Episode IX.06 - The Tyranny of Mediocrity

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One of the most frustrating things about a relationship with a woman is her emotionality.

I know for me, this has often been a thorn in my side when iteracting with women romantically.

The way that every thing can seem to be perfect on the surface, and then suddenly, due to one

word, or due to nothing at all apparent to my eyes, the entire thing can suddenly go south, with

the woman suddenly seeming to wanting to sink the entire relationship based on something

that I literally could not see or feel, or did not see the harm in, such as a casual expression that

I made or a word that I chose to use in conversation

or even for no apparent reason at all.

Like me, then, a lot of men in the same situation will take refuge in something they see in the

endless sea of pop-psychology that is the Internet.

Maybe she is a narcissist, we’ll tell ourselves. Maybe she is bipolar. Maybe she has borderline

personality disorder.

Centuries ago, while struggling in such romantic catharsis with a man or a woman, our

ancestors may have taken refuge in religion, they may have appealed to the gods, or

sacrificed an animal, or asked a witch to cast a spell or brew a potion.

Nowadays, we tend to engage in what I call ‘mystic psychology’. We explore various candidate

neuroses, and we believe perhaps, that once we have found the patron saint of our lover’s

diagnosis, maybe Our Lady of PTSD, or Saint Peter the Depressed, St. Mary Ann Margaret of

Generalized Anxiety Disorder, we think, with this knowledge, we will be able to understand our

disturbed lovers, to bring them closer to us,

or perhaps, to finally distance ourselves from them.

And so psychology, rather than the tenets of christianity, has become the new metric by which

we distinguish between that which is salutary, that which is worthy of approval, and that which

is deemed outside the pale, even, that which is evil.

Like any new religion, psychology has gained its converts over the last century and a half.

People have flocked to practitioners of this new faith-based belief system. Now most people

go to therapy instead of confession. They take psychotropic drugs instead of receiving the

sacraments.

But along with participation in the rites of this new religion, people must also accept its

dogmas and its doctrines. Just like believers in many other religions, the followers of

psychology must make at least an intellectual assent to the substance of its creed.

And by this turn of phrase, the followers of psychology, I refer to most of us, because, like it

or not, most of us are, by default, participants in the church of psychology, even if most of us

are not really aware of its fundamental teachings.

This lack of awareness, this flimsy credal compliance, goes for most religions, anyway, today in

the West. I mean, ask any American catholic about the meaning of transubstantiation and see if

you get a coherent answer.The same goes for psychology. Most of us just have a haphazard grip on some buzz words,

like narcissism or psychopathy. We don’t really know what happens behind the veil that

surrounds the altar of psychology.

So, once you begin to study it, to study the ideas that are promoted by psychology and

defended by its practitioners, you suddenly realize that you have indeed been following a

religion this whole time. Even though, you may have been telling yourself that this time, this

religion, it was different.

You didn’t even think that it was a religion.

But then, like me, perhaps, you began to see the leaps of faith involved in it all, or you

recognized the mystic appeal of the subconscious as some kind of Vedic godhead. You

noted where the sign posts of dogma had been laid down, to demarcate the places to which

your mind is not allowed to wander.

And keep in mind, as I meander through this podcast, this episode is very much about your

mind not being allowed to wander.

Now, there is a body of doctrine over which the various sects of this religion squabble: genetics

versus environment, Adlerian, Cognitive-behavioral, psychoanalysis, Attachment theory, etc.

But, this is not an episode about psychology, though psychology as promoted today plays a

part in what I have to say. Instead, I am more interested in the way that modern psychology

has played a role in erecting the walls that confine us: that imprison us mentally, emotionally,

spiritually.

You often hear the adage about “the walls that divide us” as a people, but I myself am more

worried, on a sociological level, about the walls that confine us, like the side-walls of a box

containing all of us.

And, at the moment, just for a moment, I am particularly interested in the way that modern

psychology plays a role in women’s lives.

You know, it actually really seems strange to me that psychology is such a popular subject

among women. I mean, something like 4 out of 5 college psych majors in the US are women.

I suspect that a lot of people, men and women, are unaware that psychology really got its start

as a method that men used to determine why women “were so crazy.”

Look it up if you don’t believe me. In the 19th century, so-called psychologists fingered

women to orgasm to rid them of their “hysteria”. Hysteria is just the Greek word for the womb,

and it was applied to madness because, according to psychology as we know it, women are

prone to craziness.

Don’t call me a misogynist. It’s the psychologists that hate women. It’s in their literature.

Anyway, back to the topic. Remember how sore I was getting, how befuddled and

disappointed I was trying to understand a woman’s behavior? Once upon a time, I was

wallowing in self-pity and bemoaning how crazy women were, and I ate up all this internet

psychology about narcissism, personality disorders, etc. Like any conspiracy theorist or

doctrinaire worshipper of any religion, I now had the framework, all caps here, theframework, for understanding the cruel universe around me. Things were making sense.

These women were disturbed. Their emotions were manifestations of psychological disorders

created by unloving or absent fathers, competitive, angry mothers, parents with drug or alcohol

addictions, or some other cause.

