On What Is Normal Anyway?
Extreme defines the normal
“In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.” - John Stuart Mill
What the hell is normal anyway? It is the extreme that defines “normal”. Normal is one of the most deceptive words in the English language. We speak of it as though it possesses an objective reality, as though normal exists somewhere outside of history waiting to be discovered. Yet normal has never existed independently. It is always relational. It is always comparative. It is always measured against something greater, rarer, or more exceptional. The ordinary soldier is understood only because extraordinary soldiers exist. The average businessman is understood only because remarkable entrepreneurs exist. The competent father is understood only because there are fathers whose devotion, sacrifice, and strength establish a standard toward which others orient themselves. Extreme defines normal. Remove the exceptional and the ordinary loses its meaning. Flatten every peak and eventually one loses any sense of elevation at all.
This truth appears so obvious that previous civilizations rarely bothered to state it explicitly. The Greeks understood it instinctively. Their heroes embodied virtues toward which ordinary citizens aspired. Medieval Christianity elevated saints not because sainthood was expected of everyone, but because the saint revealed the horizon of human possibility. The American frontier was settled by men and women whose courage exceeded the average. Their willingness to venture into uncertainty established conditions that later generations would mistakenly regard as normal. What we call normal life is often nothing more than accumulated inheritance from extraordinary people.
Modern society, however, has developed a complicated relationship with excellence. We celebrate achievement rhetorically while often resenting it psychologically. We speak endlessly about empowerment while becoming increasingly uncomfortable with visible distinctions in competence, discipline, intelligence, or character. We are suspicious of hierarchy, suspicious of authority, suspicious of standards, and yet standards are precisely what make aspiration possible. A child learns to run by watching someone faster. An apprentice learns a trade by observing a master. A young man learns courage by witnessing courage embodied in another. Human beings do not develop in a vacuum. They develop through imitation.
This insight sits at the center of René Girard’s work. Girard argued that man is fundamentally a mimetic creature. We learn not only how to act but what to desire by observing others. The question is never whether we imitate. The question is whom we imitate. A healthy society supplies worthy models and channels imitation toward excellence. A disordered society floods its citizens with distorted models and then wonders why confusion follows. Looking around the modern world, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that we have created the largest mimetic machine in human history. Social media places millions of lives, real and imagined, directly before our eyes every day. Every scroll becomes an encounter with another person’s desires. Every platform becomes a theater of comparison. Every algorithm becomes a curator of envy.
Christopher Lasch anticipated much of this before smartphones existed. What he recognized was that a society detached from tradition and increasingly organized around consumption would inevitably produce individuals who were simultaneously self-absorbed and deeply insecure. Without durable institutions capable of transmitting standards across generations, individuals become dependent upon validation. They seek audiences rather than communities. They seek visibility rather than belonging. They seek affirmation rather than formation. The result is a peculiar kind of fragility, one that hides behind displays of confidence but crumbles under genuine adversity. Modern life increasingly rewards performance while neglecting character.
Artificial intelligence arrives at precisely this moment of uncertainty. Much of the public discussion surrounding AI focuses on employment, productivity, or economic disruption. These concerns are real, but they are secondary. The deeper question is anthropological. What happens to a civilization already struggling to define excellence when machines begin producing outputs that appear excellent? For most of human history, extraordinary work implied an extraordinary worker. A beautiful painting pointed toward a talented artist. A brilliant essay pointed toward a disciplined thinker. A sophisticated invention pointed toward a gifted mind. AI introduces the possibility that exceptional outputs may become detached from exceptional people. It is not merely labor that risks automation. It is the visible connection between mastery and achievement.
This is what makes the current moment so psychologically destabilizing. The danger is not that machines will become conscious. The danger is that human beings will increasingly abandon the difficult process through which consciousness matures. The temptation will be subtle. Why wrestle with an idea when software can summarize it? Why struggle through a first draft when a machine can generate one instantly? Why cultivate memory, judgment, or patience when external systems seem capable of supplying them on demand? Each individual decision appears trivial. Collectively they risk producing a civilization that gradually loses the habits required for excellence. Human beings are formed through effort. Remove effort and one eventually removes formation itself.
Max Weber warned that modernity was constructing an iron cage of rationalization. The great achievement of the modern world was its capacity for efficiency, calculation, and organization. The danger was that these same strengths would eventually crowd out deeper questions of meaning and purpose. Weber understood that modern societies excel at answering questions about how to accomplish something while growing increasingly uncertain about why it should be accomplished at all. Artificial intelligence may represent the culmination of this tendency. It is optimization elevated into a governing principle. Faster, cheaper, easier, more efficient. Yet the most meaningful aspects of human existence have never emerged primarily from efficiency. Love is inefficient. Friendship is inefficient. Raising children is inefficient. Reading great books is inefficient. Building character is inefficient. The things that give life weight often resist optimization.
Perhaps this explains the peculiar malaise that seems to hang over so much of contemporary life. We have become extraordinarily skilled at eliminating difficulty while simultaneously eliminating many of the experiences that once gave difficulty meaning. We pursue convenience and wonder why life feels hollow. We pursue comfort and wonder why we feel restless. We pursue security and wonder why we feel fragile. The contradiction is not difficult to understand. Human beings derive purpose from responsibility, from sacrifice, from striving toward worthy ends. The muscle grows only when it encounters resistance. Character appears to operate according to a similar principle.
For this reason I remain more optimistic than pessimistic about the future. Human beings possess a recurring tendency to rediscover reality whenever abstraction becomes intolerable. Periods of decadence often generate movements of renewal. Excess comfort eventually produces admiration for strength. Excess artificiality eventually produces hunger for authenticity. Excess passivity eventually generates a desire for action. One can already observe these impulses emerging. People are returning to religion, physical training, craftsmanship, family life, classical education, and local community not because these things are fashionable, but because they satisfy needs that technology cannot. They reconnect individuals to reality itself.
The central challenge of the coming decades is therefore not technological. It is civilizational. The question is not whether machines will become more capable. They will. The question is whether human beings will continue cultivating the distinctly human qualities that no machine can possess. Courage, judgment, sacrifice, faith, love, loyalty, responsibility, and character are not informational achievements. They are existential achievements. They arise from choices, obligations, relationships, and commitments that cannot be automated.
The danger of the AI age is not that machines become more human. It is that humans become more machine-like: passive, optimized, dependent, and spiritually still. In an era increasingly obsessed with artificial intelligence, the rarest thing may soon be an actual human being.