There is a personality disorder known as normopathy. It’s like psychopathy but differs in that rather than substituting an imaginary reality for what they perceive, they substitute a social norm regardless of how that affects their wellbeing or impairs their daily function. They can be driven to emotional breakdown when something prevents them from asserting and preserving that social norm in their environment. What do you think of this? They believe so powerfully in the social consensus, normalization, that it impairs and even cripples their personal resourcefulness, often leaving them to be dependent on external validation.
So presenting their personal truth breaks them? Yes. If your personal truth is socially abnormal, it frightens them to one degree or another. It gets worse when the abnormal is persistently presented and if they can’t avoid or eliminate the abnormal behavior.
Is that why my wearing bright teal harem pants or tennis shoes with no laces freaks some people out? It is indeed. Some people suffer from only mild normopathy on a neurotic level rather than truly crippling. For others, it really is disabling. It can even cost them their jobs if the work doesn’t involve strict protocols to follow. These people can have a nervous breakdown if they can’t make it to an office party, and things like that.
I remember a girl in college was asking her friends what she should think about a new song. She sounds like a normopath.
Most teenagers I grew up with were normopaths then. That is very possible, and were they happy and well adjusted for it?
Would you call that also validation? They want to be told what’s cool and what’s not. Many scientists are calling this human nature, even going so far as to say it’s more or less unavoidable. What will that mean if their conclusion is true? The obsessive search for social validation. Our society is based on it, so is our economy. What would happen if you grew to total awareness of this?
You might become an outcast?
You would start to make different decisions?
Or learn how to manipulate the system.
Is validation also submissive? Submersive. Submersion is potentially far worse than submission. Submission can be done consciously. In submersion, you lose your sense of identity.
Many animals groups, I think, use social validation to manage their groups and keep out the unwanted unless that one can show a usefulness. Indeed, they do. It’s natural, even instinctive.
Notice in the class so far I have established two different poles of human behavior? Actually three, but the two are defining. We base all our self-development goals on where we perceive ourselves to be on that spectrum.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~