But, because I am always, ultimately, skeptical of anything that I find myself starting to

believe, I began looking deeper into the matter. I think I was first tipped off when some self-

appointed, internet guru who was discussing these things happened to mention that

“most people with borderline personality disorder seem to be women.”

Now, for those of you not steeped in internet academia like myself, BPD, or Borderline

personality disorder, is a clinical diagnosis in psychology in which the subject displays a

handful of the following personality traits:

Emotional instability

Impulsive behaviors

Paranoia

Propensity for self-harm

negative self-image

And they typically experience unstable relationships with others

This sounded familiar. It sounded like some of the people in my life who had caused me the

most harm. And, initially, in my butthurt, this confirmed for me what I had long suspected:

These women were crazy.

But it seemed strange to me. These internet sources were also saying similar things about

bipolar disorder and a bevy of other states of being and mindsets that psychology has deemed

disordered, disturbed, unwell, etc.

And it seemed to be predominantly women that were being diagnosed with these things.

According to the AI overview that I get when I search for these terms on the interwebz, I get

the following result:

The ratio of women to men diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) is about 3:1.

some studies suggest that clinicians may have a slight gender bias in favor of females

Now, if I really were a misogynist, I would have just kept on down this road, letting all this so-

called data confirm my suspicions about women. Instead, I started asking myself why. Why

were women so much more frequently being diagnosed with these mental disorders?

I won’t pretend like it took me a lot of time and research to figure out why. I mean, the answer

is pretty obvious right? When you see something so skewed against one gender or race, you

immediately, at least, suspect bias.

Once I started looking more into the origins of psychology, it became obvious real quick, one of

these things where you wonder why somebody else hasn’t loudly taken notice yet. I mean,

from the 19th century on, into at least the mid-20th century, psychology was a profession

outrageously dominated by men, who spent most of their billing hours examining women to

see what was wrong them.Anybody having a problem with this, yet?

Now, before I go on, don’t get the idea that I do not actually believe in mental illness or the

usefulness of psychology as a field of study and as a profession. Especially when it comes to

things like psychopathy, real psychopathy, not the term that just gets thrown around every time

somebody doesn’t like somebody else or thinks that they’re mean so they must be a

psychopath.

No, I watch all the Netflix documentaries just like you, I know about Ted Bundy, the Zodiac

Killer, Dahmer, Kaczincski. Yes, mental illnesses exist. And psychology, by which I mean the

study of the mind, not necessarily the modern profession that calls itself psychology, yes,

psychology is necessary and good.

And I am sure that there are good, well-intentioned psychologists who are legitimately curious

about the human mind and who truly want to help people.

But understand also that psychology has always been around. It’s not new. It’s not like people

didn’t identify mental illness before “the profession of psychology” appeared. You can go back

through literature and find all sorts of references to mental illness throughout history.

Even the inquisitions of the middle ages, they more often determined mental illness than

witchcraft or demon possession as the cause of someone’s behavior, and then they would just

let the suspected witch go in those cases, because they didn’t have asylums back then, didn’t

have those containers that we have now to detain people whose only fault is that they are

unusual.

You can read, even in the ancients, of people talking about psychological phenomena.

Even down to people remarking in old books something like, “You know how a man, when he

has a certain character flaw, how he will perceive it in others rather than himself.” This is just a

reference to the idea of projection, how someone accuses someone else of a behavior or belief

that they themselves actually manifest but fail to recognize. But people have likely been aware

of this facet of human psychology for many thousands of years.

You don’t have to live with other people for very long to see all the manifestations of basic

personality quirks.

It wasn’t modern psychology that discovered, for example, this phenomenon of projection.

Psychologists just gave it a name.

And they billed you for it. And you paid your tithe.

People already knew of these psychological diagnoses thousands of years ago, they just didn’t

think that they needed an expensive degree and an office with a couch to identify what was

wrong with someone.

So, yes, I believe in psychology, but even just glancing at the history of the modern profession

of psychology, it’s obvious that there were and are a lot of men just abusing and manipulating

women.But let me move more directly now to the real topic of today’s podcast. Believe it or not, the

topic today is not specifically psychology, nor is it women.

I’m an expert in neither.

What I meant to talk about today is mediocrity.

Perhaps another, clumsier term for what I am getting at is, boringness.

Middle of the roadness.

Because, after realizing all this about the appalling way that people diagnose each other and

designate every quirky, unusual behavior as some sort of illness or mental defect of some sort,

that requires therapy or medication or worse to rectify,

only after this did I begin to understand that we live in a time in which all acceptable human

behavior has been limited to a very narrow little strip of the whole behavioral continuum.

Imagine all the possible ways that a person can act or behave or believe, imagine all those

possible actions and beliefs on a strip of paper, or on a number line if you like, and then

envision somebody marking out a very narrow little piece of that continuum, that number line,

and saying,

all normal behavior is found here.

The rest, the entire rest of this nearly infinite number line of possible behaviors, the rest is

abnormal and should be stopped.

We must occupy that thin strip of the behavioral continuum or suffer judgement. It’s the narrow

road that you’ve been told to keep walking since you were a child.

Remember how they told you in school to keep your hands to yourself, not to talk in class, to

stand in line?

You were in formation, that whole time, they were preparing you for the box that you would

someday live in, and for the box that they will someday bury you in.

