How "Normal" Keeps Us From Being Fully Human

In my mind there are what I would call “natural” conditions for people (or any species) to live in, and then there are “normal” conditions.

By "natural," I mean the conditions a species evolved with, in which it can thrive and reach its full potential.

By "normal," I mean conditions we may find a species in that we assume are normal, but which may be significantly different than what is natural for it.  Some extreme examples could be a monoculture, an isolated nuclear family or a single parent family, a factory farm, a zoo enclosure¹. But many less obviously artificial environments are nonetheless still a long way from natural.

When a person or animal or plant lives in natural conditions, it’s behavior will be healthy, appropriate to the situation it’s in, and harmonious with other life-forms that share its surroundings.

When a plant or a person or an animal lives and grows in conditions that are not natural for it, that’s when the health problems and the behavioral problems start.

What is “natural” for humans? 

Examples I would give of natural conditions for people to live in would be:

• To have grown up in a family and community where there were enough helping adult hands for parents to feel supported, and for children to feel valued and wanted. 
• To have a strong sense of identity, belonging, and a sense that you and your contributions are needed and valued.
• To do work that feels worthwhile, meaningful, satisfying.
• To be surrounded by family and extended family/community you know you can rely on.
• To know where your food comes from and to have a relationship with it and with the environment you share.
  
• To have means of self-expression, to feel fully all that it is to be alive, and to be supported and accepted when you express what you feel.
• To be in contact with nature daily, not just on the weekends or on vacation. 

That’s an abbreviated list of what I would call “natural” circumstances for humans to live in.

Do you know very many people for whom all those needs are met?

Me neither.

In fact, I don’t think I know of even one person for whom all those needs are met.

What most of us call “normal,” is unnatural for us. What we call “normal” is not a setting in which we can be fully human.  

A “new” normal, or "more" normal?

In the early weeks of the corona virus lock-down I heard people say, “This feels surreal. It feels like nothing I’ve even read about in a book or seen in a movie.”

If until now you’ve accepted the “normal” that we see around us as being, well, normal, then the corona lock-down might indeed have felt strange and unexpected.

But since you’re reading this, I imagine that you may not be a “normal” person. You may already, long before Covid, have been feeling that something was way out of whack around here.

If that’s the case, maybe you’ll relate to how I felt in the early days of the lock-down. I felt the same sense of inevitability that Charles Eisenstein described:

Suddenly with Covid, the rope has snapped – or at least a number of its strands have. Now what?

We've entered a “new normal” in which we pulled (even further) away from each other, became (even more) obsessed with germs, (even more) concerned about the threats that other people might pose to us and our families, and (even more) anxious about our survival in terms of our economic security.

A globally cohesive response 

In his article, Charles Eisenstein pointed out that the official response to Covid has been one of control.

With few exceptions, all of us across the globe have agreed to control measures regarding Covid that we knew would severely impact us in other ways.

How come we can make such sweeping changes so rapidly when a virus threatens us, but we can’t figure out how to stop food waste in the developed world and feed the five million children worldwide who starve to death every year?

How come we can rally in response to a virus, but we can’t figure out what to do about despair and depression — which kills over a million people a year globally, or ecological collapse — which potentially stands to kill us all?

In his essay, Eisenstein gives a very plausible answer: we’re able to respond collectively to a virus because we can focus on the virus as the enemy, and rally against it.  

In contrast, when the problem is hunger or despair or ecological collapse, we can’t agree on who or what the enemy is.

We all care about these other issues. We would all do more to alleviate them if only we knew what to do and if only we felt we could. But we're all approaching them from different view points and there is no common narrative that brings us together and unifies our efforts. 

How "good versus evil" restricts our options 

This “new normal” of separation, isolation, and control actually isn’t new at all. In 2014, George Monbiot wrote in his article, “Age of Loneliness:”

Competition and individualism have become the developed world’s modus operandi.

In order to be a competitive individual (an individual can be a person or a nation, and everything in between) you have to have an enemy or competitor or challenge against which to pit yourself. You have to have a "bad guy," an "other" in the "us versus them" narrative, an evil entity that must be controlled.

Hence our well-coordinated response to Corona in which it's "us" (the world) against "corona" (the enemy).

But there’s a growing school of thought that says competition and individualism are not how we evolved – that these behaviors are not natural for us but are a response to the circumstances we find ourselves in².

The "good versus evil" or "us versus them" narrative keeps us perpetually looking for someone or something to blame and to fight against. 

The need to belong 

Modern culture has explored individualism fully, and the exploration has brought us great gifts.

All that we have learned and gained and become in our quest to be powerful individuals can serve our collective greater good, if we can let go of focusing it on looking for something evil to fight against³.

Francis Weller has written:

During the corona lock-down there have been heartwarming stories and illustrations of people connecting, ironically, more strongly than ever now that we’re officially not allowed to connect.

One YouTube video that stays in my mind was of singers leaning out of their windows in a deserted street, singing together about hope and justice, about skies and waters becoming cleaner, about us all collectively taking advantage of this opportunity for a reset.

I’m sure you saw it too, or one like it, because there have been many. They’ve been put together by families, groups and small communities, and by communities that span the globe.

We’re a global community now, and there’s no going back. If we are to heal ourselves and our world, we know we must find ways to see beyond our differences and act on the understanding that we belong together.

The potential for a return to “natural”

Covid brought about an acceleration of social distancing, the closure of small businesses, loss of what community life we still had.

It shone a glaring light on habits of being that we had fallen into and come to call “normal.”

We’ve never been so globally affected by something that crosses every barrier we’ve ever created.

What else could have brought families home and drawn them together as this video illustrates?

I heard of family movie nights, weekly zoom meetings in families that previously might not catch up for months, and hand-holding nature walks in families that previously could barely drag themselves away from their individual screens⁴

What else could turn policemen into entertainers?⁵ You're right: to see their role as being "to serve, protect, and amuse," is not “normal” police behavior.

But it may well be natural behavior, and it certainly can help point the way to a truly new “normal” that would serve us so much better than the one we've been accepting.