Abnormally Sane

I'm a big fan of abnormality.  I purposely cultivate friendships with "strange" people.  Put simply, they're more interesting because they challenge what "normal" is, and if it's really something we want.  Normalcy, at least in terms of sociological behavior, can be even more insane than individually abnormal behavior.

Don't believe me?  Consider the following:

1.  Economically, we value and depend upon greed as a motivating force to make our economy work yet somehow have trouble understanding when it leads to financial collapses and rampant inequality.  Despite the fact that the majority suffer so that a tiny minority can hold the purse strings and reigns of power, the majority puts up with it because that what they're told to do.  And we do it.

2.  Sociologically, women and men are still far from equal.  Even in so called civilized western societies, it's still par for the course if you treat women as objects of possession and/or with the mind of a child.  In the rest of the world, it's the law and duty of the culture to treat women as no different than property, with little regard for their rights and even less regard for their individual identity.

3. Morally, the vast majority of people still decide what's right and wrong literally based on beliefs that use guilt, fear and authority as moral yardsticks.  You have to believe it or...Else.  Else is usually fear, backed up by some kind of threat by a disembodied Authority figure who can make you suffer, or reward you at will.

Seriously.  This is the model billions of people use for their moral judgments.  

These kinds of beliefs keep us morally subjugated as they exploit facets of our psychology, using manipulation that makes us feel bad in principle (with concepts like Original Sin or some version of the "inherent evil nature of mankind") and then come to the "rescue" with some type of authority figure that can "absolve" you (read: psychologically conditions you to respond to rituals to remove that nagging sense of guilt or fear the belief itself caused).

It's a lot like driving on a lost deserted road and suddenly getting a flat tire.   Somehow... amazingly...there's a lone service station, only a quarter of a mile from where you broke down.  It's only after you pay way too much for a replacement that you realize that nail in the road was placed there by the same guy who fixed your tire.  

You don't motivate good behavior by instilling guilt and fear in people, and then turn around and promise if they only swear their loyalty, they'll get divine grace and forgiveness in return. Whatever that is, it's not morality. Using passive-aggression to corrupt a person's self-esteem, and overwrite their sense of identity so it's entirely dependent on a singular belief (or person) is pretty fucking immoral for a number of reasons.  How this is still regarded as "right" is still a huge mystery to me.

What's worse is these kinds of belief systems are usually instilled in children to keep them mentally sedated, emotionally dependent and "well behaved" all the way into adulthood.
     
This is all true in our culture, yet if an individual were to hold a similar belief that resulted in non-culturally approved of behaviors (for example, someone who cuts the head off a chicken and uses the blood as an offering to some sort of god), they would be regarded as quite insane by contemporary American culture.

But how is this really any different than drinking wine that supposedly transmutes into blood, or eating of bread that represents the body of a supernatural being?  The principle of the belief itself is just as crazy as the guy who thinks you need to drip chicken blood in a circle to come to some greater spiritual awareness.

The "magic" of cultural authority is it gets beliefs that are quite insane to the status of completely normal.  

I think there's a silent majority out there who seriously question just how screwed up all this actually is, and must be thinking to themselves "I wonder if anyone else thinks this is really fucking weird?"

Maybe they have.  Maybe even the vast majority are all thinking this.  But they're not going to do anything about it because they've been led to believe that's just the "way things are."

Heath Ledger's version of the Joker sums it up pretty well:

You know what I've noticed?  Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan."

The vast majority never seem to question (at least publicly) whatever moral narrative they've been spoon fed since childhood.  

Then there are those of us who are labeled quite weird or abnormal by the rest of society because we constantly re-evaluate what we are, who we are, where we are going as individuals, and as a species.  We are the social misfits and the troublemakers, and contrary to popular opinion, real progress in society (that actually leads to less suffering and better quality of life) would not occur if it weren't for people like us who push against the status quo of mediocrity and culturally approved insanity.    

Most people just integrate into society, adopting the cultural insanity and all, if only to get what they need (or think they need) to have a good life.   I've noticed American culture has basically three different strategies or coping mechanisms that seem to be employed with some of the more crazier cultural beliefs:

• Don't ask, don't tell.   Deny, deny, deny.  Our collective social way of dealing with questions that challenge the authority of harmful cultural practices is to deny their existence entirely.  Doing anything approaching a real solution is considered socially crazy or politically suicidal, and will get you isolated and marginalized accordingly if you were to make your beliefs public.      

• Binary solutions.  Zero or one?  True or false?  My way or the highway?  We tend to think of answers to questions as only having two possible solutions or approaches, when they actually have many more.  This limits our imagination in the solutions we come up with.  Binary solutions also tend to reinforce existing power structures where nothing really changes, even if the balance of power shifts to the "other" option we're presented with.  

• Distraction.  This is a relatively new strategy in the cultural game of keeping your population from noticing just how insane things are.   Advances in technology have allowed distraction to become not only a form of social control, but also a form of self-entertained control that we readily and willfully submerge ourselves in.  We can get lost in our own little world of distraction while the rest of the world burns to the ground and we'd be none the wiser.   

I think we have largely lost the ability to think about existential questions meaningfully because we've all been indoctrinated into some form of the above cultural system.  We are all very conditioned to let some combination of external authority and distraction dictate our lives.   Somehow, this is all considered very normal.

Don't trouble yourself with such questions and complicated sociological issues...just do whatever X says, be happy with the degrees of freedom and choices you're given, and just shut the hell up.  That's pretty much the message I got in formal education settings.  

Depending on who you are and where you start, finding your niche in society can include:

• Going to college and finding something you're interested in, spending massive amounts of time and money studying it, and then finding a job where you can be a "productive member of society."

• Learning to hustle and sell anything you can to make enough money to live if you can't afford the above option.  

• Working nine to five in your cubicle, collecting your paycheck, and drinking yourself to sleep as you worry about not being able to pay your mortgage and bills.

Your identity or baseline for "normality" is largely dependent upon what it takes to survive in your immediate environment.  Don't assume what's normal for you to think and feel, is what everyone else ought to think as well.  After you start really talking and getting to know people, you learn very quickly that most everyone is hardwired slightly differently because they all inhabit slightly different environments.  But there are shared and common experiences that we all have, and I'm betting some of us have come to the same conclusion...

Something is seriously insane about our culture.  

Yet, people en masse don't tend say anything when it's all a culturally reinforced illusion.  Individual identity becomes submissive and subverted to cultural authority.  It's considered weird or rude if you share doubts or voice criticism that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and even if you do have these thoughts, you're told you can't go against the status quo anyhow.  If you do, you're quickly put into your place by others who believe they're similarly limited, and therefore confer the same illusion onto you.  It becomes a vicious self-reinforcing cycle where everyone learns to limits their degrees of freedom in what they're allowed to think and consequently, what they're allowed to change.

Instead, we play this game where talk to each other, but don't really communicate anything.  It's just parroting and repeating of the thoughts of those around us.  We're so interconnected now that I think a lot of individuals of this generation don't know how to make themselves more self-aware in a world where being interconnected with everyone and everything is instrumental as part of how we "make our living."   In the process of doing this, the skills of honing and developing individual responsibility, personal authority and a strong separate identity are quickly becoming a thing of the past.