So I started this whole episode going off about women not because I am a misogynist, not

because I actually think that women act crazy -

but because I think that they should act crazier.

(Music)

If you listen to this podcast, you are probably also aware that I love history. In particular, and

what drew me to do the podcast to begin with, was my love of Greek history. Last year I

finished the production of the entire 42-episode ancient Greek history series and am currently

producing episodes on Ancient Roman history.

And, while researching things like Greek culture and their religious practices, I learned about

the Maenads.

Now, this is not the place for in-depth, detailed discussion of ancient Greece and it’s religious

rites and so on. I’ve already done that. If you’re interested in learning more about the ancientGreeks, you can go to my website, western-traditions.org, and check out my second podcast

series, called the Greek Sun.

For our purposes today, though, the maenads were groups of ancient Greek women, or women

living in the Greek milieu, anyway, who dedicated themselves to the worship of the wine-god

Dionysus. The Roman or Latin term for the same women was bacchantes, because they

followed Bacchus, which was just the romanized version of the name for Dionysus.

Anyway, these maenads, these worshippers of Dionysus, they did not perform their acts of

worship in a conventional temple or shrine. According to the lore, they gathered in the

wilderness and they drank wine until they became intoxicated.

And that’s when the fun began.

They would then run screaming through the woods, killing small animals or even men that

they encountered. They tore them apart with their bare hands. They handled snakes, they

draped them over their shoulders, they ran about nude or dressed in wreaths and leaves. They

practiced unknown, strange rites under the light of the moon, burning herbs to the gods,

drinking and/or smoking various substances.

You may have actually dated a girl like this. Maybe it’s bringing back memories or triggering

your relationship trauma.

Now, my purpose here is not to analyze the story about the maenads, or to investigate it’s

truthfulness, whatever that means.

Rather, this was one of many stories about our ancestors, both men and women, that opened

my eyes to just how constrained we are today, how boxed in we are, by our societal norms.

You see, nobody was taking the maenads off to sanitariums and imprisoning them and forcing

them to listen to some egghead’s pontifications about proper behavior and how to control our

emotions.

Now, I’m not saying, either, that people were perfectly okay with these crazy women running

about committing atrocities, either. What I am trying to say, simply, is that the spectrum of all

human behavior is broad, very broad. And, ultimately, I guess, I’m lamenting the fact that we

are permitted to occupy such a small portion of that continuum without being diagnosed,

indicted, and imprisoned, whether that’s physical, emotional or medicinal forms of restraint.

In our long history as humans, we have been mass murderers and gentle saints. We have been

maenads shouting gibberish and we have been humble Christians listening to the Virgin Mary

saying that she gave birth to God.

We have been noble leaders like Charlemagne and Alexander the Great ——both of whom also

had multiple sexual partners of both sexes and who both were responsible for the deaths of

thousands of men, women and children, if not more.

We have been St. Francis dealing with sexual temptation by running about in the snow naked

to literally quench his desires.

We have been Egyptian pharaohs marrying their own daughters and having offspring with

them.We have been George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fighting for democracy but owning

slaves and sleeping with them.

Now, I’m not about to say that all these things, or any of them, are good things, or things that

we should approve of. You yourself may agree with some of the actions mentioned and

disagree with others. Hopefully you do disagree with some of those things, or you’re no son of

mine.

My point is that what has been acceptable, or permissible, in any given time period of our

history, has varied. Varied considerably. During the Middle Ages in Europe, you wouldn’t dare

suggest that it was crazy to profess not only that a virgin gave birth but that she gave birth to

God himself. The same goes for daring to say that a man can’t rise from the dead.

Now, these days, it’s fashionable to say that these things, things that people throughout

society once professed devout belief in, that these ideas are just myths and that real, authentic

belief in them is a sign of mental illness.

Now, though, people promote the idea that a man can become a woman, and vice versa,

simply by declaring it to be so, and to deny this is a sign of, well, mental illness. You’re

probably repressed. You’re just in denial, I guess. Or something.

But such a belief used to be considered crazy. And not that long ago. In the psychologists’

original manuals, before the 1970s, just plain old vanilla homosexuality was considered mental

illness.

Now, its just a choice on the menu.

And, to be clear, I’m not, in this podcast, arguing for any particular view on any of these issues.

The Virgin Mary or Dylan Mulvaney, you can have your pick, I don’t care.

I guess what irritates me is the sense that we are, each of us, being strangled, like a man in the

slow, suffocating embrace of a python. There is so little that you can do or say and not be

labeled.

You know, I used to be a schoolteacher a long time ago. Did you know that students who have

a hard time following instructions in school are often diagnosed as having, I’m not kidding, they

have

Quote - oppositional defiance disorder - unquote

They actually made a disorder out of the fact that lots of kids are stubborn and defiant!

As a schoolteacher myself I saw this so many times. They classify these kids, mostly boys, and

then they medicate them and they become somnolent drones in your classroom, in the box

that safely contains the teacher and the other students as well. Mission accomplished big

pharma!

The woman who suddenly explodes on you with emotion because of something that you said,

or that she thinks that you’ve said? Maybe she’s bipolar. Let’s medicate her. The kid who talks

in school all the time and doesn’t want to stay in his seat? He’s hyperactive. He has ADHD.

