Postcard from the Edge
The Anvil of "Normal", and the Hammer of Scale
“Normal” has such anaesthetic qualities. It is non-threatening, comforting, predictable, prosperous and safe. It is seen as desirable, like something we go back to after a shock like Covid, or the regular Banking crises, or the equally regular geopolitical spats instead of continual change, which is the uncomfortable reality.
The fact that it is entirely illusory does not limit its appeal or its use as a political weapon. We are normal, they are not.
Normal does not scale, as anybody who has worked in a rapidly growing organisation will know. The '“normal” understood by the founding team stays the same size, even as numbers grow. Eventually, “normal” fragments into departments and locations, each with its own language and joined only by the shared quiet and resigned non-belief in those overarching mission statements issued by the top team. It also does not travel. I have spent significant chunks of my life working in places where the local normal was a strange and wonderful space into which I was never going to enter in anything but a very fraudulent way.
I’m fascinated by the way that the control boundaries of normal are made ever tighter. In the world of our health, everything from blood pressure to eye pressure seems to be on a continual squeeze, so we find ourselves being urged to take medication even though our metabolism has stayed constant. I guess growth has to come from somewhere.
I watch with less fascination than horror as I see my grandchildren moving from a world of play as they enter the first year of school and are shovelled into assessments and measures designed for a world of work. Normal is measured in understanding phonemes and graphemes, whilst creative play, the foundation of healthy socialisation, is sidelined.
“Normal” is highly monetisable. If we fall outside those ever-tightening parameters, someone, somewhere, has a “solution”; for a price, of course.
“Normal” is anodyne and vanilla-flavoured with the creative energy of a wet tea towel. It is a state that those in power wish we would accept, as though waiting years for an operation or being threatened if we protest, egregious profit-taking by state-sponsored monopolies, or starving our infrastructure and regions of investment to keep London healthy is normal and perfectly acceptable.
One of our greatest strengths has always been that we are not normal. We are unique, “normal” in some aspects, outliers in others, and original in sum total. Sometimes, the outliers get us into trouble; more often, they are game changers.
Normal is a celebration of the passive and unquestioning status quo.
How is that working for you?
One of my favourite songs from Harry Chapin Carpenter stays with me….
Normal kills outliers. We see it all the time. Normal is the more than death of creativity. It is death, on a cellular level, of those so creative they can't live a life focused on recreating or regurgitating the work of others. Normal can do this. Creatives must create their own thing. We seem to have forgotten this. We have pathologized the one thing that carries the whole society forward.
The inability to create, in your gifted space or start on the journey to find out what that is, drives chronic illness, neurodivergent disorders, mental illness, and all the pressure related disorders. I know this because my family is the most creative. They are savants and they die young and painfully as all of these things converge.
In our hierarchical societies the creatives are shamed and prevented from being what they naturally are. I believe this is why the gifted communities were made. To save the creatives from turmoil and early death and in turn save society. But the gifted leaders were eventually replaced by society "deemed experts" on giftedness. These experts, who were now closer to normal, misunderstood or forgot the gifted group's purpose.
The current gifted leaders don't understand the value of creativity unless it is related to production of a thing. They focused on identifying the math and science gifted. Not cultivating it, just identifying and harnessing it. They neglected the humanities, music and arts and all the others gifted. Without sensitive, kind, humanities gifted people in leadership the society grows ill. The focus becomes on a destruction and consumption cycle. They forget about creating and growing and replacing. That can be done later. Later must mean after the society collapses, I guess.
The current leaders say we need the creatives because the future is changing so quickly. Yet the response has been to oppress them with greater and greater intensity. Those that can't be controlled are destroyed, discarded and left wallowing. The need for control must be addictive. As the leaders of our society get stressed they do the worst thing they could do. They try to make the creatives act normal.
Societies use hierarchy and competition to harness the value of normal. But this does not work for the creatives. Greed and scarcity gradually increases the need for the creatives. They must be brought in to figure out how to fix the issues society has created. But the (non-gifted) leaders use the rules that worked for normal. The results are disastrous. Instead of producing, the creatives, defined by their ability to introspect, turn on themselves and implode. The powerful double down controlling them. They try to force the giftedness out of the creatives. The creative implosion magnifies and society destroys their own chances at surviving the change.
This repeated cycle of increasing shortsightedness has probably killed all civilizations when compared to all other factors. One size fits all, eventually destroys all. Think I am lying. Go read any religious text and you will see they blame the creatives/neurodivergent for the down fall of society. But they were never the ones in charge. They were simply brought in at the end to try to save the flailing empires.
And we are doing it again.
Societal homeostasis seems a natural and useful dynamic that probably served our ancestral tribal lives quite well - cultural feedback loops in a self-regulating system to ensure cohesion, stability and security. But when this proclivity to normal is scaled and empowered through a modern technocracy with global reach we are left with a stifling monoculture that limits our other uniquely human qualities of curiosity, experimentation, and adaptability. The fact that normal can be so easily systematised and mechanised to serve the profit and control seeking technocracy, which then becomes the newly accepted normal, should be raising alarm bells.