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on so-called 'normality'

Posted by Chuck on 2026-September-30 17:12:34, Wednesday
We are taught to worship "Normality" --that which "legitimate" institutions and their academia tells us. Most people are on trips of maintaining their cult of the "devoutly normal" as they dictate to themselves and those they legally own (kids, the mentally "incompetent", and elders) what is "acceptable." It's an effective game that keeps us all confused and in "our places".

So what if you look at other's views of what constitutes "normal"? Like R.D. Laing, who in example:

"questioned the actual value system on which our notions of 'madness' and 'normality' is based";
and said: "[i]t is radically estranged from the structure of being...The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of normal men." (R.D.Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry; Kotwicz, Zbigniew; Routledge, 1997; p.3,67)

And Dr. Erich Fromm:

"...Many [appear] normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle [for happiness] or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." (BRAVE NEW WORLD--REVISITED by Aldous Huxley; Harper & Row; 1958, 1965; p.21)

Aldous Huxley adding to Fromm's words above, said that "the really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal...they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted,... have been to a great extent deindividualized." (ibid; p.20, 21)
Chuck
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