Let’s medicate him. The man who believes in conspiracy theories, that we never went to the

moon? He’s delusional, let’s medicate him.Now, at the same time, I don’t want to seem like I’m saying that people who suffer from any

form of mental or emotional instability should just be left alone, or encouraged in their

particular behaviors.

If a mad woman runs naked down my street with burning leaves in her hair and tries to tear a

squirrel to pieces in the local park where my kids play, I’ll be happy when the police subdue her

and take her away. I can talk all I want about freedom and anarchy but, like most of you

probably, that kind of craziness in my little corner of suburbia just isn’t going to fly with me.

In fact, you know, the following may seem like a tangent, but just bear with me. It provides a

little dose of reality to moderate the madness that I will ultimately be promoting in this podcast.

Back in the early days of Netflix, when they had almost nothing streaming, your subscription

was like $7 a month, and you had to order movie discs in the mail, literally in the mail, in the US

mail, to come to your house and watch movies. Back then there was a documentary on the

Netflix website called Dark Days, it was streaming for free, back when streaming was still

revolutionary.

Anyway, the documentary was about homeless people living down in the subways and tunnels

below New York City in the 1990s, and about their lives and viewpoints, and so on. It was

fascinating.

At the end of the documentary, the authorities got involved and they cleared the people out of

this tunnel system. They destroyed their structures and removed the homeless people living

there, against their will, to public housing, and to the assistance of other social programs. I

don’t remember the exact details.

But, anyway, the pseudo-anarchist in me was initially angry seeing these people being ripped

from their freely chosen lives and the new culture that they had created down in the tunnels.

“Stop hassling people, man!” The little hippie in me cried out. I was outraged, I tell you.

But, anyway, the documentary goes on, in its final minutes, to interview at least one of the

subjects, as I recall, a vagabond who lived in the tunnels and was featured in the documentary

and he was later relocated to a housing project with government assistance.

And this guy was grateful for the intervention. He was grateful for being forced out of the

tunnels.

He was like, “man, I lost years of my life down there, living in the dark and rooting through the

garbage everyday.” And it struck me, even back then, that sometimes people really do benefit

from someone coming into their lives and forcefully doing something to make their life

materially, emotionally or otherwise better.

So, the point is, I’m not saying, let the mad be mad. Let people with crippling depression be,

let the neurotics and the OCDs waste away in their bizarre activities and remain social outcasts

for life and so on.

But, then, what am I saying? What do I want?

I don’t think that any kind of law or repeal of law satisfies here. I’m not a big believer in the

idea that passing more laws is good for us. I think most laws are just ways to oppress poorpeople, because rich people have lawyers to avoid the consequences of breaking the law,

while poor people just go to jail for breaking the same laws.

Is it possible to even form a society that does not engage in this behavior, anyway? That

doesn’t promote some activities and forbid others?

I mean, the people in the early middle ages venerated the stylites, these were men who

climbed atop pillars and spent the remainder of their lives there, praying and fasting. They

spent their whole lives sitting on top of a pillar!

And people back then genuinely thought that a virgin gave birth to God,

and these people had their own sets of other behaviors that were considered beyond the pale,

outside the scope of what’s considered proper now, their own continuum of acceptable and

unacceptable behaviors..

Certain theological opinions were forbidden, certain sexual activities were forbidden or at least

publicly frowned on. Divorce was not permitted. Just failing to receive the eucharist once a

year got you in trouble, for Pete’s sake.

And more libertine societies like our own have a different set of behaviors that are condemned.

Are you a man that is repelled when you learn how many other men your girlfriend has slept

with? There’s something wrong with you.

Are you a woman who thinks that trans women should not play sports with you or share a

bathroom with you? There’s something wrong with you.

Those opinions, now condemned, were once considered normal, now they’re small-minded or

transphobic.

But I don’t really think that we are a more liberal, or freer society, even with so many activities

and opinions now legally permitted to us.

I think that we are a society in a straitjacket.

How did we get into this straitjacket, though? Who wrapped us up in it? When did this

happen?

I blame the Victorians.

(Music)

In college, I had this writing professor who was doing her own research on the Puritans. She

would occasionally just share some things that she had learned with us in her creative-writing

class. This was back in the 90s, so her research was not just Googling something for 25

minutes and deciding she was an expert. She was actually going to libraries and ordering

hard-to-find books and taking notes and composing papers. So this was a serious endeavor.

Anyway, she told us some revealing things about the Puritans. As a movement, the puritans got

their start after the Reformation, but their heyday was the 17th century, when some of their

number landed on the shores of British North America and founded a new colony you might

have heard of, at Plymouth Rock.Now, we have all these knee-jerk ideas about the Puritans, especially with regard to sex. And

we tell ourselves what confined lives they must have led, how dim and gloomy their outlook

must have been. As a Catholic myself, this idea always appealed to me since there is mutual

animosity between these two religious flavors, the Puritan and the sensual, the Protestant and

the Catholic.

My writing professor’s research really opened our eyes, though. She told us things about the

Puritans that just made their lives seem so vibrant and engaging. And she completely dispelled

this idea about gloom and restrictive lifestyles. For one thing, I remember, she told us how the

puritan women smoked pipes.

