This plays on issues I've contemplated many times over the years.
I guess because I've always been a bit of a loner, so I've been on the outside looking in (and I'm comfortable there). It seems to me the social game of strength in numbers (blue wall of silence, freemasons covering each others' backs, high school jocks bullying to get what they want, busybody women spreading false gossip)...the "numbers" groups cross a gamut and the list goes on, but in order to fit into any group, the individual *must* surrender a piece of their individuality to the group.
I don't consider myself anti-social, but I can say emphatically I am not comfortable in a crowd of strangers...so concerts, sporting events, crowded beach or amusement park, not generally my first choices for entertainment. And I realize it takes me a while to warm up to a new person that enters my circle. I don't consider myself standoffish, but I do evaluate before I open up.
My society, which I think translates well into the West as a whole, and I would venture to guess mostly applicable across the "developed" world, values "beautiful people." As if being "ugly" translates to some criminality. I see either side of this coin preached across all manner of children's education, from cartoons and story books, through commercials and social media. Beautiful equals good, ugly equals bad...yet reality is quite different.
Frankly, "ugly" people have *never* caused me harm, it has *always* been "beautiful" people who have gone out of their way to snub me, disassociate, and even deliberately cause me grief...as if they were entitled to do so, because they were beautiful and I am not. Or so it seems to me. I can enumerate examples, but why bother?
I am not the ultimate judge of souls, but I do have the right and the obligation to gauge a soul as to how it will impact and affect me and mine.
Prejudice, meaning the dictionary English definition of judging prior to evidence, is rife and rampant, and has painfully little to do with skin color. It makes me wonder if there is some natural, dare I say "normal," basis behind it. Perhaps it is an instinctual part of being human, perhaps there is some psychological base in self preservation that long after the animal cause has dissipated, we have somehow turned it sideways onto ourselves. I don't know, but I have certainly dealt with it all of my life.
How do we define "well adjusted?" Is this reference to the socially acceptable "beautiful people?" (Thank you John Lennon)
How do we define "better soul person?" How do we define "sane?" How do we define "psychologically healthy?"
Consider this; how many of you here go on about "monkey mind" and "being in the moment?" The same folks who champion various exercises to empty the mind to enlighten the soul...for ten minutes before they return to the insanity that is their normal routine. The solution is simple, Thoreau knew it and did it, even wrote a book about it. Walk out into the woods, put up a shack, grow a plot of beans and contemplate your navel. There's the healthy solution in a nutshell.
Or not. Try that today and you get locked up and your shack burned down.
Woodland hermit's cabin fire leads to state investigation | Fox News
That's not socially acceptable, that's insane, that's abnormal... But living in a rat race, rushing headlong to a heart attack with fast food and soft drinks and bumper to bumper traffic is socially acceptable, sane and normal. And other folks are so caught up in being "normal" that they fail to see the insanity all around them, that they themselves are consumed by. The travesty is that we have allowed it to happen.
It is this very kind of hypocritical dichotomy that leads me to want to learn from the obscure cultures, the very ones modern anthropology wants to "save" by introducing modern ways. Nonsense. So many of these cultures have survived from before historic times, hidden in out of the way places that developed civilizations couldn't be bothered with...unless there were resources to exploit. Otherwise, these folks did just fine all by themselves in the middle of nowhere. Seems to me there are lessons we all could learn there.
Sanity is relative. Psychologically healthy is relative. Well adjusted is relative. Beautiful is relative. Are you content in and with your individuality, or do you prefer to surrender pieces of that for the opportunity to fit in and associate with...what turns out to be insanity?
