I have been told there is no such thing as a normal or average person.
Now, I actually disagree with this as I think there are clear societal norms that could generally be agreed upon here.
What is normal/abnormal to you?
Anything wrong with being traditional even if your views may restrict others?
Where do we draw the line?
I will give forth more examples and views in due course...........
When we say 'normal', it could refer to many things. One kind might be normality defined in relation to some given standard. Such that someone living in their town have their relationships and understandings of people built on certain facts that appear to be present, stable and consistent in all the people around them, making them notice those individuals that differ in any significant manner. From each individuals perspective you can imagine a subjective concept of normality, or standard, like a heuristic of normality that they use to create meaning in the world around them by making quick correlations and contrasts.
Looking more statistically, a normal person could be viewed as anyone who is on the distribution expected from a population of human beings in today’s day and age. Such an example as height plotted on its normal distribution curve will show many people around an average height, with frequency tapering off towards the extremes. Now that’s not to say that the very tall are abnormal, they are precisely normal in the sense you expect to find them in the population at their given low frequency. So normality is somewhat different to average.
Of course one would eventually have to break humans down to all the measurable individual attributes or features to ascertain how each one exists in relation to that of other human beings in the spectrum, keeping in mind that each individual will have many features that make them who they are, each with the potential to be individually assessed.
I think temporal existence is also important, especially highlighted in the field of medicine, when we talk about heath. One can clearly see how a meaningful definition of 'normal' lifespan has changed over the centuries, illustrating that normality is not something fixed, or even only dependant on individual factors, but also the context in which they exist.
Mental health is most interesting i think, mainly due to its complexity and our still relatively ignorant understanding. Such that it differs from something like height, which can be clearly quantified, and plotted on a graph to produce and expected distribution. The qualitative aspect makes it hard to compute, and also the scope for totally novel and new behaviour and thought patterns to emerge make it unpredictable and puzzling. One could on one side create some statistical cut off for what is normal by appeal to a majority and face the difficult issue of justifying its arbitrariness, or instead consider all the weird and wonderful people that exist to be normal in the sense that they are a genuine and unique piece of humanity, and prove some normality through their very existence, in terms of what is reasonable to expect of certain human beings. Although Einstein might have been a rare calibre of human being, his existence is completely normal in terms of human capability and potential, even if such occurrences are rare.