Which just seems hard to fathom or picture.

And most interesting to us students, all of us about 20 years old and as horny as you might

remember being at that age, most interesting to us was that she told us how frankly the

puritans discussed sex.

But how could that be? I mean, weren’t they all repressed?

Well, in a way. Let there be no doubt. The puritans had strict ideas about sex. It was a one

man-one woman affair, for sure, let there be no confusion on the matter, their sexual

limitations were those laid down in the Bible. And sex was definitely meant to happen within

the confines of marriage. Sure, they had infidelity among themselves, as in any society, but the

rules were definitely strict, compared to today, in the sense that sex was only properly done

within the context of a marriage.

But, unlike many of us, even those of us who consider ourselves modern, free-thinkers, they

didn’t blush when they talked about it, when they discussed sex. Body parts, the act of coitus

itself, their discussions of such matters were explicit.

And when you think about it, after a while, you realize, of course they spoke frankly about sex.

I mean, if you have ever spent any time on a ranch or a farm, and the puritans were largely,

though not exclusively, an agricultural society, but if you have ever been around herds of

animals all day, you are going to see plenty of copulation. Plenty. Those flocks and herds don’t

get bigger just through patience. They’ve gotta fornicate and they do it right out in the open.

And everybody on the farm, including little kids, would witness this stuff. They would see the

animals going at it in broad daylight.

And, I mean, remember, also, that bedrooms are a modern innovation. When you hear about

some married couple five hundred years ago having a lot of children, realize that they made

most of those children lying on the floor, in the the only room in the tiny house, right in front of

their other children, and probably other relatives. Maybe even in front of their own parents.

He’ll, they were probably going at it in simultaneous pairings lying on the floor throughout the

room.

I know it seems hard to accept, this shocking behavior, this apparent sexual exhibitionism in

front of family members and so on, because we have all these lies in our head about our

ancestors, about how they behaved and what they believed and what they said. But there’s no

way around it. There just weren’t any bedrooms where mom and dad could go and get the job

done quietly while hiding it from the other kids.Now, I am not trying to tell you that the Puritans were a bunch of perverts glorying in their open

sexuality in front of the whole world. They, and for that matter, nearly everyone in the whole

world before the advent of the bedroom, just treated and thought about sex differently than we

do. They had a different viewpoint, and attached different stigmas and taboos to sexuality.

They weren’t offended by the idea of the sexual act, but rather were more concerned about

with whom you were having sex.

So, you didn’t have to explain the birds and the bees to puritan kids. They were too busy

noticing the animals mounting each other and watching their parents make the beast with two

backs as they drifted off to sleep every night.

And, again, I’m not suggesting any thing prurient here, not suggesting people were getting off

with this apparent exhibitionism. I’m saying sex was just part of the business of life, and like

any matter important to life, it had rules yes, but it wasn’t something hidden away, in a box.

It violates the idea, though, that modern schools indoctrinate us with: that in the evil past

people were conservative and sexually repressed and only now are we enlightened and free-

thinking and able to talk about sex.

Where did we get this idea, though? And why are we shocked to imagine that our ancestors,

even the really religious ones, talked freely about sex and even got it on right in front of others?

Why do we assume that people used to be more repressed, that things like sex were never

spoken of? I mean, one read of the Bible and you can see that religious people, once upon a

time, were not afraid to talk about sex. The book of Leviticus has some really interesting

passages about how you shouldn’t have sex with animals, and this is a high religious text. I

mean, they wouldn’t talk about it in their most sacred text, in the Torah, if it wasn’t

happening, and they talk about this in the Bible just as glibly as they talk about not stealing or

not killing or not taking the Lord’s name in vain.

But, today, it is common for people to think otherwise, that only today have we freed ourselves

to talk about things like sex freely, when, in truth, we’re not even really allowed to talk about it,

we’re just allowed to say certain scripted things.

How did we get this perception of our past, that it was so repressive?

Because of the Victorians.

And by Victorian, I don’t just mean exclusively the people and the culture that lived and existed

in England during the reign of Queen Victoria. It applies, really, in the context of this

conversation, to everyone in the whole Anglosphere since sometime, let’s say, in the 19th

century.

About the time that modern psychology was born, actually.

Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences!

The Victorian period appears to have had an incredible impact on our society. And I’m not

going to say that this was necessarily all bad or anything. You can look up the issue yourself if

you like and see how things changed in the anglosphere, in the English-speaking western

world, as a result of this period. The Victorian period is, admittedly, probably responsible for abig improvement in the way individuals approach hygiene, for instance, in the way our societies

deal with sanitation.

It also, ultimately, had a big impact on reducing our alcohol consumption.

A topic for another podcast would be how an enormous number of Americans, pre-prohibition,

were just barely functioning alcoholics, and that includes the founding fathers. Look up their

bar tabs during the constitutional convention, sometime.

But, anyway, no one who studies the Victorian age would deny that it also brought about a

certain prudishness in society.

