What is normal? Is it a benchmark which provides the capacity to measure mental capacity? It certainly should be, but we do not measure "normal" in that manner and there is therefore a great deal of confusion to unpack.

We live in a world where Bias is very common and it is therefore more difficult than ever to identify "normal". The best we can do is to identify and to reject bias, whether it is our own or somebody else's. We should pay extra attention to people who are knowledgeable and aware and understand the fact that most people are relatively clueless because their tendency to generalize distorts reality more often than not.

Consequently, the most "normal" people are essentially basic, intelligent people who do not go around carrying pretential baggage.

We cannot speak about mental capacity in global terms as long as we have no common standards. The best we can do is to practice objectivity by rejecting all politically moticvated bias and instead of labelling people we do not agree with, it is more productive to speak, not in terms of normalcy, but in concrete terms that describe the deployment of specific abilities that fulfill specific tasks.

Consequently, mental health is about abilities, not "disability" and the tendency to get it backwards is far too common for comfort.

For the sake of clarity, embrace ideas espoused by credible people like M.D., M. Scott Peck, who wrote the following in his brilliant book, "The Road Less Traveled":

Problems are the cutting edge which distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed. they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn. As Benjamin Franclin said, "Those things that hurt, instruct." It is for this reason wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.

Most of us are not wise. Feeling the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain.We attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on. We attempt to get around them rather than to suffer through them.

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health. Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality. In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, "Neurosis is alway a substitute for legitimate suffering."

But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid. The neurosis itself becomes the biggest problem. True to form, many will then attempt to avoid this pain and this problem in turn, building layer upon layer of neurosis. Fortunately, however, some possess the courage to face their neuroses and begin - usually with the help of psychotherapy - to learn hoiw to experience legitimate suffering. In any case, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.

With that understanding, everything should be much clearer and the people who currently baffle us should be much easier to decipher.


Next: Watergate empowered Richard Nixon.