I wish I had the time to write an article which lived up to the promise of that title. But all I have is a moment and a few ideas.

If there is one thing you can say about normal people—perhaps because it’s the one thing that most defines normality—it’s that they seem to intuitively understand the value of civil interaction. Normal people are polite. Normal people refrain from offending others unnecessarily. Normal people speak in moderate tones using ordinary language. Normal people try to be friendly. Normal people are a dying breed.

I’m not all that normal, by those standards. I can be, but I’m not as dedicated to the belief in the value of normal behaviour as I could be. It’s only recently that some last part of me has grown up and realized that society, and even civilization itself, is at risk primarily because of a shortage of normal people. And that for those of us who could be normal if we only tried, the question of whether we should put in the effort to act like normal people has stopped being a trivial question. It’s become the essence of determining whether our societies can continue to function effectively.

When most people believe in the importance of being normal, of adhering to some kind of standard of civil behaviour, those few who can’t or won’t behave normally can be tolerated to the extent that they give back enough to benefit society. Unfortunately, abnormal behaviour is now at epidemic proportions. What do I mean by abnormal? Partially, I mean illegal and serious anti-social behaviour, the kind of anti-social identified by psychiatrists: violence, wanton destruction of public and private property, drug abuse, criminal negligence, and flagrant disregard for written and unwritten social laws.

Take driving. People don’t respect traffic laws in Toronto. It’s an epidemic. Even not counting deliberate red-light and stop sign running (which today amounts to essentially an outright rejection of the validity of traffic control indicators by the whole of society), you would probably see a traffic infraction in ninety seconds or less on an average street or highway in the Greater Toronto Area. Turning or changing lanes without signals. Excessive speeding. Ignoring rules of dedicated traffic lanes. Straddling lanes. Using private parking lots to circumvent intersection rules. But that’s only the outright law breaking. Consider use of cell phones and other distractions while driving. And then there’s just the general quality of today’s drivers. They suck. Normal people take pride in their skill at such everyday tasks as operating a motor vehicle. I think the number of people on the road (who knows if they even have licenses) couldn’t pass a strict driver evaluation test probably is in double digits. People simply don’t care.

Consider politics. In and out of election time, politicians are a deceitful, scheming bunch. But you can take it for granted that for every underhanded act by a politician, some fringe supporter is actively slandering, libelling, or engaged in illegal acts to undermine representatives or supporters of their enemies. There is a lot of hate in the world, but what’s disturbing is to know that Canada is a hotbed of hateful people and attitudes. And it’s threatening to undermine society.

How else but as the result of a culture of hatred and contempt can you interpret the scandals that have rocked American business over the last few decades? It’s well known that there is mistrust and dislike between the wealthy and the poor, but the extent to which regular people have been lied to, cheated, abused, manipulated and ultimately robbed by the owners and operators of big businesses—aided and abetted by members of the government and civil service—approaches industrial revolution standards. And the reason that the wealthy can get away with this is not lack of laws, but lack of conscience. You don’t have to feel bad about hurting someone you hate. And you are free to hate anyone who you believe doesn’t share your values. And poor and wealthy people obviously can’t share the same values, right?

What about “elites” and … well, what’s the opposite of “elite”? Is it “normal”? What kind of elite are we talking about? Not the moneyed, per se, but the educated. What is the deal with the way educated and … uneducated? is that fair? … people feel about one another? Is it really a question of over-educated and under-educated? Overly intellectual (rational) versus overly intuitive (emotional)? You might think it’s because the elite dismiss average people as incapable of meeting their standards … and you’d be right. But what standards are they espousing? And in what fantasy world would a majority of people have university degrees and professional credentials, and what would the elite be like in that world?