When people read English period pieces, or watch a film about something in British history,

these works are often based in the Victorian period, or, even if they are not from that period of

history, the creators of these period pieces will, consciously or unconsciously, make the plot

and the characters reflect Victorian values, as if we could reshape the culture of earlier eras

according to a Victorian model. It’s like we, particularly Americans, set the narrative all of

English history with a sort of Victorian frame.

When, really, you would be quite surprised how English culture has differed over the years.

Read up on how English culture went on a pendulum ride after the Elizabethan age, then into

the English Civil War, which was the result of a reactionary revolution in the 17th century, a

conservative, puritan revolution, and then English culture swung back into licentiousness with

the restoration that followed the ultimate failure of that conservative revolution.

But the Victorian Age was, in many ways, not all ways, but in many ways, it was a prudish

period, a conservative period. In terms of social matters, especially. This was the age of the

characters that we see in books by Charles Dickens, and in books by the Bronte sisters, like

Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre, even if in some cases those books do not strictly fall within

the time period of Victorianism, but, I’m being a little generous with the timeframe here.

Men, in these books and in the films adapted from these books, Men court women

elaborately, and the characters in these stories often go through long periods of sexual

abstinence early in life, and they marry late. If they do engage in any sexual shenanigans, it is

only rarely and they may be consumed with shame or social stigma later.

There is an old story, not factual, about how the Victorians used to cover-up the slender,

graceful legs of their pianos because they were sexually suggestive. The story turns out to be

false but the fact that people found it believable really tells you something fundamental about

the victorians.

And all this prudishness, even the legendary kind, is an approach to sexuality that is actually

quite opposite to the sexual mores of the previous age in the Anglosphere. Post-restoration

England, from AD 1690 onward, was actually quite libertine in terms of sexual mores. And I’m

not coming in to this saying whether that was good or bad, only that sexual morality, and our

human thoughts about sexual morality, differ from age to age.

We do not live at some “progressive” endpoint in history, having “evolved” from earlier sexual

and moral conservatism. No, we are just at one end of the pendulum swing. Things will be

victorian again someday. Count on it.Now, getting back to that Victorian period, another thing that happened, which also

transformed our society as a result of the Victorian period, was the growth of the middle class,

the growth of the idea of the middle class. Maybe, if I wanted to look deeper into this and

prepare a master’s thesis, maybe it is actually the growth and presence of a middle-class

which brings about the sexual conservatism, the Victorianism, really, about which I have been

speaking.

I know, I know, we seem a long way from the beginning of this podcast. What does this have to

do with women? With psychology? Why is this podcast called the tyranny of mediocrity? Why

the long digression on Victorian sexual morals?

I’ll tie it all together. Just continue to be patient a little while longer.

If you ever dabble in sociology and history at all, like me, you may come to realize that the

sexual behaviors of the poor and the rich have often been very similar. Down through the ages,

the poor, even in so-called conservative times, have usually had a lot of pregnancy out of

wedlock and extra-marital affairs.

Now, you may have some sort of knee-jerk reaction to this, a part of your brain saying that this

couldn’t possibly be true, that during the middle ages everyone was catholic and anyone who

strayed from sexual purity would be outcast, etc.

But that’s all just bullshit. There is zero support for that idea, which exists only in your head as

a legend. Any review of medieval history reveals just how common things like infidelity and

bastardy were.

Not only were these things common among the poor, but among the nobility as well. Think

about how many medieval stories are about sexual infidelity and the numerous bastard children

of kings and dukes and so on.

The actual story of King Arthur’s conception is quite naughty, let me assure you.

Do you ever notice how you, if you are a little Victorian like me, how you feel shocked by the

behavior of the very rich in the media today, and it makes you wonder why they are acting like

animals, like, gulp, poor people? Because the whole idea of sexual propriety, of prudishness,

so to speak, is a middle-class idea.

We get upset when we see celebrities acting out with sexual abandon but they are just

behaving the way that most people have always behaved. Because most people throughout

history have either been very poor or one of the lucky few in the upper classes. The existence

of a middle-class is not consistent throughout history. Often, societies do not really possess

one.

The United States in the 20th century had a vibrant, and very socially conservative, middle-

class. The United States of the 21st century, for better or worse, looks as if it will be returning

to the norm, however, possessing virtually no middle class, a tiny upper class, and a horde of

poor people. And most of those people, rich or poor, will be sexually unrestrained.

Sexual activity among humans, among the rich and the poor, has always been very liberal, very

free. I’m not trying to push here for one take on sexuality or another, I’m just saying that

humans are basically inclined toward sexual liberty.And I’m not trying to say that such sexual freedom was actually promoted at a specific time

or among a certain class or culture of the past.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s just like speeding on the freeway. None of us wants the speed limits or

other traffic laws repealed, but we all speed and we all forget to turn on our blinkers

sometimes, and so on. So people historically encouraged one another to be better in regard to

sexual morals, sure, even the rich thought it best to keep bedroom matters under as much

control as humanly possible, but they were always, ultimately, pretty lax about the

enforcement.

And I’m not saying that all poor people necessarily glory in sexual abandon. Poor people also

have moral codes and wish to order their lives like anyone else. But sexuality has always been

one place where outlets have been permitted, even if discouraged, by people from all

backgrounds.

