Be normal!

Normal as how norms are expressed, not adhering to one set of them

Hasan Piker has been in the news a lot lately - mostly because spineless liberals and various people on the right are trying to blame one of the few sane voices on the left for ‘instigating violence’ when no such thing has occurred. But he has defended himself perfectly well and I’m interested in well….norms again.

I started watching Hasan during the pandemic and, funnily enough, actually realized I might be autistic after he took the RAADS test on his stream at the insistence of Mya Higa (the so-called Gen-z jane goodall).

One thing, this is a very small thing, I’ve noticed is how Piker often tells people to ‘be normal.’ By this he doesn’t mean ‘don’t be neurodivergent’ or ‘don’t be weird,’ rather that there are reasons (in his case often political reasons) for not being too extreme while reacting with other people. This would seem, at least on its face, to be in contradiction to his own self-declared autism (as he jokingly says all the time that he has ‘political autism’ ie his special interest is politics). In part, the questions is whether self-expression (at least on the internet) is always tactical whether you want it to be or not.

But there’s actually, I think, a few interesting distinctions regarding ‘being normal’ as a weapon versus masking or being afraid to be weird. I don’t think it’s only a tactical thing rather it is more about finding a place where you are weird for yourself but where you also don’t forget completely that other people may have different norms, expectations. In other words, I think there is an importance place between acting normal for the sake of not upsetting people and acting normal as a kind of trojan horse.

In recent days this came up regarding trans issues via JK Rowling’s half-hearted (or maybe completely fake) retreat regarding her grotesque levels of transphobia. Piker made the claim that many people may not understand trans folks but they are also not transphobic and that what really ‘bricks the brains’ of transphobes is when they actually meet a real life transperson. (Importantly I am not equating the social pressures upon autistic and trans people as there is several differences especially at the level of visibility).

I suppose the issue here is being authentic to oneself (I hate the word authenticity but it seems to have intuitive clout for many people) while not being militant to the extent that you can be easily dismissed by someone who has drank too much oppositional kool-aid. This is not to fall into an assimilationist politics but to understand that intensive exaggerations by oppositional groups expect extremism in return and when they face actually living versions that do no confirm to that idea, but very importantly, don’t shy away from talking about their identity, this is in fact more affective opposition ie trojan horse style.

Obviously this doesn’t work in all situations and there is certainly a difference between individual and group situations, between survival mode and activist mode which are going to be highly context specific. But there is an interesting suggestion about the politics of the individual not overriding collective politics even if politics of the individual of some kind is tied to identity. In other words, the emphasis of the individual within political groups and across groups has to take a different form not to appease the larger group but for the sake of the inner group.

I don’t know if this is anything - but there is a real sense of exhaustion regarding a certain form of identity politics and any kind of universalism. I wonder if the internet accelerated exposure to differences and divergences while rewarding and monetizing the worst kind of collective reaction to them. It’s more about the how and where and not the what.

So many aesthetic categories born from the internet (like cringe) are lazy meta-norms ie ‘don’t do that kind of thing’…but without any of the relevant important context (like where and why and relative to what community…the entire internet is not a pragmatically reflective entity).

Will probably write some kind of sequel to this….