It is very difficult to understand how come a society that values so much individuality, personal freedom, and the right to own choices – expects people to behave and express themselves in a specific and unified way.
Most people accept duality (at best): good-bad, appropriate-inappropriate, a girl-a boy, left handed-right-handed, heterosexual-homosexual. But everything and everyone outside of those boxes appears to be scary, even threatening. And when something/somebody is scary, we tend to attack them with ferocity.
I was born left handed. At that time and in my part of the world, being left handed was unacceptable and evil. I was forcefully changed to a proper right handed individual. In the process I completely lost my sense of direction and still, after more than a half of a century, cannot tell right from left. But it doesn’t matter. I am “normal” now and should be grateful for teaching me to do the right thing.
Not long ago, and still in many parts of the world, being a gay has been considered a crime. More “advanced” societies learned to accept that some people may have different emotions and needs. However, we still call it a “lifestyle”or a “choice”. Even though nobody wakes up one day and decides “well, from now on I will be a gay, it looks like fun”.
We learned – more or less – to accept some exceptions from our societal norm. Some…
We love variety in nature: different species, colours, sounds, smells. Nobody plants all the same flowers in the garden. We even take pride in our Canadian diversity, but… There is always “a but”. How much diversity is just right, how much is too much?
There are some areas in social life, where the monotony and uniformity is not only welcomed but required. Why! I am not sure. It is quite difficult for me to understand why I should be concerned with my neighbour living with two partners or wearing a dress instead of customary male attire? If it hurts nobody, it should be nobody’s business. But yet, it is.
I wish I had a penny for every time I heard from others that something was “abnormal”, “crazy”, “weird”! At the same time we teach our children: “you can be everything you want to be”, “dream big”. As long, of course, as you want to be “someone respectable”, like a doctor or a lawyer, maybe a scientist. But don’t try to be a musician or a ski bum!
We want children to be boring, tedious, colourless and, at the same time, we get obsessed with celebrities. Why? Because they are different, interesting, exciting. Somehow it doesn’t make sense to me.
What are we afraid of?
From my observations, people are most afraid of “standing out”. It’s almost like being big, being original, being interesting was gonna take something away from others. Like there was a “pool of originality” that gets depleted every time somebody dares to be different. As long as they are average, they are fine. Being different is dangerous, even threatening to others.
When I ask people what they would like the most for themselves, they often say, ”not to care about others’ opinion”. They worry so much about what others think of them that they don’t have time and energy to discover what it is they think and care about.
Every day we make difficult decisions. We chose to be average out of fear of being rejected by majority. We reject others judging them harshly for being different from the majority.
We can argue that it is a survival skill; we choose to comply with the societal expectations to feel included and safe. But, by locking ourselves in small like-minded circles we feel unsafe anytime somebody “different” shows up. And when we feel unsafe, we attack, ostracize the”culprit”, make them irrelevant. We live in a constant state of war looking for danger. We divide the world into “them” and “us”. How safe is it?
The experience of the last 15 months clearly shows how much we need and crave connection with others. We can easily live without shopping, traveling around the world, conferences, symposiums, even sport events. But we cannot live and die alone. We know it now. Can we change the way we see the world equipped with this new knowledge? I really hope we will. Although, I am a little doubtful. After all, according to George Bernard Shaw “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
By Eva Sadowski Photo by Jiří Mikoláš from Pexels
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