Aldous Huxley - What is 'Normal'?

Normal? What do you think of this quote?

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

I tried to be normal once. Worst two minutes of my life. I embrace the chaos!

reply to post by EnPassant


It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Kristnamurti.

Normality is only what society dictates it to be. In my eyes there is no such thing as normal, we are all individuals regardless of what people say.

Itisnowagain
reply to post by EnPassant

 

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Kristnamurti.

Truer words were never spoken.

So many ways to state this truth. I'm fond of Emily Dickinson's.

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

You realise you are saying that the mentall ill aren't ill. If they are better adjuste to our society then we the non ill are at a disadvantage, hence we are ill. If they function better then they are superior and hence well and better than those that are seemes ok. They then have a competitive advantage and there would be less of us and more of them. Then we would have to adjust to their society rather than the other way around.

reply to post by EnPassant


Huxley also wrote the Perennial Philosophy.

"The Perennial Philosophy is an attempt to present this Highest Common Factor of all theologies by assembling passages from the writings of those saints and prophets who have approached a direct spiritual knowledge of the Divine..."

Using the tools of comparativism, the perennial philosophy can be detected in world religion and myth. An enlightened society has a fully-functional religion that is in accord with the perennial philosophy. An unenlightened society like ours has no such harmony with the perennial philosophy and so it is insane. In an insane society that is out of touch with the perennial philosophy the normal people who are adjusted to the insane society are the truly insane ones.

I have always felt that I was abnormally normal in a normally abnormal world.

I KNOW what causes insanity. It is hereditary.
You get it from your kids.

werewolf99
You realise you are saying that the mentall ill aren't ill. If they are better adjuste to our society then we the non ill are at a disadvantage, hence we are ill. If they function better then they are superior and hence well and better than those that are seemes ok. They then have a competitive advantage and there would be less of us and more of them. Then we would have to adjust to their society rather than the other way around.

Good point. I guess Huxley's quote might be too general to be taken literally 'though there is a truth in it. Society is many things. It is both sane and insane. We need to be in the world but not of it...

reply to post by EnPassant


Erich Fromm wrote in THE SANE SOCIETY that in an insane society, only the insane were sane.

BTW, the standards of ATS require one to personally comment substantively on their opening post quote.