1 - The History of "Normal."

In this first episode of Normal Is A Lie, Julie Harris discusses the history of the term, 'normal', and how it came to be applied to human behavior. People have lived with this fabricated term, thinking that they must conform to the idea of a normal person. However the original purpose of the word, 'normal', was created by an astronomer and statistician, who applied faulty mathematics to human bodies. Julie also proves that the definition of a 'normal human' is a complete falsehood, that was created through a very specific and very small group of men, and it's based on the average of those men, not any one individual. You'll be shocked at just how incorrect the definition of a 'normal human' really is when it's fully revealed. Not one human being on this planet can actually fit the definition of 'normal.'

What is Normal is a Lie?

A podcast where Julie Harris dismantles everything about what normal means, with history, science, lived experience and reality - not some fabricated version of it.

NORMAL IS A LIE WITH JULIE HARRIS
EPISODE 01 - THE HISTORY OF “NORMAL”

This is Normal Is A Lie, with me, Julie Harris, where we dismantle everything about what “normal” means with history, science, lived experience, and reality, not some fabricated version of it.

In this episode, we are going to talk about the standard that humans are measured against our entire lives and how it is a fictional character. For many of us, most of us even, we are treated as if we need to be “normal.” And so we adopt a belief that “normal” is the goal to achieve. We treat it both socially in our societies and also as individuals as the baseline for health, for professionalism, and for success in general.

But “normal” isn't actually even a human reality. It's a statistical myth created by 19th century astronomers and mathematicians who were looking at stars and numbers, not people. They tried to add their understanding of stars and math to humanity. And now it's been perpetuated to the point where whenever we are in the workplace, we are treated as the thing that is abnormal because the workplace was built for this idea of “normality” that originated from these astronomers and mathematicians.

So we're going to dismantle that standard human myth and we're going to look at why workplaces at this point in time feel so rigid, why requesting accommodations or any kind of adjustment, whether it's disability related or just human related, why they feel like battles, and how we can move on from that, both as individuals who are made to fit into the “norm” and as leaders who are perpetuating that idea of “normality.”

So first, let's go to this astronomer and statistician. The main one was named Adolphe Quetelet. He wasn't a doctor, he wasn't a psychologist, he didn't even specialize in any aspect of humanity. He specialized in stars and numbers and math. He was a Belgian astronomer and statistician. And like any astronomer in the 19th century, he was obsessed with the bell curve, which at that point was a mathematical tool used specifically to track errors in star measurements. So in astronomy, if you're measuring stars, where star is, and there's differences in those measurements, those variations were defined as errors. So if you're using a telescope to measure a star location and it's slightly to the left or right of what is the mathematical average, then that is called an error, that's called a mistake. And at one point, Quetelet had this idea, well, what if he applied that bell curve to people? So his first way of doing this was getting a study of chest sizes of 5,738 Scottish soldiers. He calculated that average, and when he identified the average, he called it “l'homme moyen," or the average man. And calculating the average, not inherently bad, it's just data, but here is where the lie of “normal” as a human, well, and “normal” at all, began.

Quetelet didn't just see the average as a midpoint anymore. He didn't see it as the mathematical average. He decided that ‘average’ was actually perfection. So he said in some of his writings, this specific one, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties”, of course, that's the English translation of it, and the quote I'm about to read is also English translation. But he said:

“It is of primary importance to keep in view that we ought to consider the average man as the type of all which is beautiful, of all which is good. If the average man were completely determined, we might consider him as the type of perfection and everything differing from his proportions or condition would constitute deformity and disease. Everything found different, not only in regard to proportion or form, but as to mode of existence, though it might be even better than the average, would still be considered as a comparative imperfection.”

So here, he is not just defining “normal” as a statistical mathematical data point. He is defining it as what is correct. He's defining it as what is ideal perfection even. He is defining everything else when it comes to human, the humanity, the human body, he's describing it as deformity and disease and imperfection.

Now, mathematically and in astronomy, that makes sense. Anything that's outside of the average is literally an error. However, he's now saying that anything outside of the average of a human is an error, that you as a human are a mistake for anything that's outside of “the norm”. So how did we get “the norm?”

“Normal” never really existed. There is a term norma, which meant a right angle, a perpendicular angle. And it was used by craftsmen to measure the angle from the floor to a wall to make sure that the wall was at the correct angle. It was a builder's tool. Well, Quetelet decides to apply the word “normal” to this ideal average. He's not even using it as average. He's using it to define this mathematical average that he's now calling the ideal, that he's now calling perfection, human perfection. And so this is where the word “normal” first ever existed outside of a mathematical context.

