senses of normality

One of the great misunderstandings among people, is in the recurrently trendy discourse over NORMAL and ABNORMAL behaviour and capability. Going up a level, the notion of normalcy has two different meanings for any human population.

The first meaning is DESCRIPTIVE, and defined in terms of statistics. Here, normalcy is a matter of empirically quantified FACT.

The second meaning is NORMATIVE (sic), and has absolutely nothing to do with statistics. The second meaning refers to the formal and informal empirical markers which signify a population's PREFERENCE.

Now, aggregate PREFERENCE is always decided by aggregate POWER, and so here normalcy is a matter of opinion, presented via power as fact. Thus, politics clutters culture, and thus both culture and politics draw the attention, of both political scientists and anthropologists. Yes, yes, all the other social science disciplines as well ... vis-a-vis intersectionalism/ty.

So, the next time you hear junior epistemologists babbling about neuroDIVERGEnce or criminal abnormality do review their statements, in case these two senses of normalcy are clumsily mixed up. 

fear of negative appraisal

Many people lack the quality of being able to enjoy a presentation of themselves as powerless, weak, poor, distasteful, unpopular, ill, evil, foolish, or ugly ... this tends to be due to trauma associated with such frames.

So whereas a neutral person is not bothered by such presentations of self, a historically wounded person may not be able to see at all how such presentations could be neutral or positive. They are wearing lenses, they cannot remove.