What's Wrong with the World, part I

Homogeneity of Humanity (and its Tyranny)

‘Mental illnesses’ are new. By new I don’t mean new as in the commercialized meaning of the word – even though I haven’t quite decided whether or not the business of treating mental illnesses is commercialized – but I mean rather that it has slowly seeped into Western thinking. The existence of a mental illness presupposes one important thing: there is also something like a normal mental condition, a condition that should, because of its regularity, reflect the condition of the average human being. It is of significance to see that is unimportant whether something like that – a normal mental condition, I mean – exists or not; it’s a lot more important that we believe it exists. We totally embrace the medical world in the hope it can cure our illness, normalize our mental state.

By normalizing, not to say homogenizing our humanity – I could in fact give many different criticisms on this, such as the disappearance of creativity or the insecurity imposed on women by beauty ideals, but they won’t really help me prove my point – by normalizing fellow humans, we believe we can make them happier. We believe happiness lies in normality, in homogenization, and, although I’m not a competitive kind of person and this should be plainly viewed as an argument for those who are, averageness! Happiness equals being normal. I’ve never taken any psychology courses, but this seems to be the basic law from which the whole field has emerged.

Perhaps we have already accepted this by long, and perhaps my vision that humanity is disgusted by everything that is out of the ordinary – except when you can make money with it, that is – is based on my own prejudices and therefore nothing better than any other unjust conclusions that are derived from prejudices. But I can’t suppress the idea that not so many people consider themselves to be normal, even though they might not stray from ‘the point of normality’ as much as those who are diagnosed with a mental disease. In fact, almost everyone wants to be special, failing to perceive one of the most striking characteristics of being normal.

And perhaps, just perhaps, that is the problem with having good norms and values – one might say ‘normal’ norms and values, or is that too tautological? – that even I myself preach, for it seems that without those values, call them Christian, European or Western, our society is unable to function properly. Those who are more normal than others, who are also those who are with larger numbers, maintain control over what is good and bad, what is just and not. They have the ability to single out everyone that tries to denormalize their system through either official coercive means or the much more powerful social communal means. Which puts being out of the ordinary in a very awkward position, in the first place because society declines them the ability to strive towards their kind of happiness (through legal means), and in the second place because they will become jealous of normality and therefore necessarily unhappy.

Is there a balance to be found? A balance between the normalizing pressure of society and the oddness, I prefer creativity, which seems inherent to many populating that society? It is too bad that these people do not at all become any happier with the relentless attempts of civilization to homogenize them, otherwise there would be no problem. But those who are abnormal, even though they can be made normal, can hardly ever be made happy by making them normal. In fact, they are the ones keeping society in its equilibrium by being abnormal, in which it allows for more people to live than just the ‘normal’ ones, almost sacrificing themselves for the others to be happily normal. For if there was no abnormal to compare themselves to, there would be no normality and thus no happiness.