What is normal?

What we regard as “normal” is the acceptance of many dysfunctional systems of food production, agriculture, economics, industrialization and science that have lead to our ill-health, inequalities, injustices, domination and the destruction of the planet earth. We accept it because it is the norm and the only world we know.

It is like a biologist who has only seen cancerous tissue and understandably mistakes it for a healthy organism, failing to distinguish between pathology and physiology.

Edward Goldsmith in “The Way: An Ecological Worldview”, explains:

“This general human tendency to regard the only world we know as normal is reflected in the disciplines that are taught in our schools and universities.

> Thus the modern discipline of economics is based on the assumption that the destructive economic system that is operative today is normal;
> the discipline of sociology on the assumption that our modern atomized and crime-ridden society is normal;
> our political science on the assumption that the elected dictatorships that govern modern nation states are normal; and
> our agricultural science on the assumption that large-scale, mechanized, chemical-based agriculture (which rapidly transforms arable land into desert) is normal.

It simply does not occur to many academics that what they take to be normal is very atypical in the light of humanity’s total experience on this planet — necessarily short-lived, and totally aberrant.

They are like biologists who have only seen cancerous tissue and understandably mistake it for a healthy organism, failing to distinguish between pathology and physiology.

Another reason why our scientific community still accepts the paradigm of science is that, though it paints the most misleading picture of reality, it is nevertheless a totally coherent and self-consistent whole.

This must be so, for scientific theories are not adopted by mainstream science because they have been proved to be true by experimentation in controlled laboratory conditions, or even as a result of simulation on a mathematical model, but because, first and last, they happen to fit in particularly well with the paradigm of science.

The disciplines which these theories constitute are only judged to be scientific, and hence worthy of being taught in our schools and universities, if they conform to the reductionistic and mechanistic paradigm inspired by Newtonian physics — and this in spite of the fact that Newtonian physics is supposed to have been disposed of by quantum theory.”