Now, before we talk about how the idea of normal and how his math specifically ruined our workplaces and the idea of humanity in general, I want to talk about what we lost. So we tend to think that the past was primitive and that we are advanced. Now, some of us know there's some pretty advanced things that happened in the past, but I want to address a very specific way that has to do with what we're talking about today, “normality” and the idea of “normality” and that there is even an idea of “normality” in humanity. So the 1700s were actually light years ahead of us in this way. Or mass production, which I'll get into later, turned us into interchangeable parts. The world operated on a very different logic.

In the world of traditional craftsmanship, so those who saw blacksmiths, there was no such thing as just a standard hammer because a hammer isn't just a tool, it is an extension of the blacksmith's arm. So think about the physics of a swing. It relies on the standard force formula that mass times acceleration equals force. If a hammer is too heavy for your specific arm strength, you can't accelerate it fast enough. You'll be tired in an hour. If it's too light, you'll have to use too much muscle and not enough gravity. So blacksmiths would choose a weight or identify a weight, usually between one and a half to three and a half pounds, based on their body. Now, one and a half to three and a half, that's a pretty big difference for such a small weight. The person, the blacksmith, would not only identify a specific weight, but they would also carve the handle to fit their grip. A blacksmith with large hands needed a thick handle to prevent cramping and other things. A blacksmith with small hands needed a thin one for control. It wasn't a luxury to have something specific to their body. It was the way that it was done by then, it was survival. It was effective. If the tool didn't fit, the work didn't happen. If the tool didn't fit, the work was hindered. The body would either become in pain, would start to have pain, and the output would be impacted by it, or the body would be tired, and the work would be impacted by it. So if the tool didn't fit, it wasn't identified as a human problem, it was identified as, well, this is the wrong tool. We need to change the tool. We see this everywhere in history back then.

There's the tool used to mow grass, really, really physically demanding work before lawn mowers. And if the ergonomics of it are off by even an inch, the back would give out. This was well known. Traditionally, the handle was measured against the user's body. The lower handle was placed at a distance from the ground to the user's wrist. The upper handle was the distance from the wrist to the elbow. If a short human tried to use a tall human scythe, he wouldn't just be slower, but would actually be injured. And the logic at the time was incredibly simple and, quite frankly, logical. The tool must adapt to the human. Specifically, the tool must adapt to the human's pivot points.

So we can look at another example as well. Look at the tailor, thimbles. Right now, they're just a cheap plastic, sometimes metal cap. But for a professional tailor, a loose thimble means it's gonna slip and there's gonna be errors. A tight one means there's gonna be discomfort leading to things even numbness. So if your finger's numb, you're not gonna be able to feel as well, it's there's going to be errors. So whether it's a thimble that's too big or a thimble that's too small, there's going to be errors. So there are thimbles that were custom cast to the specific finger. And this was just common sense back then. Of course you need it specific to the finger so that you have the best output.

Then with a cobbler, there was no size nine, size seven. Every single person had what was called the last, a wooden model of their own foot kept at a cobbler shop. The shoe was built around your specific foot, the various bumps, arches, the idiosyncrasies of your specific foot. Now, this wasn't even just for the elite. The philosophy of fixing the tool that is, it was standard procedure for any profession. You had tools that were designed for your body. You had tools that were designed for your customers. You had tools that were designed to help make sure that whatever your output was was going to be quality and a sustainable quality of that.

So back then in the 1700s and before and after in some ways, if a tool didn't fit you, the tool was considered broken. Then look at today, if a tool doesn't fit you, you're the one that's considered broken. If you can't use the same tool as the person in the desk next to you, in the office next to you, then you are the one who's considered broken. You're the one who's considered wrong. And how does this make logical sense at all? It doesn't. We traded the logic of craftsmanship and the logic of fitting the tool to the body for the logic of the machine. That happened based on Quetelet’s math, but also with the Industrial Revolution.

So how did we go from the tool must fit the human to the human must fit the tool? We stopped caring about the individual and started caring about scale, which is interesting because we later learned that the only way to really effectively scale is to bring in individualization.

So back to the Industrial Revolution. It started with the American, well, the Industrial Revolution was going on long before the American Civil War, but the Civil War was a catalyst of a significant change and led to what we now call the Second Industrial Revolution. And one of the things that happened during this time was that the military needed to clothe millions of men really quick. They couldn't do bespoke tailoring at the scale that they needed to clothe military. So they used Quetelet's data to create standard sizes that they now called small, medium, and large. For the first time in human history, we stopped building the clothes to fit the human. We told the human that they had to fit the clothes. If the sleeves were too tight or the chest was too tight, the shirt was too long, that was a you problem. You were now “abnormal.” Then people brought this thinking into the workplace.

