outlier

Deviants

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments

If we were to take any cross section of society, we’d end up with a median – ‘normal’ – and all the rest of us. Broadly speaking, within the first standard deviation, we’re all ‘normalish’, in that we aren’t completely normal but are ‘normal enough’.

This works for age, weight, and even I suppose sexual identity these days. IQ, an attempt to measure intelligence, is in the mix, as well as how much money we have in the bank, and how many people we want to hit with a stick.

I mean, think about it. How many people do you want to hit with a stick? We don’t talk about that because that is not… normal. It’s not even normalish, we like to think, but there are times are genetic roots have us looking around for a stick. I haven’t felt that urge in some time, but to be fair, I’ve also cut down on being around people who I would have that urge with.

A psychologist would call that avoidance, I would agree, and I would be normalish. Why? Because I have not hit a person with a stick since childhood, and according to my mother was quite fortunate someone didn’t lose an eye.

It used to be normal to think that there was a bunch of people who had lost an eye to such incidents. Now a bit over half a century later, I can tell you that people with one eye have been pretty rare in my life. I thought there would be more of them.

Right there, a shift in what is normal. My mother, trying to instill in me the value of not hitting people with sticks – a survival trait, really – had also instilled in me this idea that there were lots of people losing eyes. This could be because that line worked and less of us hit each other with sticks. We may never know.

But as adults in in a normalish society, we know that’s simply not done except in defense, and even then, you should consult an attorney before doing so in some places. Sometimes the laws of society and how they are enforced make it easier to die or be wounded, perhaps even maimed, than actually hurt someone else in self-defense. But then there’s the whole question of what constitutes defense and what doesn’t. This is not to say it’s wrong or right, it’s a simple statement of fact. It’s the way it is.

Statistically, if you don’t break the rules, you’re a standard deviant. You’re not what Malcolm Gladwell would call an Outlier.

What’s standard varies over time.

Outlier Dilemma

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OutlierAmid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to the fearful risk of losing his place forever.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield“, Twice-Told Tales(1837).

There is truth in that, and for those of us who have been uprooted from places place and dropped in others, the comfort of having a place and belonging didn’t go where we did. It got left behind, losing it’s place forever as well.

I caught myself thinking about that today, throughout the day. I have something I’m writing for another site that, when I paused to think about it, I realized that by saying some things about what others have done, I would be putting them on the defensive without intending to. So I’ve been trying to reconcile that in my mind, to find a way to get them past that hurdle in what I will be writing, an annoying by-product of knowing the audience.

In doing that, I ended up thinking about why I look at the data that has been collected so differently and see things that, apparently, the great cogs of an ‘academic bureaucracy meets government bureaucracy’  do not see in their love child, ‘dysfunctional data’. Truth be told, the data was collected for a purpose, but without a plan for the future.

And so, here I’ll be, the outsider – a role I know well – explaining why the work done over a 10 year period sucks. Of course, I’ll need to couch it better, but the reality is that with a little more planning and thought, it wouldn’t.

But as I thought about all of this, I knew it was deeper, and it’s something that as an individual who has dealt with it my whole life and I’m comfortable with, it’s something I’ve constantly had to wrestle with when communicating just so that people don’t stop reading, or listening. It’s amazingly easy to come across as a jerk, even unintentionally.

Granted, there are times when being a jerk has benefits and is a wonderful thing to be – really – it’s more of a sledgehammer in the toolbox of a communicator, and if it’s a default tool, people won’t listen – which defeats the reason for communicating.

So you get back to the basics and you muddle along writing for a deadline you announced to someone so that you would actually do it in time. And that’s that.

But even as I made my rounds on my land today, reconnecting with people, I knew that given different circumstances, I could have been any one of these people just as given different circumstances and opportunities I could be so well entrenched in academia I’d have the same thoughts as everyone else there. Or so well entrenched in other things that I would have the relatively mundane thoughts on things that they do – something I touched on in The Gentle Art of Self Deception.

I didn’t have those circumstances or opportunities. Later, I would make decisions so that I could retain that. I am an individual, but not like in the video, and that has value.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY&w=560&h=315]

Being an individual is dangerous, because it’s easy to think you’re right and everyone else is wrong. It’s dangerous because it’s easy to go off of metaphorical cliffs that the crowd doesn’t, and yet it has it’s own value as well in that if the crowd is heading for the metaphorical cliff, you can shout at them from the side and get absolutely no satisfaction if people don’t listen to you.

I suppose it would be easier to just fall into the crowd and lose one’s self, if only I could do that. If only I could have done that. There was a time in my life when I wanted that, but it was not to be.

And further, how could the status quo be properly challenged from within it?

Losing one’s place forever, as Hawthorne wrote, can be initially frightful – I don’t remember if I was frightened, to be honest – but it is most certainly not the end of the individual.

It’s the beginning of a dance with crowds, of the art of appearing to belong while not actually belonging, of being the chameleon, and figuring out how to use it in a way that adds value.

Precious Precarity

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RealityFragments-Uncertainty
Nothing is ever truly complete because everything changes. While we’re not looking and still hold a snapshot of our former selves in our minds, we change – we’re almost never who we carry in our own mind.

We know this at the beach, when we stand and watch the sun rise at the intersection of boundaries of earth, sea and wind – and light. The sand shifts beneath our feet as the water laps at our toes, as we sink the wind blows through our hair. The light of the sun comes to our viewpoint through the globe prism of Earth’s atmosphere, cascading our eyes with a rainbow of reflected colors off of our surroundings.

We only see what isn’t absorbed, the colors we see the shadow of the visual spectrum that wasn’t.

Where the water line falls is determined by the tides, and the tides are combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth. And even as the Moon rotates around the Earth rotates around the Sun… our Sun hurtles toward Lambda Herculis at 20 km/s. 12 miles per second.

We’re dragging along with it with the rest of the Solar System even as Lambda Hercules itself rotates around the center of the galaxy that we, in the limitations of our languages, call “ours”.

As if happening to be in something gives one ownership. Think of that the next time you’re in a bad situation.

Most people don’t know all of this, and they don’t care. They just see the beauty of it – and they will talk about the beauty of a sunrise as if it’s a constant when it isn’t. It’s a precious precarity every morning of clouds, winds, dust and tides. It’s a cluster of precarity, a moving intersection in the Universe – however small those changes are.

And when I take a picture of all of this, people like that without knowing any of that.

It boggles me, like so many other things that people dismiss. The precious precarities that surround us, the wonderful beauty of improbability dancing through the Universe, ourselves looking in the mirror of our existence, wanting to be constant yet decidedly finite as we are.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo]