What is Normal?

Humans as a race see things in terms of normality. This is normal, this is not normal and should be changed. Each society living at each time has a sense of ‘normality,’ which is the conditions they are used to and grew up with. For a person living in a hot desert, water is scarce, it is hot in the day, cold at night, so they have a desert normality, when things happen like starting to rain or suddenly being mild both day and night seen as a very worrying condition. “it should not be like this, something is wrong,’ rather than ‘this is pleasant.’ People going from one society to another also experience this displacement, ‘this society is all wrong and evil, I need to change it to what I am used to, as it doesn’t have the same value system I had that I grew up in.’ A person living in a cold snow bound existence has the opposite view, ‘where’s all the snow, something must be wrong.’

Conditions are different, not inferior or superior.

Idea are like this, people hanging onto the traditional view, not, as is this right or logical, but when I was small people and growing up people had better values than today. No, they had different, and grew up in a different world. Technology can be good, bad or indifferent, not better or worse, taking the ‘all or nothing’ view. ‘Computerised sex toys are bad, so you would have disagreed with the wheel’ being an example of this, seeing only in black and white, all or nothing terms, rather than different shades of grey for everything.

We are stochastic in nature, in that we look at outcomes based on our own internal world view, but our worldview is a tool like with mathematics, not reality, but a representation of our view of reality, sometimes with a little or lot of fantasy blended in. We have never tested a lot of things, assuming that those things have in fact been tested throughout human existence, when in many cases they have not, just taken as exact. This goes for normality. We have a world view that we see as moderate and normal. A person who doesn’t fit in is seen as abnormal, so the obvious thing to do for others is to change them to be normal or ‘normalise them.’ In the days of lack of understanding in science, what was imagined was normal, so religion took off big time as it seemed as good an explanation of how things worked as any.

We are still in the thralls of imagination and fantasy, people rarely using any scientific approach as a basis for their views, when really they should be using it in virtually everything they think of, not just as a basis to win arguments, picking it up and dropping it constantly. It needs to be picked up and held in every transaction.

When experiments are conducted and tests are actually made ‘mice suddenly run down the maze the wrong way; eat the wrong bit of cheese,’ to quote Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Society is not a natural process, more an artificial construct with artificial parameters and artificial norms. So, to live in it comfortably you need to be somewhat artificial yourself. You need to think in an artificial, not a natural way, things only changing gradually as people begin to understand that what is expected makes no sense whatsoever. You are expected to behave 2+2=5, when you think 2+2=4, as 5 was good enough for us when we were young. This idea of 4 is unnatural and against societies views and laws. But change takes time, and you get caught between the 2+2=5 and 2+2=3 political parties, each demanding conformity and everything else as sacrilege.

Think of society as an old and cranky machine, not the new state of the art perfection. The old hands make an adjustment they think best and it stays within certain parameters. It needs a change and a new part; mild adjustments are being made. Somebody new sees the machine going out of its specification, so they make an immediate large adjustment to bring it into line. It goes out of specification more in the opposite direction, so a bigger compensation is made. And another, and another, ending up in wildly fluctuating and never giving anybody what needs to be produced. Nobody happy, as too much was demanded too soon. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, being true in the mind and social circumstances as much as in the physical world. Mild slow change, gradual acceptance, big fast changes, opposition and polarisation, with the effect of wildly fluctuating.

I used the word displacement at the start. Anxiety in society is quite often caused by this ‘displacement,’ people not feeling they fit in. The fact is, in an artificial society nobody fits in, the more wildly it fluctuates and ignores what is going on, using more and more artificial corrections in the form of laws to regulate itself into the ‘normal’ situation. An extra little weight here, an extra little weight there, until there are more weights than machine and it runs so badly everybody is unhappy, but not willing to say so for being cast as not normal, the weights having become more important than the machine.

I am not normal, you are not normal, people are not normal, nature is not normal. Science? What is normal anyway? Think for yourself to find out and you may find a path. Don’t just take anybody’s word for it. They are not normal, so why take their word for it and follow their path?