Right Matters — Truth Matters — And Normality Matters!
Absolutely Anything Can Come To Seem Normal
I wanted to go back and say, “Sorry, it’s not what it looks like. You will get out of this alive.”
The Inexplicable About Face
The man was a visiting professor to our Engineering Faculty, an expert in his field. It was meant to be the start of a world-beating collaboration. But what started well, suddenly evaporated. There was no second visit, no joint project. People murmured their disappointment: He couldn’t get away quickly enough!
It was a long time later — too late for damage repair — that my memory replayed the moment he was led into the big research lab. I wanted to go back and say, “Sorry, it’s not what it looks like. You will get out of here alive.”
He stepped into the lab, and stared at the gaggle of postgrad researchers, arguing animatedly over some esoteric technicality, and his expression changed, became suddenly fixed. I took it for distaste at the ferocity of the debate. I slightly went off the visiting prof in that moment. I’ve met academics who hate to see the next generation of researchers heading towards overtaking them. Personally, I’ve always seen it as a badge of honour to have nurtured someone to fly higher, further, and faster than I ever could — that’s how progress happens.
I marked the point that our visitor’s enthusiasm waned, and tagged him as old-school set-in-his-ways.
With the clarity of hindsight I now know he wasn’t turning his nose up at our postgrads, he was realising he’d been led to a remote laboratory with only one exit and wondering if he would get out alive.
Working Out What Happened
It was a far earlier memory that was the catalyst to unravelling the truth. I was a junior technician in a hospital pathology lab — different city, different discipline. Our head of department was a consultant pathologist who, in addition to his recognised professional expertise, was a fan of Monty Python. He was also the same height and build as John Cleese and could do a perfect impression of Cleese in the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.
The first we knew of this was the day our door swung open and a foot appeared at chest height. It was followed by a leg that took an impossibly long high step, bringing into view the very upright and deadpan form of our head of department, who silly-walked the entire perimeter of the room interleaving swooping gargantuan steps with tiny tiptoe pseudo-dance moves.
The first time he did it — indeed the first few times — it left us in helpless hysterics, but after a while, we got used to it. When we no longer even looked up from our work, we thought he might stop, but no, he took satisfaction in his performance with or without an audience.
Until the day we weren’t alone. An auditor was doing the rounds and happened to be in with us, checking whatever it is that auditors check. Not everyone ‘got’ Monty Python. Apologies ensued and the performances stopped.
I thought back to the look on that auditor’s face. For her, our indifference to this display of clearly dangerous insanity on the part of our head of department turned a bizarre sight into a sinister one. And until we all jumped back into her normality, she was scared.
Having taken out that memory, my mind’s eye looked again at our visiting professor from all those years later, because surely, that had been the exact same look. And yet …
And yet … there was no John Cleese impersonator in that engineering lab, there was only —
— my mind’s eye pressed home the point with another replay — Ah, yes, of course. There was Barry.
A Normal Day At The Office
Barry was a postgrad researcher whose passion was the circus. He rehearsed his circus skills in every spare moment. We became accustomed to walking into rooms and having to dodge plastic balls and mini bean bags as Barry practised his juggling.
As time went on, his juggling grew proficient, we no longer had to duck, and Barry began some serious workouts in full circus regalia. It was no game to him, it was deadly serious. To the rest of us, it became part of daily life.
By the time of the professor’s visit, Barry was performing without conscious effort, and to the rest of us, his antics were just the norm. So once in that lab (the isolated lab with just one exit), it wasn’t the sight and sounds of furious debate that caught the professor’s eye — I doubt he even noticed it — it was Barry, wearing a multicoloured jester’s hat with bells on, juggling furiously in tempo with the discussion. He wasn’t even concealed within the group because whilst vigourously defending his position in the argument, he stood head and shoulders above his colleagues as he rocked back and forth on a unicycle.
For us, just a normal day at the office. From our visitor’s viewpoint, he had been lured to an isolated spot by a clearly deranged group of people. I wonder how he told the tale after getting safely home, or if he ever told it. Maybe he smothered it like a bad dream and vowed to keep his distance. We never saw him again.
Anything Can Become Normal
If the truly bizarre can be so easily normalised, then it’s no surprise that the same can be said of the patently untrue.
Within its own bubble of affirmation and agreement, anything can become normal — that we live on a flat earth, that the moon landings were faked, that abusive behaviour is fine, that long-dead politicians/celebrities have faked their own deaths and are about to return to public life, that anything at all that you don’t like or want to change can be changed or denied in an instant just by connecting with a network of like-minded people and shutting out everyone else.
20th and 21st-century communications don’t help in this regard. Our planet’s shape and circumference were worked out in around 500 BC by the ancient Greeks; it wasn’t until the 1950s that flat earthers began to peddle their ideas, and nowadays there is a thriving flat earth community … around — as they’ve been heard to say themselves — the globe!
The fact of man having walked on the moon is a pretty special normal for any species to have on its CV, but despite every faked moon landing theory being comprehensively debunked, there is a sizeable number who insist it was staged by film director, Stanley Kubrick. They cling desperately to a normal where it didn’t happen, perhaps just because they can.
“The reality is, the internet has made it possible for people to say whatever the hell they like to a broader number of people than ever before. And the truth is, [people] love conspiracy theories.” Former chief historian at Nasa — Roger Launius
However, there is a difference between bizarre normals and untrue ones. Once they have been pointed out, people are generally amenable to recognising their bizarre normals — I don’t think anyone would argue that Barry on his unicycle should be taken as standard fare in an engineering lab. Yet they cling on to their patently untrue normals in the face of overwhelming evidence, even to the point of giving up people, principles, and things they’ve long held dear.
Those who have seen a family member fall prey to conspiracy theories often remark on how their loved one has changed. This article by B Kean is a case in point: someone who would once have fought tooth and nail against being labelled a victim now, in the grip of a conspiracy theory, desperately wraps the cloak of victimhood around himself.
What is it that drives people to swallow a lie that twists their personal sense of normality beyond anything that anyone outside their own echo chamber could conceive of as an objectively reasonable stance — and then to cling to it no matter what?
It’s not only themselves they damage. There are sizeable groups who have never been personally touched by, or remotely close to a war, who rattle their sabres and call for their fellow citizens to take up arms — thinking presumably that it will all be a jolly adventure and they — the Good Guys in their own heads — will emerge victorious and unscathed. How about the climate change deniers striving for positions of political power — what’s that about? Whatever weird normal they operate from, they threaten to take the rest of us down with them.
How do we get them back? Facts and logic don’t make a dent; parodies are taken at face value. I don’t have any answers. Maybe it’s time to take a leaf out of 90s newsgroup alt.humor.best-of-usenet’s book, turn the illogic right round and fire it back.
Yes, sure Stanley Kubrick staged the moon landings, but you know what a stickler he was. He insisted the moonwalk was filmed on location.