The Myth of Normal 165

young Trappist monk Thomas Merton, the most influential American Catholic writer of the twentieth century, articulated in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain: “The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”[3] Identity crises such as Ulf experienced are not consciously self-authored— they are the outcome of how we develop in our assorted contexts, from the family outward. “The success I had was one hundred percent external,” Ulf said to me. “Totally external—and based on a mental construct I built as a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old of what it takes to be accepted.” In this sense, as the social psychologist Erich Fromm pointed out, the family acts, unwittingly, as the “psychic agent” for society to form what he called the social character. The social character is, in Fromm’s words, “the core character common to most members of a culture.” This is different from the individual character we each possess and display to the world. The social character, to the extent it defines and governs us, assures that we will fit the “normal” mold in our particular culture. Fromm’s concept strikes me as a potent rendering of how we function in society—antlike. I speak here not only of the “we” in an individual sense. The collective “we” is far more blind and dangerous. For example, none of us like to see people sleeping in the streets, but as a society we countenance growing levels of homelessness. Nobody wants life on Earth imperiled, yet the march of climate change seems inexorable. Something in us normalizes such calamities, whether the result is that we actively enable them, deny them, or merely look on in passive resignation. All my life, no doubt spurred by the horrors that shaped my childhood, I have wondered how it is that so many good people can be hypnotized into compliance with the indefensible. There has to be some mechanism to acculturate us to accept as normal what is inimical to ourselves and to the world we inhabit; it is certainly not an inborn