Certain personality types have the tendency to fanboy over people or franchises, which probably applies to the majority of Luke Smith’s audience. Granted, most of that consumption could be considered mindful and towards practical or personal goals, but there’s still an inherent cringe at letting some dude on the internet tell you what to do. This isn’t the first time virtual words affect people’s real life, nor will it be the last; people call themselves atheist after watching George Carlin clips on YouTube, and others shave their head in honor of whatever toxically masculine role model the Algorithm is pushing in current year. This time around, if the YouTube comment section is to be trusted, some conservative, indo-european elitist in the woods is influencing people into ditching their cell phone, frantically memorizing the keyboard shortcuts of his custom linux distribution, and living the better part of their life in the rural countryside.
Granted, most of these ideas have been part of larger cultural and developmental movements; We’ve had for a while now people who evade mindless internet usage after a lifetime of the contrary, people who dabble in keyboard oriented programs and window managers (for karma on r/unixporn), and we’ve always had people in less than ideal living conditions who frantically crunch the numbers over and over again to see how much they need to own their property and have a place they can call their own. Cutting off all of their social media and getting rid of every aggregator (YouTube subscriptions, following Reddit pages) has already paid dividends in freeing peoples’ time, with a gradual phasing out of more suggestive content guarenteed to seal the deal. Additionally, the terse, well-paced rhetoric of the Unabomber’s Manifesto all of a sudden becomes attractive, and is itself part of the larger meme of taking reading more seriously - a fast and easy way to get truly big brained.
The aspect of Luke that clicks with people, for better or for worse, is his antagonistic and judgemental nature. There are one or two ways to think about any given topic or solve any particular issue, and he has specific names for anyone else who deviates from them, usually something with normie or cuck in the name. He and his cult are big brain and red pilled, and everyone else are bugmen (people who instead of using inmutable family or ethnic history to describe their character, use pop culture and trends to describe their personality) or so he would have you think. He has insinuated he has choice words for LGBTQ individuals that probably stem from his strict Christian upbringing.
Would a friendly, welcoming Luke Smith even be possible? Maybe Mental Outlaw? Either way, living a more Luke-like life isn’t the goal, and Luke himself has asserted in a livestream that for any given listener or commentor, they were dealt with a different set of cards and have the responsibility to pave their own path. The average YouTube doomscroller, for example, takes themself far less seriously, is less inclined to talk to people, and hasn’t yet built the skills to study for extended periods of time. For others, consooming anime, which Luke is vehemently against, can be the perfect marriage of indulging your inner child and sharpening the art of learning languages. Most starkly though, Luke believes in God; and the majority of the Westeren world doesn’t, although he’s probably the most palatable religous zealot brought up in forums, and has convinced many to apprecitate religion and all of its auxillary functions (again, if YouTube comments are to be believed).
If there’s anything to take away from Luke, it’s that you can’t take your mental convictions for granted; in his article “Why don’t I talk about politics,” he fiendishly outlines the inevitable process of becoming red-pilled, which involves deconstructing emotional, knee-jerk reactions to topics considered “off-limits” by academia and by extension, society. This, and his skepticism of institutionalized science based on his experience in grad school, sum up his beleif system quite neatly, and while there are many facets of Luke’s character that his fans constantly misunderstand or misinterpret (this article included, probably), this sentiment still rings true above all else.