Why are we uncomfortable when other people aren’t much like us?

By David McElroy · February 19, 2015

At a gym where I go, there’s another member who makes me very uncomfortable.

The guy is about 30 years old and he has no apparent understanding of social boundaries. He talks to everybody in intrusive ways. He’s constantly repeating things that don’t seem appropriate to be talking about in public. He’s been known to open curtains in the showers to randomly talk with people.

Employees at the place tell me that people have complained about him and his family has been warned that people find him creepy and intrusive. He makes me very uncomfortable.

After he came through the locker room when I was in there Thursday morning — stopping to talk with people as though each were a trusted old friend — I found myself talking to a couple of guys after he was gone. We were speculating about what his issue might be — something on the autism spectrum was our best guess — and one of the guys mentioned that he had grown up across the street from him. He said the guy’s parents were strange, so maybe it was some sort of family lunacy.

After that brief chat, I walked into the shower feeling a deep sense of relief. I was surprised to realize that I felt relieved simply because I’d had another conversation with people who validated my feelings about the guy. The unspoken subtext of the conversation was, “That guy is weird. He’s not normal like we are. There’s something wrong with him. We’re the ones who are OK.”

And while I couldn’t disavow those feelings, they also left me very uncomfortable. I was judging someone for being different — as I constantly worry about people judging me for being different.

I’ve always felt badly alienated from most of the people around me. There have been times when I’ve tried to blend in, at least to some extent, but I’m less and less willing to do that these days.

More and more, I feel as though I’m a stranger in a strange land, to use the phrase that Robert A. Heinlein used for one of his most famous books. The older I get, the more I realize that all of my biggest fears are about being judged and rejected.

So how could I be so uncomfortable with this guy who was so different from me? How could I judge him and feel so relieved when others judged him as creepy, too?

I think the problem is that most of us truly want to be “normal,” but we think normal is whatever we happen to be. This isn’t literally true, of course, because I’m very aware that I’m the one who’s different in society. The people who are considered normal terrify me. But deep down, whether I like to admit it or not, I feel that others should be like me.

Other people should think as I do. They should have my values. They should come to my conclusions, at least in broad strokes. In areas where my thinking is conservative, they ought to be conservative. In areas where my thinking is comparatively liberal, they ought to be liberal-minded, too.

In other words, I’m still asking — to one extent or another, despite my best efforts — “Why aren’t you people more like me?”

Society is more tolerant than ever, in some respects, but I wonder if it’s more a matter of society simply changing what it’s intolerant about.

Just 40 or 50 years ago, it was considered a mental illness to be a lesbian or a gay man. Laws and societal norms conspired to “cure” gay people in very ugly ways. Today, the tables are turning entirely. Same-sex orientation is generally considered acceptable and normal. In fact, anyone who believes that such an orientation is wrong — even if the person doesn’t want to legally stop it — is considered socially unacceptable.

Society was intolerant of gay people not long ago. Now, there’s a general intolerance of those who believe homosexuality is wrong.

My purpose isn’t to argue which position is right or wrong. I’m only pointing out that society arrives at what it considers a “normal” position — and it punishes people who believe something different from the norm.

When you’re in the minority on some issue that has been chosen as a key indicator of normalcy, your life can be miserable. You will be pressured to conform. But when you’re in the majority — especially an overwhelming majority — the rightness of what you and others believe can seem so obvious that it doesn’t even deserve explanation or defense. It’s just obviously normal — and deviation from that norm is obviously wrong.

I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that this is simply a part of humanity that isn’t going to change. I don’t think we’re ever going to be tolerant. Yes, we’ll be tolerant of certain things and we’ll pat ourselves on the back for tolerating certain things we don’t like — but there comes a point at which we simply want other people to agree with us.

We want other people to be like us, because that’s what “normal” is.

Some people believe that humanity is perfectible and that we can all one day learn to get along and live together in peace. I don’t think so. I think we’re always going to find excuses to subdivide ourselves and hate others who aren’t like us. Even when it’s not outright hate, we’re going to find reasons that others should be like us.

What if the guy from my gym is the normal one? What if there’s something wrong with the rest of us for not acting like him? How would we ever know?

The more I think about such things, the more certain I am that we need ways to separate ourselves from each other. We’re not going to all agree. We’re not all going to get along. We’re not all going to tolerate the same things.

We need to find ways to group ourselves with others who find our ways of thinking normal or acceptable. Despite great hopes for universal tolerance and unity, we’re never going to have that — and someone is always going to be willing to use government force to ensure that others act like them.

I feel different enough that I feel as though I belong on another planet — with other weirdos who are like me. I suspect we’re all going to be better off if we have the political and social freedom to group ourselves with others who seem like us — although I’m betting the group of people like me will always remain vanishingly small.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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