The Perennial Clash Between Normalizers and Radicals

Social conformity and the prophet’s apocalypse

Photo by Suliman Sallehi, on Pexels

There are two kinds of people, normalizers and radicals.

Normalizers prefer to work within systems, so they can streamline their conduct and adapt to rules and excel. They don’t question why the system works as it does because they’re preoccupied with the business of making the most of the system.

When anomalies crop up that call the system into question, the normalizers spring into action and “normalize” those doubts, which is to say they paper over them, reassuring themselves and others with conservative judgments or sophistry that distracts from any deeper perspective that would encompass those anomalies.

Normalizers are happiest when they’re conforming to an automated environment in which everything functions smoothly as expected. An anomaly would amount to a “glitch in the matrix,” an event that falls outside the system’s parameters and thus indicates the presence of something not factored into those automations.

Those who are familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s sociological explanation of scientific revolutions will notice the similarity between this normalization of any trace of strangeness in life and what Kuhn thought of as the narrower function of “normal” scientists who aim to conserve a scientific paradigm or theory. The latter function is that of puzzle-solving, as the normal scientist applies the established assumptions to make sense of what might appear to be contrary pieces of evidence that cast doubt on the paradigm.

In that context, the radicals that have the opposite function to normalizers are like the revolutionary scientists that aim to build a new paradigm, once the old theory proves inadequate to handle mounting contrary data.

Radicals, then, are happiest outside of any system since they thrive with an open mind that envisions new systems. What makes them radical is that they’re preoccupied with the status of a system’s foundations. Far from conforming to a system’s rules, they question the merit of entire ways of being.

I’ve written elsewhere about a clear case in which this distinction applies. On the one hand, you have the established news media, such as the New York Times (NYT), and on the other hand, you have outsiders like the author and podcaster Michael Wolff. Both report on Donald Trump’s second “presidency,” but they do so in very different ways.

The NYT is a normalizer because its audience is America’s establishment. The NYT speaks to lawyers, bankers, doctors, lobbyists, and other professionals, and they, too, are normalizers because they excel within their country’s economic and political systems.

Alas, Trumpism is a glaring anomaly in American society, so the normalizer’s task is to make something that’s palpably strange or alien to the system’s routines seem normal, as in manageable, so that there should be no call for radical doubts or revolutionary action.

In an episode of his Daily Beast podcast, Wolff quotes a NYT article on Trump’s shifting assessments of his war with Iran. The newspaper article says that Trump “cultivates an erratic style.” Wolff points out, in effect, that that interpretation is a normalization. Trump isn’t cultivating a mere style since he himself is obviously erratic. Trump is erratic in his bones and DNA. There’s no daylight between Trump and erraticism, so this is a clear, albeit minor case of a corporate news outlet minimizing strangeness for its audience’s benefit.

By contrast, Wolff is a radical who relishes the chance to highlight Trump’s bizarreness and even his brazen anti-Americanism. Of course, the notion that America could elect an anti-American leader is paradoxical, and that’s grist for the radical’s mill. Rather than pretending there’s no such paradox, or that Trump is a normal or at least a normalizable political figure, Wolff highlights the paradox and its absurdity for the rather mystical purpose of enlightening his audience.

Indeed, in the broadest sense, the two mindsets in question fall into the profane and sacred camps, respectively.

While extreme individuals may belong purely to one side or the other, most of us think and behave in both profane and sacred ways on different occasions.

A pure normalizer would be something like a machine with no capacity for meta-reflection or appreciation of foundational, existential matters. A pure radical would be a prophet or neoshamanic philosopher or artist who lives constantly high on an apocalyptic vision, which would entail that the radical fails utterly in life’s mundane terms.

Thus, the two mindsets are inversely related: success according to one of the standards causes failure according to the other.

In any case, in that broadest sense, normalization is a matter of civility, of fitting into a society by accepting its expectations and compromises, and adopting its framework for judging whatever the normalizer may encounter.

Radicalism is more for outsiders who insist on a revelatory freedom of thought that impedes the radical’s efforts to conform to social conventions. Radicals often critique their society for failing according to what are supposed to be higher or more universal standards of rightness.

Chances are that you could apply this distinction to any social situation in history. It’s the key to understanding the dynamics of history and culture.

