The Trouble With Normal

One of the many tools that the folks in power use to build and maintain their power and control over the people is defining what is acceptable and what is not. They use a wide variety of methods to do this. Laws, social norms, peer pressure, education, media and the control of language are a few of these methods.

The word Normal can be defined as “conforming to a regular pattern” or “occurring naturally.” Using terms such as “Normal” in ways that define and amplify human differences or in ways that create the illusion that there is some inherent natural order to the rules of social interaction make it easier for people in power to maintain that power.

Outside of its meaning in a strict scientific process of measuring commonalities in a population and variation from those commonalities, the word Normal has little usefulness in helping humans make sense of the world around us.

Why be Normal

When used to describe human behaviors or human traits, Normal is a box in which we can place acceptable or desirable human behaviors or traits in order to exclude other traits and behaviors. This is often extraordinarily harmful. Defining some human traits as normal and others as not normal provides a foundation for racism, for sexual puritanism, for gender reductionism, for ableism, for ageism, and all kinds of other harmful and dangerous divisions.

Utah Phillips aptly illustrates the way the use of normal constrains us in the following story.

We were in the Grand Union, [a] supermarket, getting some food, over by Greenwich or Cambridge, one or the other, with old Dorothea Brownell, Morrigan's godmother - now this is education! A little kid was fussing at the checkout counter, stuck in one of those baskets - it's all the lights in those places, make kids crazy, we all know that, don't we? Well, and the kid was fussy, and the parents were ragging on the kid, and... I get them to laugh, and the parents laugh, and the checkout person laughs.

Morrigan starts punching me in the side, and said - yelling at me! - she said, "Why can't you be normal?"

And old Miss Brownell rapped Morrigan on her shin - rudely - with her cane, and said: "He is normal - what you meant to say is 'average.'"

The new Normal.

Capitalists often concern themselves with what is normal because they have to both manipulate and react to human behavior in order to make profit. They measure what is considered to be normal behavior in the economic system in order to reduce and eliminate costs while reaping rewards. One of the favorite phrases in corporate boardrooms is the “new normal.” Especially as we move into a more steady state life with COVID-19 persisting, capitalists need to know how this has changed “normal” behaviors. The problem here is that what they consider normal is just manufactured and controlled rules of human interaction that were created by humans. It is no more normal to buy an orange in a store vs, for instance, picking an orange off of a tree. There is nothing normal about human beings being allowed to starve to death because other human beings own and control the distribution of food, especially when those that control the production and distribution of food waste enormous amounts of that production annually.

Human actions can certainly be judged as more desirable or less desirable, but it is not helpful in understanding and assessing human behaviors when we use the term normal to define them. Slavery, murder, hatred, racism, could all be considered normal human behaviors but are certainly not desirable. Compassion, cooperation, sharing, and generosity also could be considered normal human behaviors and are definitely more desirable behaviors in comparison to others. When we understand this we can better see why the term normal distorts our ability to assess the quality of human interactions in relation to our current social structures.

When we start to wean ourselves away from the concept that our current social and economic structures are somehow normal, we can begin to imagine, and build, better systems in their place.