Except among the middle class. Middle-class sexual morality, when it has existed, has

always been more strait-laced. Even though you hear about things like swinger clubs and so

on in the suburbs, those things are usually hidden and not open. It’s all about keeping a clean-

cut exterior while the kids go to school and learn how to become middle-class as well.

And so when we see people seeming to imitate the sexual outlandishness of celebrities, it is

most likely because the those people are really just reverting to the mean, to the basic

inclinations and actions of humans with regard to their sexuality since time began.

And when we see people on certain social media apps which will not be named cause I might

get banned, when we see them behaving outrageously and getting naked in public and having

sex with new partners every other week and having babies out of wedlock, this is just the way

it has always been.

I know that there is a part of your brain that denies this, that insists that, prior to now, people

were generally chaste, or encouraged to be so, and only certain behavioral outliers got into

trouble every now and then.

But its just not true. I’ll give you examples one last time. Think about King David in the Bible,

or King Solomon, with one thousand wives and concubines. Think about the story of Herod

and his step-daughter in the gospels. About Emperor Nero, who publicly married a

castrated transvestite. And this was two thousand years ago. Think about the sexual

exhaustion of all the kings and queens you’ve heard about, about Shakespeare probably

having a young male lover, about Walt Whitman.

And understand that the poor, the truly poor in these times, were just as liable to all these

sorts of things, to irregular sexual habits, as a nice way to put it, they were just as liable as

anyone else.

We just don’t hear about this stuff because history rarely writes about poor people, but, ask

yourself, why would the church reinforce so many laws about sex if people weren’t regularly

violating them?

I mean, like I said, we only have speed limits on the road because so many of us like to drive

fast. If everybody tended to drive slow, we just wouldn’t have speed limits. There wouldn’t be

any point in the law. So our ancestors had all these injunctions against sexual irregularity

because most of our ancestors were…sexually irregular.

But, now, today, we have this weird tendency to see the past through middle-class,

victorian lenses. Even if we do not philosophically agree with the victorians about these

issues, in particular the sexual issues, even if you consider yourself a progressive type, it

doesn’t seem to matter.

And this is really important. If you are some free-thinking, self-proclaimed leftist and a

supporter of gay-rights, trans-rights, women’s-rights, etc, this still applies to you. You are a

victorian. You see things through this lens that I am talking about. You’re not as liberal as you

think you are. You find it difficult to see the past through anything but the lenses that were

placed over your eyes decades ago when you were in school.

That’s what really intrigues me. Even if we consider ourselves sexually liberated, we still

perceive things, especially things from history, and set them in a Victorian frame.

In a middle-class frame.

And with that middle-class frame we really like to classify things, don’t we, to keep things

neat. To put things in boxes. And we really like that narrow strip of the behavioral continuum,

that place of predictability, of the clearly known numerals of the number lines, nice small

numbers that don’t have any fractions or square roots or algebraic symbols associated with

them.

And, oddly enough, this has become a particularly American way of perceiving things, l speak

here particularly of things like politics and sexual morality.

I mean, people just don’t think like this in other parts of the world, even in the more religious

parts. They don’t have this victorian restraint on the way that they perceive human behavior.

But maybe you still don’t get it. Maybe you are still saying to yourself, “Rob, what are you

talking about? America is the place where every sexual behavior is accepted.”

Is it, though?

Or is it that certain sexual behaviors, the ones that used to be unacceptable, were just labeled

and put in boxes and placed on that continuum, placed within the acceptable boundaries?

Here’s another a digression but it makes the point. Or it makes a point, anyway.

I remember, a long time ago, when I worked in a religious mission with refugees and the

homeless on the border in El Paso and in Juarez. An American woman I worked with, a sort of

semi-free-thinking protestant, made a remark about

how the Puritanical views of the Latin people, due to the influence of the Catholic Church

in their lives, had repressed them sexually.

I was immediately confused and amused by this remark. First of all, I thought, how could

Catholics be puritan, since puritans hated Catholics for their sensuality? Puritanism and

catholicism were diametrically opposed on so many levels.And I was also confused because the people I encountered then, and later, when I lived in

Central America, were vibrantly sexual, and quite liable to having children out of wedlock.

Meanwhile, the American girl talking to me about latin people’s puritanism was allegedly a 23-

year-old virgin who was holding out for marriage.

My point, with that weird story, is that people, in our culture, anyway, tend to see the past, and

religion and the world, through that victorian lens, whether they agree with Victorian mores or

not.

And, even when they proclaim to be more liberated, they themselves actually lead proudly anti-

septic, victorian lives.

I’m not saying that this girl at the mission had Victorian values or whatever. Maybe she did,

maybe she didn’t. But this girl saw this other culture - which did indeed have strict rules about

sex, in terms of the commandments and the Bible and the Catholic church and the Virgin Mary

and priestly celibacy - she saw them as being repressed by the very mores that actually

shaped our own society, the Victorian morality.

And she was unable to see, with those blinkers on, that however latin culture may have had

rules about sexual and other behaviors, it was certainly not repressed. And, the greater loss

here is not just that we see other cultures through this Victorian lens, but we are unable to see

them as they really are. There is, no doubt, an accurate way to characterize and understand

latin culture or any other culture. But we will never achieve that understanding thanks to the

blinkers that were placed over our eyes when we went to school

As anyone who has ever lived in a latin country can tell you. It’s a far more sensual culture,

without necessarily being scandalously libertine.

