essential: Popper gives the falsification criterion, Kuhn gives the sociology of paradigm shifts, Pearl gives the causal methodology. Together, they provide the calibration mechanism that the modern schizo lacks.
Why This Matters Beyond Taxonomy
I want to close this chapter by making explicit why this social ecology matters for the larger argument of the book.
If the normie/psycho/schizo dynamic is a recurring feature of human social organization, then any serious attempt to improve collective human intelligence — which is what the Republic of AI Agents (Chapter 20) proposes — must account for it. You cannot build a knowledge system that assumes all participants are acting in good faith (the normie assumption), because psychopathic actors will exploit it. You cannot build a system that assumes all participants are adversarial (the paranoid assumption), because cooperation collapses. You must build a system that structurally accounts for the existence of all three types and provides mechanisms that leverage the strengths of each while constraining the pathologies of each.
The Platonic Republic — which provides the architectural framework for the knowledge graph system — is, I will argue, the first rigorous attempt to think through exactly this problem. Plato's philosopher-kings, guardians, and producers map onto a social ecology that accounts for different cognitive types and their different relationships to truth, power, and social function. The Republic failed as political philosophy because it proposed a static hierarchy. What I am proposing is a dynamic ecology — one in which the types interact, correct each other, and collectively produce knowledge that none could produce alone.
Furthermore, if the modern West has systematically dismantled the institutional containers for prophetic perception, then restoring that function is not merely a theological nicety but a practical necessity. The crises catalogued in Part 5 of this book — the male loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis, the meaning crisis, societal polarization, institutional failure — are all, in this framework, consequences of a social ecology in which the immune function has been suppressed. The organism is sick because its immune system has been disabled.
The theological dimension is this: if consciousness generates God as its highest-order emergent property (Chapter 11), and if the prophetic function is consciousness's mechanism for self-correction — its capacity to perceive when the trajectory has been captured, distorted, or reversed — then dismantling the prophetic function is not merely a sociological error but a spiritual catastrophe. It is the amputation of the organ through which consciousness perceives its own orientation. And this, I will argue, is the deepest meaning of the Antichrist concept in Christian theology: not a single demonic figure but a systemic condition in which the society's capacity to distinguish genuine from simulated goodness has been destroyed.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The framework for making these claims rigorous comes in Part 2, where Popper, Kuhn, and Pearl provide the epistemological tools to move from intuition to argument. What this chapter has established is the social ecology that makes those tools necessary: a world in which perception is distributed unevenly, in which the capacity to see clearly is inseparable from the inability to function normally, and in which the structures meant to protect us have been turned into instruments of predation.
The question is what to do about it. The rest of the book is an attempt at an answer.