There's this guy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is the father of scientific management, what we call scientific management now. He started to treat humans like interchangeable machine parts. He wanted to be able to slot any standard human into any seat without changing the desk or the chair or the hours, and without changing the output. And this is where we meet what I call the paper human. It's the human who only exists on paper, because even from Quetelet's math, when he was defining the “normal” human, there is nobody who fits every single average. There's no human who fits that. And if some human is born at some point that does fit that, then they're not even “normal” because they're “abnormal” in the sense that they're the only human who actually falls into every average of measurement of a human body.

So this paper human, when we're talking about not just size of the body, but function, function of your brain, function of your body, how you perform. This human only exists on paper, but from Frederick Winslow Taylor, he was using math as well, this time mostly using a timer to identify how long things take. And he decided that this human is the employee that everything needs to be designed for. You need to fit into it. So now it's the employee that current workplaces are designed for, that HR systems are designed for. It's a human that only exists on paper. The human has perfect focus for eight hours straight. This human has no chronic pain. This human has no sensory processing differences. This human definitely isn't blind or deaf, and this human can walk. This is a human that does not exist. And just like paper falls apart when it's wet, or when wind is introduced, or any sort of resistance or struggle, the paper human also falls apart just as easily. It breaks when we are just expecting this paper human to fit into the workplace.

But industry loved the paper human, and they asked us to become it. So this is the living, breathing person, you and me, who's been vaporized just to fit this blueprint that was decided by measurements. And mathematics and timing, but actually no human naturally fits into. So when people talk about the Industrial Revolution, and even today when they talk about standardizing the workforce, really what we're doing is admitting to taking the natural variation of humanity out of humanity, and trying to fit them in to work into the systems that we've already built. And we expect that these systems are built for humanity, but it's the idea of “normal” humanity that does not exist. So we decide and we think this is progress. And now there was a lot of progress during the Industrial Revolution. There's a lot of progress that's beneficial to humanity. This one though, this isn't even progress. We think we're so advanced because we have mass production, but honestly standardization is actually lazy design.

So when we're looking at what I call environmental integrity, like structural integrity, you need structural integrity for a building to last to withstand the various things that it could encounter. Environmental integrity is integrity where the environment can withstand and support whatever human enters it. Now in the 1700s, a blacksmith had far more environmental integrity than a modern software engineer. The blacksmith knew that if the hammer didn't fit, the work would suffer. And those who judged the blacksmith knew that as well. They were not blaming the blacksmith himself. They would identify obviously if a hammer didn't fit, that's the problem. Now we tell the engineer to fit into the systems. We tell them that if they can't perform, and of course I use a software engineer as an example, but it's any position. We tell people that they need to fit into the workplace. And so we didn't actually get more logical. We got better at ignoring the natural variations of humanity. And we got less efficient in actually making tools that fit all humans.

So when I talk about scale and how personalization and customization is actually necessary for scale, we can see it in cars. We see it when in cars, whether you're the passenger or the driver, especially the driver though, seats are most often you can move them forward, you can move them back up down. You can make so many customization to it, you can move the steering wheel. This is all necessary for safety and for functionality of a car. We know that designing a car for one human is not going to be effective. This leads me to one of the most common examples of how average is actually unsafe and incredibly ineffective.

So back in 1952, the United States Air Force had a significant problem. Their pilots kept crashing and there were deaths, but also there were planes that could no longer function. So it was like a really, really bad time for the Air Force. They hired this researcher named Gilbert Daniels to measure 4,000 pilots on 10 physical dimensions to update the average pilot because the average pilot that was defined, I believe back in the 1920s, they thought, well, maybe the pilot is different. Well, Daniels started to look at it and looked for a pilot who was average in all 10 dimensions and much like Kettle's standards, there was not one person out of the 4,000 who fit average in all 10 dimensions, not one person. And 10 dimensions isn't even a lot of factors. It's not even a lot of measurements, but there was not one person in all 4,000 of them who fit all of them. So not a single pilot fit the average, one pilot might have an average arm length, but the legs were longer. Another might have an average height, but a wide chest. And then the heads, their heads were different sizes, but there was just one helmet made for everyone, or a size, one style and size. So the conclusion was, if you design for the average, you design for no one. This was well documented. So they realized something that we already knew historically. And yet still this was identified in 1952. It was publicized. It's been talked about many times, but we still act as if we designed for the average in the workplace and everybody should fit in.

So the Air Force realized that it wasn't the pilots that was the problem. It was the cockpit. They thought it was going to be really costly to make the change, but they outsourced the solution and invented adjustable seats. They had adjustable pedals. They returned to the logic of the blacksmith and they made the tool fit the human. And suddenly the crash has stopped.

