The Golden Mean

Today I was thinking about normalcy.  I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles.  So I read through some of them.  One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns.  But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy.  Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.

And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good.  And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection.  Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite.  But most people aren’t perfect.  They’re ordinary.  And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).

Averageness is a hidden strength in the world.  Disdaining normalcy is a disease.  Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families.  Take as an example Bruce Jenner.  An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune.  Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman.  And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product.  A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.

Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good.  What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal.  After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.

What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok.  Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards.  For that stuff it’s actually useful.  It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like.  That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.

And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally.  And that means in the real world.  You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people.  And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids.  Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people.  And the best thing they can do is work.  Because work is the basis of human life.  And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable.  Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man.  I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower.  But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office.  And he was probably a better man for having done it.

So average looks, average intelligence, average salary.  But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life.  So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network.  Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.