by robertsloan2

Created on: October 29, 2008

Falling outside of the norms created by society is often a good thing.

Stop and think about what "norm," or "normal" means. It means "average." To set "normal" as the goal for everyone in a society is to exalt mediocrity and punish achievement as well as discriminate against anyone who isn't dead-center average in everything. Yet any individual human being will have both strengths and weak areas, interests, directions in life that aren't always the same as everyone else.

If you fall outside the norms created by society, that creates conflict. Blind obedience to authority no longer seems like a good idea because it's obviously a bad idea in some circumstances. Injustice and hypocrisy show up as glaring problems and are harder to ignore.

The real myth here is that Society is an entity in itself or that there are norms. What there are in America are some common ideas that get taken as cultural principles but flatten out culture. This is a country of immigrants. Italians, English, Scots, Irish, Polish, everyone but pure blood native Americans came here with a culture from somewhere else. Not everyone did so willingly, African Americans have the history of slavery.

Conformity often goes hand in glove with racism. The person who's born black or Hispanic or Asian can't conform enough to be within the norms of white society because wearing the clothes, speaking the language, mowing the lawn and eating burgers is not enough to convince a conformist that they're just like everybody else. Visibly they're not. Visibly their family history is not like the "norm" and there are probably atrocities in it.

Why there is a perception of Norms Created By Society is interesting in itself. Much of it is created in schools, and the American school system is based on a Prussian school system intended most of all to create passive unthinking obedience in a large pool of laborers. I had no idea of its history until I read the well-researched article "Against School" by John Gatto. http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm is the link. You may find it interesting.

My anthropologist son in law tells me there is no such thing as American culture, that what we have in this country is a superstate composed of a polyglot mix of many cultures. Which means the impression that there are norms Set By Society is created in the schools and in the media. People do believe in this myth, except when their own reality contradicts it.

It doesn't count that for an Italian family all the family customs of

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