As I said, for instance, Trumpian “populism” is supposed to be about some outsiders’ recovery of their dignity, as the white supremacists, Evangelical “Christians,” and anti-modern “conservatives” have felt alienated by America’s surge towards liberal progress since the 1960s. Depending on the outcome of his social movement, Trump’s political ascendency functions as a normalizer of American taboos, or a revolutionary anti-presidency that denigrates the country’s founding principles and traditions.

Or you could look at social media, and note that the internet was supposed to democratize the flow of information, eliminating the middleman and enabling anyone to be an independent “content creator.”

Yet Big Tech companies swooped in to normalize and capitalize on that liberation, so that algorithms became the new gatekeepers of a social system, and content creators must conform and normalize the compromises to excel in business terms. That is, business culture co-opts the arts even to the point of making artistic outsiders obsolete, since large language models can generate content as flawless normalizers that lack any prophetic capacity for revolutionary truth-telling.

But this underlying clash is everywhere you look.

In the Canadian suburb where I live, life is normalized according to middle-class expectations. The houses look mostly the same, which trains their occupants to think and behave alike. In addition to following the law, we must all be civil and adapt to the local culture. To paraphrase the Joker from the movie The Dark Knight, when things don’t go according to “the plan,” suburbanites freak out. The plan in question is the underlying system that establishes social normality and dictates what counts as mainstream success or failure.

For that matter, when the New Testament has Jesus say that “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40), he was speaking as a radical whose visionary reversal of roles in what he called God’s kingdom threatened the Roman Empire’s pragmatism.

The “least of these” weren’t just the poor, sick, and downtrodden. No, that lowly status overlapped with radicalism since necessity is the mother of invention. Who else would bother to contemplate alternative social orders but those who don’t flourish in the established ones? Early Christianity was thus radical, as Jesus’s parables recontextualized what his listeners took for granted, namely the absurdity in which the godless ruled over the godly in the present, material order.

But in the fourth century, the Roman Empire absorbed the Jesus movement and transitioned into Christendom, another mainstream way of life that normalized new absurdities, such as the pairing of Jesus’s apocalyptic ethics with the vicissitudes of an earthly empire. Even as the Church proclaimed that it followed Jesus, Christendom persecuted and tortured outsiders, conducted wars of conquest, subjugated women, and made peace with slavery and feudalism, in which rich minorities ruled over poor majorities.

Personally, I happen to have more radical tendencies because I grew up in a Jewish household in a largely liberal Christian society, and I inherited Tourette syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder, along with an artistic sensibility. I went on to study philosophy at the graduate level, so that I came to specialize in dealing with potentially subversive meta-questions.

Respectively, the normalizer and the radical see normality or strangeness everywhere, even when they’re looking at the same thing. This is because these mindsets filter reality. They’re ways of interpreting experience that’s on some level neutral or noumenal in Immanuel Kant’s sense. What things are in themselves has little to do with how we’re used to understanding them.

But there are these two main, antithetical ways of understanding: one fixates on managing systems, and the other leaves or builds systems to contemplate ultimate, inter-systemic matters. Normalizers thrive in mainstream societies, while radicals are typically counter-cultural since their doubts and visions threaten the established routines and social hierarchies.

The clash between these types of people is as old as civilization, and likely even as old as behavioural modernity, the human fascination with imagining the symbols that produced religious and artistic cultures in the late Stone Age.

With their psychedelic expertise, shamans or proto-shamans were the first mind-bending radicals. They imagined the realms of consciousness and ideas as “spirit worlds,” and they insisted that the earthly realm ought to reflect those ideals. We’re supposed to have obligations to “the spirits,” or our highest, most disciplined thoughts and feelings.

Ever since, we’ve strived to domesticate ourselves, conforming to envisioned or civilized codes of conduct, which radicalized our entire genus in the animal kingdom. In the big picture, people as such are all radicals compared to wild animals. We’re the freest, most godlike living things on Earth, since we’re free to contemplate alternatives to naturalness itself and to apply our visions to new worlds we create.

Further reading

• Why does the Mainstream Media Normalize Trump’s “Presidency”?
• Noble Lies and the Recurring Withdrawals of Neo-Shamans
• Must Civilization be Saved by Neoshamans?
• The Ancient Cold War Between Intellectuals and the Unreflective Masses
• Mass Society’s Triumph Over Intellectuals
• “The Melania Comparison Trump Won’t Like,” on YouTube

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