Elitists are those who appoint themselves superior to the average person. From that point, they take a hopelessly schizoid view of those over whom they have become elevated. It is a varying mixture of paternalism and disdain. It is a great mistake of the educated, analytical mind to consider others as incompletely formed: intellectual children. And since intellectualism has ascended all other human qualities, anyone with the intellectual capacity of a “child” is invariably considered a child in other ways. Ironically, it’s this kind of skewed understanding of maturity which children themselves display when they attempt to put themselves above other children in fatuous arguments.

Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t stop there. If all the intellectuals in the world were socially immature, the rest of the world could still get along. It’s easy enough to placate the self-described elite. You do it the same way that you let children think they’ve won: give them what they think they want. They end up spoiled, but not necessarily dangerous. But, again, unfortunately, the crisis of delayed social maturity currently affects our whole world. We’re all under-developed. We’re all guilty of trying to avoid blame and put it onto some other person or group. We’re all children playing at being grown-ups.

The painful reality for the world’s shining lights of intellectual achievement, however, is that by electing themselves superior, they also appoint themselves as responsible for making things right. But they aren’t doing it. Instead, they game society and the world into feeding their over-developed egos at the expense of developing the rest of their personalities. They pimp out their intelligence by making toys and gadgets in exchange for fame and fortune, all the while ignoring the obvious ills of the world which they so haughtily claim sole right to understand and repair, but more significantly, ignoring the less obvious ills which include their own abnormal, anti-social and ultimately hateful attitudes towards those they think are different. And the result of their contempt and disregard is that those whom they abuse rightly hate them back.

In the political arena, there is always some level of grudging tolerance for elite attitudes, but only during the temporary deals which are struck between some elite group and whatever larger political movement they think they can use to forward their freakish plans for changing the world. It happens on the left and the right. But I think, historically, it’s been much more common on the left, because of a couple of things. One is that the left is traditionally the home of the outcasts, which attracts many kinds of intellectual elite. Liberalism means openness, sometimes to its own injury. (Likewise, conservatism means closed-ness, sometimes to its own injury.) Liberals are more open to ideas—interpretative uncertainty—if not necessarily to understanding them completely. Similarly, the liberal elite is more open to moral uncertainty.

The cognitive dissonance which so plagues elite liberalism is the need to be open to ideas, on the one hand, while also needing to closed to bad ideas and poor thinking, on the other. To whit, elite liberals can be both supportive and dismissive of the same people at the same time. They can try to help people while simultaneously using them as a means to an end. Such contradictions understandably make people uneasy, if not downright hostile. People want to know who their friends and enemies are. The worst kind of enemy is the one who masquerades as your friend.

Which is why intelligent, educated, liberal people need to get over themselves. They need to drop the superiority and belief that the rules don’t apply to them. They need to rediscover the importance of getting along. They need to stop trying to think their way through relationships and public policy, and learn how to use their guts and instincts. They need to reconnect. If they are right, and they have the best combination of intentions and abilities, then they need to get face to face with what they are trying to accomplish, instead of getting lost in the theories of how they are going to accomplish it.

The world has only shown much tolerance for elite intellectuals insofar as those people have given back something of value. Well, we’re quickly approaching a point where the payback for indulging the wishes and dreams of intellectuals of all kinds is dwindling away to nothing. And the people who are going to suffer for it are those self-aggrandizing, moralizing, self-appointed intellectual superiors who don’t have anything to show for it. The amoral and manipulative ones will find their places working behind the scenes, parasites conniving with more brutal accomplices to take advantage of the chaos and uncertainty. But where will the well-meaning ones go? The ones who aren’t that self-interested, and as a result haven’t learned the skills necessary to communicate their ideas to those with the political power to realize them?

Well, the truth is, it doesn’t matter. The future will once again belong to those who know how to relate with normal people in normal ways. In the mean time between now and then (when things settle down), everyone is going to suffer. And how long the uncertainly lasts is completely dependent upon for how much longer the worst amongst us continue to refuse to act normally. Whether they’ll do so by choice, or only after battling to the death with one another, remains to be seen.