Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend GRF Magdala’s rose cafe about the pathological versus normal. This conversation was extremely interesting as it got me to think the degree to which society is so fixated on everyone being compared to this “average”, so much so that if you don’t fit into whatever social role expectations you are supposed to, you are considered an outcast or abnormal. On a broader level, I believe that the reason there is so much negativity in the world with respect to not valuing other races, or people of different gender identities, is because we are so fixated on using binary classifications to make our live easier, yet at the same time contradictory, these binary classifications complicate the way that people are able to freely express themselves.

In that regard, while I believe that we don’t need to have a “normal society” in order to function, I feel that given current social role expectations, it will be challenging for us to divert from this viewpoint.  For example, we are  so used to comparing things to certain “normal ideas”, in order to detect right versus wrong, unhealthy versus healthy. For us to not have these classifying factors, will increase the amount of confusion and gray matter we have over ideas. Thus, I believe that a normal society, where we have an average expectation of how things are supposed to be is important just so that we have metrics to track progress or the regression we make as society in developing cures to vaccines, solving mental health problems,etc. We thus will continue living in a world that is abnormal due to its constraints on the normal, perceived views of how society should operate and a world that is normal as perceived by society since all our actions fit into this measure box of ideas, values. etc. Anything that deviates from this would be considered normal in this context of pathological versus normal, however abnormal to society given that we have binary,and definite ways of classifying ideas, problems,etc. In that sense, through analyzing our discussion, it is evident that there seems to be contradiction in what society perceives as normal versus not abnormal and what the French Naturalists perceive as normal and abnormal. When I try and imagine a society that is without any binaries, I feel that it would be more inclusive and that I would not have these pressures to live up to. Everybody has their own expectations from themselves, but these expectations seem to be arising on this one central idea of who we should be and what we should do.  In trying to emulate this average idea, we all tend to act similarly. Sometimes, I wonder how different my life would be if there was no pre-defined metric to classify “success”, or “who I should be and what I should do”.