Wise Words? Normal vs. Weird

English, as a language and especially the way we speak it in America, has a lot of words and phrases with somewhat complicated or weird meanings. Take a word as beloved as well, love. People can use it to describe how they feel about music, jobs, other people, etc. There are of lot of such examples, but one that strikes my mind often is the concept of being Normal. 

Normal is a pretty normal word to say. People talk about it a lot, often to ask if something they do is normal. Is watching Netflix for 20 hours Normal, is it Normal to check Twitter first thing in the morning, is it Normal to listen to the same song 100 times in a row, the list goes on. Its always seemed to be me that Normal, despite trying to represent a lack of deviation from the natural flow of the universe, is particularly strange for two mains reasons. For one thing, its often a term of judgement, and for another people talk and think about it like some kind of ubiquitous standard but really it is an intensely individual concept.

Lets tackle the judgement side first though. Personally, I've had a lot of conversations that go something like:

"Well I don't really know why I dont like that person, they're just not Normal"

They use it to quantify how negatively they feel about someone without qualifying with specific examples why they feel that way. As I mentioned before Normal is perceived as something universal which should not have to be explained unless you yourself are not Normal. This makes it a very difficult thing to argue with, because really they made something of an irrefutable claim. They place a person in an outgroup without having to specify which group it is they dont belong to. And its this lack of having to make an explanation that makes the phrase "Not Normal" such a strangely powerful method of judgement.

If you really hate someone, you'll probably have a lot of really specific reasons why. But if you simply dont understand something, than its much easier to say its not normal to convey your distance from it and its place outside of yourself. But you might not use those two words "Not Normal". You may take it perhaps one step further and call something "Weird."

Weird is also a pretty Normal thing to talk about. Weird stuff is kinda inherently interesting, to me at least. Its has some kind of implied deviation from the normal which makes it inherently more rare and special. But I also hear the word used a lot in a judgemental tone. People call specific other people Weird, they call other religions Weird, they call call entire countries or parts of the world Weird. And maybe I'm imaging things, but it always seem to me like when people talk about something in this way, its to imply that is does not align with the way things "should be."

Buddhists think that the desire for the way things should be is one of the core causes of suffering, so maybe its not surprising at all that the desire for reality as it "should be " would cause someone to judge someone else and in turn place them in the outgroup. However I think the difference between calling something Not Normal and Weird is that Not Normal places someone or something in an outgroup but Weird has a more directly negative connotation that places that outgroup specifically lower than the ingroup. As the Dali Lama says we're all just one of the seven billion people, so in my book this placing of people in lower out groups is always a jerk move, but maybe thats only because its been done to me so many times. I never thought I was Weird, I fit my own definition of normal just by being a kind person overall and trying to speak my mind, but I quickly found out that not everyone shared my same definition of Normal.

As I've mentioned a few times, people refer to Normal itself as a ubiquitous concept, but upon further analysis thats a total and complete lie. Stop for one moment and think about what a "Normal" person looks like. I would go out on a limb and say most people imagine someone who looks somewhat like them. Maybe not the same exact face but probably the same race, gender, and nationality. After all as we touched on before, the concept of Normal represents belonging to the ingroup. 

People think in terms of ingroups and outgroups mostly to distinguish who they think is a threat and who isn't. As long as we develop a normal sense of trust for our parents and other people (see other people) we regard people in our ingroup as those who we can rely on and trust for both the meeting of our needs and not betraying us. These same people who are trustworthy in our eyes also demonstrate a lot of behaviors which we implement into our own lives. We speak the same language, have some of the same mannerisms, and generally do a lot of the same things. Yes kids hopefully play and adults generally work but the example set by people we trust has a lasting impact on our lives. How much our parents watch tv, how much they read both to us and themselves, how creative or kind they are in their own day to day lives. In fact I was talking once with a friend of mine who teaches teenagers who struggle to read as late as ninth and tenth grade, and she says one of the things all these people have in common is that no one read to them as a child, especially not long texts like books. What was especially interesting to me was the even someone who was read long texts in a non English language was able to read English texts more easily than someone without any long text experience. So needless to say, our experiences with external behavior at young ages lay down patterns which persist throughout our lives. Normal patterns of thought, normal behavior, normal ways of being a person. So when someone who we meet falls outside of our ingroup of Normal behaviors, we assume that they must not be trust worthy. This is especially damaging if we live in a small world with walls defined by institutional racism. We end up thinking that everyone lives like the people in our ingroup and that our definition of Normal applies to everyone. I've heard this concept refered to as habitism, and I was first exposed to it in this video by an online philosopher named F.D. Signer. He used it to help explain how white liberals like myself see the world which was certainly an interesting thing to watch as the kind of person being talking about, but regardless of its origin this can often create a correlation between surface level factors such as skin color and trustworthiness. Such a correlation makes it extremely difficult to create a peaceful society in which people live alongside each other in celebration of their differences instead of fear.

So in short, creating a peaceful planet is a tall order. But one of the most effective way to deal with it in our own lives is to avoid creating large dark boxes and casting people in them long before we know whether they're good or bad. So to that end if you like Twitter and Netflix and one song more than any other song I say go on and enjoy those things, there's certainly much worse things to be doing. Unless something is bringing your life down or harming others, casting people into the out group is certain to do more harm than finishing that whole season of Sex Ed in one day.

Stay Weird

Sam