This brings me back to the concept of environmental integrity. It means the space actually supports the person inside of it and knows that the tools, whether it's the environment, the tools that it's using, that the environment and tools support the end result knowing that humans vary. If a person needs a variation that doesn't yet exist, then the environment lacks integrity. And most of our workplaces significantly lack environmental integrity.

So where do we go from here? Big question. We need to redesign the entire workforce. We have innovation in so many ways, yet some of the most innovative companies, some of the companies who claim to be the most innovative are still using outdated workplace norms that were designed in the time of the Industrial Revolution that were designed just to make humans interchangeable. It is no long, well, it wasn't arguably, there's parts of it that weren't even effective then, but it's really not effective now. It's incredibly ineffective to ask everybody to behave the same way, to fit into the same tools, to use the same size desks and chairs and whatnot, and workplaces and be in open workspaces, and work without the tools that we need, without the environment that we need, to perform the same and to have the same output. That's just illogical, yet we do it every day. There's people who get put on performance improvement plans after they request accommodations because they don't fit in, because their output isn't the same as the other person with the same tools. Well, yeah, of course, because they're a different human. And this isn't just specific to disability. Of course, this podcast, not just this episode, but the podcast overall is going to highlight disability and those differences that we label disability, but it's just the idea, it's all rooted in the idea that “normal” even exists.

So if you are a leader who's listening to this, when you build products, if you think about your company, almost certainly, whatever you do, whether it's a product or a service, you know that scale only happens when there's individualization built into it. You know that the success of your product works because you consider various points of failure. You consider how the user is going to use it. You consider the environment that it's going to be in. Does it need to be waterproof? Is the waterproof effective? Does it need to…? I mean, there's so many things that you have to think about to make sure that it's going to work in whatever environment it is. If you're a service-based provider, almost certainly your service looks at what the specific individual needs and you adapt your service to what your client needs.

Why do you act as if it's different for employees? Employees are not interchangeable parts. It's completely illogical and it's bad business that we've just perpetuated for over 100 years. If you're the individual, know that what you've been made to think is wrong is actually just your evidence of humanity. It's not evidence of your “abnormality.” It's not evidence of a mistake. It's not evidence of an error as Quetelet would have described it. It's just evidence of your humanity. And even though the world says that it's a mistake, it does not mean that it actually is. This is true for all humanity, especially marginalized communities. And almost guaranteed you're exhausted from trying to fit into a mold that not only wasn't made for you, but literally does not exist. The math was never real. Quetelet was looking at stars. Tried to apply it to a human body, but in a way that even he knew, he identified that it didn't fit one human, yet still perpetuated. He also is the one who created the BMI. And we know that that doesn't stand up mathematically anymore.

That's just kind of a side note that I could go into for a while as well, but we'll just go and end with a challenge. Just look for one policy in your life, whether you're the individual and you are trying to be quote unquote normal. Where is one policy that you're trying to be this paper human that only exists on paper? Find one rule that exists only because someone assumed everyone is the same and you have adopted it as a judgment against yourself. So you try to fit into it. When you find it, recognize what it is a lie and stop applying it to yourself.

And then as a leader, if you're a leader and of course you could be both, but if you're a leader, recognize where you have this paper human policy where you're expecting all of those you lead. You're judging them all against this standard of what you believe is “normality” and you're applying it to everybody. And so anybody who thinks differently, performs differently, even if their output is the same, you're judging them as less than, you're judging them as “abnormal”, you're judging them as not good enough. Or what if their output actually is less, lesser quality, whatever less means in your specific field, in your industry, but are they actually doing less because they are of lesser quality or because they do not have the tools that they need? Are you trying to make them work within the tools that you're giving to everybody else and expecting them as a different human to have the same level of output?

Recognize any of these expectations that are built on humans being the same, humans being this idea of “normal.” And again, recognize it for what it is a lie. We are going to stop trying to be normal and we're going to stop expecting normal from people and we'll start demanding environmental integrity, both as the individuals working in it and as the leaders creating the environments. We're going to stop trying to be paper humans, we're going to stop trying to force people to be paper humans and start being real ones that actually withstand struggle, withstand resistance because the tools were built for us, the tools were built to help us, not break us.

This was Normal Is a Lie with Julie Harris. If you want more information on accommodations in the workplace, you can visit earnestemployee.com. That's earnest-e-r-n-e-s-t, employee.com. And if you want to hire me to speak with your organization or at your event, you can reach out via LinkedIn or email in the show notes. And you can always, by my book, boldly belong anywhere books are sold. Always remember, Normal Is a Lie. Be you.

Announcer: Normal Is a Lie was produced by Julie Harris and Blazing Kiss Media.