Are You a Path-Hugger?

by **1PolarBear** » Thu May 31, 2012 4:58 pm

Twinkling_Butterfly wrote:I thought you meant someone who is malignant but not because of a PD

More like anybody malignant that does not have my PD (which happens to be eccentric; someone with no PD would be a non). Actually, I usually mean Norm as in people that follow norms. Those Norms also almost inevitably think that their norm is normal, and therefore good. "It is the way we do it and the right way it should be done."

It is also sometimes followed by contempt for anything that goes out of the norm, whether in act of in words. Like last week, I had two or three people arrogantly invalidate what I said, because they had decided I was "ill". That for me is malignant norm. It is a form of discrimination and moral stupidity.

Twinkling_Butterfly wrote:, but it's interesting that your description reminds me of David Lykken's distinction between psychopaths and sociopaths. I imagine he might say that psychopaths create bad norms and sociopaths follow bad norms. (Incidentally, this is what I thought Jeremy Sherman meant by "Psychopath Cowboys, Sociopath Herds," but that turned out to be about the Milgram experiment. )

I would consider the sociopath as a Norm in that sense. Although, the sociopath rarely follows the herd as a whole, just his own group. So they are semi-Norms.

Twinkling_Butterfly wrote:
For a Normal, what I just said would be an oxymoron, because normal always means good.

It sounds like a confusion of two senses of the word. You said "someone who creates and follows bad norms," implying that a norm is a rule or custom (as in, "rising before dawn is normal in our household"), but "normal always means good" would imply that a norm is a standard for health (as in, "a normal heart beats without an artificial pacemaker"). In the second case "malignant normal" would indeed be an oxymoron, but creating and following bad rules is entirely possible (and all too common) because the person creating and following the rules may be simply deceived rather than disordered.

I did not make the distinction, because those I am talking about do not make it. This is why I said: "For a Normal", which implies a shift in the point of view.

The more emotional about his custom a Norm is, the more likely he is to consider it as good and anything different as bad. It is the "Golden Rule fallacy", where what I think is good is universally good no matter what others might be thinking or their condition. So if I like Pizza, I will feed pizza to everybody, because it is good, even if the other person is allergic to cheese (just as an example).

It is especially a problem in the therapy settings, because the therapist, having branded himself normal and good, want to help the other to be more like himself, regardless of the reality of the fundamental differences in brain structure. In this case, therapy is only an exercise in condemnation and arrogance. Malignant Norm.