Are You Normal?

And What’s That?

There are “normal” basic life requirements for a human, like air, food, shelter and sleep.

There are also “normal” things that drive a human, like safety, hunger, love, reproduction, curiosity, purpose, meaning, and belonging.

What about behavior? Is there such a thing as normal behavior? Is there a normal for how a human addresses these normal needs and drives?

I’d say no.

Humans born and raised on an island near India, might eat worms, kill their third child, roast their dead, adorn themselves with bear teeth through their eyelids, and worship birds. Humans born in New Jersey might kill and eat birds, slice off their newborn’s penis tips, adorn themselves with oyster pellets and rocks, cover their dead with dirt, and worship their imagination.

Normality gets established by the environment in which one grows from mindless to mindful. What we might call civilized is simply what humans in a certain area adopted as such. Conditioning and habit are the underpinnings of how most people get to what they consider standards of “normalcy."

We get conditioned from birth by those who were conditioned from birth, with deviations by specific society and culture along the way.

Nevertheless, we maintain an air about ourselves that our particular society’s normal (or good) is the normal or good for all humans, not just our family.

The US constitution says there are self-evident truths: All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That’s prefaced however by “We hold these truths to be self evident…”

A cluster of humans in the 1700’s in America held and documented certain truths for the society they established, within its borders.

Today, hundreds of years later, there are plenty of places on earth where humans do not agree with the perspective established by those folks in the 1700’s in north America. Some humans today do not agree with said truths, let alone that they are self-evident; nor do they necessarily feel there are any inalienable rights for all humans.

There is no universally accepted moral code or universal conception of equality or right. Arbitrarily clustered humans decide amongst themselves whatever they wish to decide. But a cluster doesn’t make those decisions universal. Even if a specific cluster becomes stronger than all other clusters, the most it can do is force behavior, not perspective.

So, there is no universally agreed-upon normal human sentiment or behavior; just conditioned standards of normalcy, subject to one’s society.

Some may argue that basic right to life, and thus respect for another’s life, is normal basic humanity, but that too is conditioned opinion or personal perspective, and impossible to certify as universal fact.

There might be behavior that’s done by a considerable percentage of humans alive, rendering what is normal based on percentages, but that’s not necessarily inherent to humans, and rather circumstantially done by many. Were those people allowed to leave their culture or were you to privately ask their preference, behavior and preference might show up differently.

There might be a billion people in China. Does their behavior indicate something inherently human, or just common among those people?

We just are, just as a rock is. Anything more than just being, is created by the human mind.

Being is from the universe. Meaning is from the human mind, and it can differ from mind to mind.

While it’s normal for humans to seek meaning, there is no normal meaning.