Are there any normal people out there?
Now I donāt mean this as a cry of desperation, like Iāve suddenly realized that every single one of my peers is some kind of freakish sub-human weirdo who reads Fifty Shades unironically and eats raw two minute noodles for breakfast.
This is a legitimate philosophical query. Perhaps I should better phrase it as: āIs it possible for a person to be normal?ā
Before I discovered the amazing parasitical mass that is internet culture, I had to deal with a small dysfunctional community of conservatives in suburban Adelaide as a child. I didnāt fit in very well in that community, mainly because I was into that whole book learninā thing, while all of those adults saw the Artemis Fowl series as Satanic liberal communist socialist feminist etc. propaganda. It also didnāt help than I played videogames, which every adult including my parents saw as mindless blarg that drains the IQ. And thus I was deemed to be ānot normalā. And for the longest time I believed it, because I had no evidence to the contrary.
Ten years later I have a YouTube channel based on books and find that not only does Artemis Fowl have a significant and sizable fan base, but that there are hordes of readers like me all across the globe. And that videogaming is one of the largest growing cultures in the world. Then I discover, lo and behold, people deeming themselves āfurriesā self-identify as animals, atheism is the worldās fastest growing religious view, and grown men start celebrating television shows intended for five-year-old girls. Thus the word ānormalā seemed to lose all purpose and meaning.
Hereās the dictionary.com definition for the word ānormalā:
1. conforming to the standard or the common type.
2. serving to establish a standard.
So apparently ānormalā refers to standards either being conformed to or being established, which seems contrary to me because if one is establishing a standard, then they arenāt conforming to the standard that is already established. Oh, never mind. Thatās a technicality.
What standard? Whoās standard? That dysfunctional community in suburban Adelaide I grew up in had a standard that I certainly didnāt fit into. My high school peers had a standard that I didnāt fit into either. But I do seem to fit into the standards of the YouTube book community, the brony community, and other various people groups. So I am simultaneously normal and not normal.
It seems like the word ānormalā is used only contextually. Say, bowing to people when greeting them is normal in Japan, but not in England. But this creates a similarly founded problem as the one I brought up in my Animal Rights video. The one about drawing arbitrary lines when dealing with abstract ideas. I can draw an arbitrary line of normality between Japan and England, but could I also not draw an arbitrary line between London and Manchester? Iād be dividing up a country if I did that. But people do it. What is normal in one city is not normal in another.
Normality is sometimes reserved for individuals as well. Say, if Sally does something strange, we say, āSally is not normal.ā but if Sally does it often enough we say, āThat is normal for Sally.ā and if she stops doing it we say, āThat is weird for Sally.ā even though she is once again conforming to everyone elseās standard.
But hereās the thing: If normality can be determined for each individual human then there is really no such thing as normality. Surely if someone can break the rules of normality such that breaking the rules of normality becomes ānormalā for them, then the rules of normality are not fulfilling their intended purpose. So why do we need them?
And hereās the other thing: if normality can be determined to arise over time, why are some things considered normal if they occur often enough, while other things are considered not normal even though theyāve been happening for ages? I mean homosexuality is considered abnormal by some. And the existence of homosexuality predates humanity, so why it isnāt considered normal is silly. By contrast, Justin Beiber has been around for I think three or four years now, but listening to his music is what any ānormalā teen girl would do.
Iāve heard the argument that normality is quantifiable. As in: the more something occurs, the more it should be considered normal. So homosexuality is still not normal because the overwhelming majority of human beings are strict heterosexuals. Well⦠this still brings in the arbitrary lines problem. Say if I included the entire animal kingdom into the calculation. Suddenly there are probably more homosexuals on Earth than there are humans. So well-fucking-done. But if you draw an arbitrary line between humans and animals, to exclude animals from the equation, then you still have to consider that there are things in human culture done by the majority that are not at all morally agreeable. For example, women have been disadvantaged and oppressed in the majority of cultures around the globe for the entirely of human history. So should it be considered normal to disadvantage and oppress women?
It seems like ānormalā doesnāt have a definite set of boundaries grounded in philosophy, science, anthropology, or any other study of the world. What is deemed ānormalā is, rather, attributed to gut-feelings. In other words: āI feel that homosexuality is not normal.ā We canāt provide evidence to back up our claims of what is normal and what isnāt, and even if we did, our definition of normality is so vague that any evidence provided would never allow us to draw any solid conclusions.
I probably wouldnāt possess such a vendetta against the concept of normal if it werenāt so fucking idolized. Why is it that people deem something as unacceptable because it isnāt normal? Iāve already established that normalcy is a stupid concept and so equating normalcy with acceptability is an act of ludicrously delusional silliness. Iād be perfectly happy to wear the label āabnormalā if it were not also implied that Iād need to change by strange ways to conform to everyone else without a rational justification.
You know, there are times when I wish I could be called normal. But then I take a look at the mindless consuming fodder that my society has deemed ānormalā and I become glad that I am not one of them.