Please, Doc, am I normal?

Please, Doc, am I normal?

In New York City a woman who gives away all her possessions and goes to the streets to help the street people might well be placed in protective custody. In Delhi she might well be considered as a saint.

Normal in one culture is abnormal in another. One culture is often the enemy of another. American culture and Islamic culture are apparently good reason for killing one another. The Shiite culture is apparently good reason for killing Sunnis. A few centuries ago Protestants and Catholics found good reason to kill one another.

"Social life is a ceremonial that has to be flawless so that man can disguise his fictions and justify them; the last thing he can admit to himself is that his life-ways are arbitrary…If you reveal the fictional nature of culture you deprive life of its heroic meaning because the only way one can function as a hero is within the symbolic fiction."

The paradox of human existence is that on one level we consider our self to be of great importance and on another level we know we will die. The despair inculcated by the knowledge of death is a heavy burden, even more so to those who are unique, those who are the most individuated, the most abnormal. Those who are the least normal are the most in danger of despair. "The problem of despair can be met only in one way; by being a cosmic hero, by making a secure contribution to world-life even though one may die."

"The humanization process itself is the neurosis: the limitation of experience, the fragmentation of perception, the dispossession of genuine internal control." To be normal is to be neurotic.

Quote from "The Birth and Death of Meaning" by Ernest Becker

Questions for discussion

Are we guided to a large extent by our first five years of life?
Can we change this childhood effect to a significant degree?
Can we be considered as free men and women if we are so determined?