Power!

We continued down the path of advanced ideas last night.

I am rather taken by the old material, the ideas underlying deconstruction of text to establish what is left out, and how this leads to Critical Theory. I remain interested in the applications of CT to law, race, feminism, etc. Granted that writing about this material (and things I’ve seen presented as “evidence”) can be, shall we say, ephemeral, still, the underlying ideas are valid. I also find Foucault intriguing, because the core idea of the power of knowledge strikes me as true, especially when trying to track down a sense of what is normal. Or, probably better, what is “normal.”

Let’s say that human thought can be seen as a continuum. That is, there is a range of human thought from here to there. From A to Z. Question one: is this range expressible as a straight line?

This is human thought:

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That is, anywhere along this line there is potentially a thought someone can think. If it’s a line like this, then all thoughts are equal in quantity. In fact, it’s not a line at all anymore, it’s a circle.



It doesn’t matter where you start or end in a circle.

But what if the range from A to Z is not a line/circle but a bell curve.



If that’s the case, then the top of the curve can be defined as the pinnacle of normal, i.e., the most normal thoughts that most people have, and at the edges nearing A to Z, you get rarer thoughts.

So here come the experts. We say that these people are experts because, well, they know something or have some experience that elevates them to this expert level. Because they are experts (even though we’ve played fast and loose with the credentials making them experts in that previous sentence, which can be the same as real life), they are given the power to determine issues in their area of expertise. If they are experts in human thought, or more specifically, mental health, we empower them to determine what is mentally healthy and what isn’t. They use their power of perceived knowledge to determine what is normal.

Here’s the problem. We cannot lay out human thought on a continuum, either as a line/circle where all is equal, or on a bell curve with a peak, or on some other mathematically determinable graph. Can’t be done. Simple as that. Which doesn’t stop us from doing it.

If the experts determine that thought is on the bell curve, and that normal thought is from point F to point W, and thoughts before F and after W are abnormal, then we’re simply using the average number of thoughts to determine normalcy. Just because a thought is rare, it’s abnormal. It’s easy to take the next step, which is normal = good, not normal = bad. We can draw moral conclusions based on this perception.

If the experts determine that thought is on the circle, it’s probably even worse. Then they can use their expertise, and the power derived therefrom, to determine what is good or bad based not on frequency but on nothing more than their own knowledge. This one scares me a lot, because then normal is simply what some people say is normal, for some indeterminate reason, as compared at least to the frequency of its appearance on a presumed scale of normalcy. That ones scares me too, just not as much.

One takes this to various conclusions. Foucault wrote about mental illness, crime and punishment, sexuality, global poltics—a number of areas. It can be applied elsewhere as well. One wants to simplify it, as done here, but the ramifications of each point I’ve made are manifold and complicated. This merely opens a peephole into the possibilities.

Which is why it’s so much fun to discuss.