Several years ago, a random user DMed me on Twitter. He had a little sun as an avatar—a sun with a cheerful face. He seemed very interested in me—almost too interested in me. He would go on and on in DMs about various topics, particularly the German esoteric thinker and mystic Rudolf Steiner. Now, I went to a Steiner kindergarten but Steiner as a thinker is dreck; his strength lay in his practical schemes, not his ideas—and I said so. However, my interlocutor continued to go on and on about Steiner, quite undeterred.
You have probably been in similar situations yourself: you really like someone but the more you want to talk to them to be friends the more they retreat from you—or vice versa, we have all met people who jump all over you like a yapping dog and make constant jolly overtures, “Let’s be friends, master. Let’s be friends, master.” The more they do it, the more disdainful you feel—similar things happen in romance, a man will moon over a particular girl who totally ignores him while other girls desperately try to get his attention. Somehow we never quite get what we want, the people who desperately want to be our friends seem repulsive to us—probably because need is always unattractive, and what people are attracted to in you is actually not so much “you” as your self-reliance. Strength and self-reliance have a certain mystery, being silent and quietly confident—the yappy person wants to penetrate that mystery but cannot.
In this case, there was an extra dimension. From the moment I saw this user’s little sun symbol and his name (a pseudonym) a voice in my head said: “Nazi. Nazi. Nazi. Child abuser. Child abuser. Child abuser.” However, although the account was rightist it was not Hitlerite—nor did it seem connected to child abuse; if anything the person seemed obsessed with Steiner—admittedly a favourite with some Hitlerites, but far from all (most Steiner fans are hippies). The swastika is a sun symbol; but there was something more than symbolism to my intuition—something pre-rational.
Despite my fairly withering responses to my interlocutor, he kept on DMing me. I was not purposively malicious, I just said what I thought and felt—and since I almost always disagreed with him, what I said was almost always blunt and contradictory. Yet many people enjoy being “beaten”, verbally or otherwise. I also noticed that he seemed to “like” my responses in a particularly premeditated way—a way that made me feel like he had psychically brushed his hand along my skin. In other words, his response pattern was a grooming one. Further, he spoke about his daughter in a strange way, albeit affectionately. I thought: “This guy abuses his daughter.”
Perhaps exasperated with me, he finally cracked and mentioned some proscribed neo-Nazi terror group in which he was involved; I then blocked him. I then flicked up some information on this group: sure enough, a leading member in the group had been convicted for having sex with his daughter—ironically, Hitlerites, though concerned with natural norms, are often recruited from the most perverted parts of society. Hitlerism in power was so sadistic that it can now never recruit from normal middle-class people as did in its ascendency—it only attracts psychopathological people; people Hitler would have hanged with piano wire.
Anyway, what I find interesting is the way I intuitively knew from the very first moment what the person was—“Nazi. Child abuser.”—just by his avatar. Rational people would say that I inferred his nonce status from his “grooming” behaviour, the way he tried to groom me for his group with the same behavioural strategy as he groomed girls; and yet my intuition was before that—it was from the very first moment, just from his innocuous avatar. One glance was all it took. To me this is the psychic power of intuition, which you should always trust.