Where does normal come from?
Said by a prominent libertarian rebel-troll-smartass guy:
If you’re saying “I’m not allowed to” in regard to any normal thing you might do, like go to a restaurant, you should be furious with, first, yourself for pretending to accept this BS, and, second, whatever municipal or corporate clown pretended to have the authority of allowance.
Is that so.
What’s he assuming there?
That going to a restaurant is “normal.”
Of course in one way it is, that one way being the fact that it has been normal in some places for some people for several decades. But in another way it’s not the slightest bit normal; on the contrary it’s abnormal, and entirely dependent on a whole massive network of institutions and arrangements and customs that would not be possible without large-scale human co-operation.
Where does he think restaurants come from? Where does he think they get the food they sell? How does he think they get to be in buildings? Who does he think buys the food, prepares it, serves it, cleans up after it?
None of that is “normal.” It’s an elaborate social arrangement improved over many years. What do social arrangements depend on? The social. What does that entail? A whole lot of customs and rules and laws that make it possible for us to interact without constant brawling.
Ok then. Can we start to see the outline of a reason it’s not actually “abnormal” for restaurants to take precautions not to spread a dangerous virus? Or for customers of restaurants to avoid them in order not to spread or catch a dangerous virus? Or for local or national governments to put rules in place to lessen the spread of a dangerous virus?
I think we can, so I won’t bother to spell them out. I will just wonder aloud what kind of fucking idiot takes for granted the presence of elaborate social institutions like restaurants while pitching a fit about the rules that make restaurants possible.
The idiot is James Lindsay, by the way.
Could we have a link to the idiot’s piece in question?
Sounds positively “hinged” by his normal standards.
Link:
https://twitter.com/conceptualjames/status/1483226176336408584?s=21
Hahaha, yeah, of course it’s that jackass Lindsay.
IME with libertarian types they genuinely don’t recognise that all the social and physical infrastructure they rely on was made by people and is maintained by people. Which is one reason that I’m guessing (if I’m wrong let me know) that the vast majority of libertarian types are men–women know better. (I have met some libertarian women, and even one who argued her case very well, and there’s Ayn Rand obviously, so it’s not that no women think this way, but I suspect it’s much harder for women to believe that ‘things just happen’ without people making them happen.)
The word he was looking for, which might have given him a clue, wasn’t ‘normal’, but ‘customary‘. There’s nothing ‘normal’ about the trappings of advanced civilisation, or at least some other species and virtually all other human cultures would have them, including restaurants.
But they seem normal, because that’s how we grew up, so if we’re very obtuse and selective about what we notice, we form the mistaken belief that they are normal, and then we talk stupid destructive crap on Twitter.
Thank you for the laugh, Ophelia!
Always a pleasure!