And, conversely, its really American culture, which people trumpet as being so free-thinking,

its really American culture that is repressed sexually. America - Where we have found a million

ways to sanitize sex, to render it meaningless, to flush away its consequences, to hide it, to

make it private.

But what does this Victorian mindset, this enduring Victorian influence, have to do with the

tyranny of mediocrity?

(Music)

You know, I’m gonna have to get to the point here sooner or later.

Here goes.

In America, we like to tell ourselves that we are freer than everyone else. That we possess and

exercise so many more freedoms than the rest of the world’s population. We have many rights.

Rights to free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of expression.

But, those rights, all of them sounding so beautiful, are really only able to be exercised within

boxes. Boxes with labels on them. Boxes just full of mediocrity.

And everything in these boxes is just as tasteless as the food in the boxes on our supermarket

shelves. And full of artificial flavors and drenched in salt to give it some taste.Maybe I’m getting a little too far into my metaphor here.

Let me be more plain, then, and just announce my manifesto.

In our contemporary period, we have taken all unusual behaviors and turned them into

madness. All behaviors, like sexual behaviors, and thoughts that do not fall into a neat, labeled

box have become forms of insanity.

Modern psychology, born out of a middle-class, victorian mindset, has helped to remove and

reclassify the behavioral outliers that used to make society a much more interesting place. As a

result, our culture has become the milquetoast porridge that it is.

And when we do accept alternative forms of life, such as the way that homosexuality has

become accepted in recent decades, we immediately strive to turn these behaviors into

something that we already approve of. Hence the mad dash, over a decade ago, to legalize gay

marriage.

If we were going to accept “gay people”, it appears, we had to make sure that they lived like us

“normal people” and got the same tax benefits, etc.

You know, I remember talking about this issue, back in the nineties, with a childhood friend of

mine. I had grown up with him and he had come out of the closet sometime during our

sophomore year in college.

This was perhaps a year after he came out. We were having lunch and talking about politics,

life, etc, and this topic, which was in the news, came up.

My friend was hesitant about the idea of gay marriage, which was being floated around even

back then, and, indeed, he was not even interested in being accepted by society in general.

He certainly wasn’t interested in being married then, though we’ve been out of touch for

decades and perhaps he is married now.

But he said something that I’ll never forget and that I wish more people would take to heart,

today, that more people would meditate on this statement and then just go for whatever they

want in life, no matter how extreme, no matter what the current zeitgeist calls for, whether they

wanted to be a mountain-climber, a religious hermit, a rock star, or even a raving-mad maenad

burning sage and running naked in the wilderness or even in the park where my kids play.

When asked about gay marriage, my friend said:

“I don’t like the idea of being pushed into the mainstream.”

“I like being a deviant.”

(Music)

I’m gonna come full circle here. I’m gonna tie it all together.

I know you want that.

You want it all to make sense. You want to be able to assign this podcast a topic name, and

then file it away.Here goes.

You see, we are really oppressed by our own version of freedom, by our carefully cultivated

and classified social liberty.

I focused a little heavily on our modern, so-called sexual liberty, our condom-wrapped,

medicinally-altered sexual liberty, because that is the topic that really gets our attention, but

this theme of mine applies to all of our other behaviors and actions and choices. Our

personality quirks, our emotional tendencies, our religious outlooks, our political views.

We still stigmatize outlier behaviors, it’s just that the things that we permit now are different

than what they used to be. And some of the things that were normal in the past are now

abnormal. Now they lie somewhere outside the permitted number line on the continuum of

behavior. We took those things out of the box of permitted things and put them in the box of

prohibited things.

Victorians like things neat. They like them in boxes.

We still stigmatize. We still criminalize. And now, we also diagnose. And we medicate. And

we mutilate other people and we mutilate ourselves so that we can fit into the new boxes

that we have prepared, the boxes on which we’ve written, with a big black permanent marker,

the word Normal.

I would write some more words on that box.

Tasteless. Soul-less. Meaningless. Dick-less.

I mean, everybody in that box is a coward. They made whatever compromises they had to, so

that they could fit inside that box with everyone else.

I should know,

because I’m in the box with you,

tyrannized by the same mediocrity that surrounds us.

We hold in our emotional outbursts, we hold in our religious mania, our sexual enthusiasm, our

political viewpoints, because somebody told us that the walls of the box might cave in if we let

those things out.

This mediocrity, it makes up the walls of that box and those of us inside the box are

desperately supporting it, our eyes turned toward those fragile cardboard walls, holding them

up with our outstretched arms.

We love the tyrant, we need this tyrant. The box.

We fear the mad woman that runs naked through the park with leaves burning in her hair. She’s

emotionally disturbed. Lost in life. Dangerous.

But, sometimes, I wonder if she is the only one of us that is really alive.If she sees the stars only as the mysterious fires in the sky that our ancient ancestors counted

and named after gods. If she calls demons what we call hormones. If there is no normal for her,

only the ocean-tide movement of the soul inside her and a finite life sparking and burning in the

darkness just like those stars.

If her madness is the only real freedom.

(Music)