I know it can be hard to watch a video essay let alone one recommened by some weirdo online, but this video is high quality, not lib and a newer channel that's putting out some decent Marxist stuff and could use a view bump. It's earned.
With that disclaimer, I was worried it was going to be super long, but it's only 35 minutes, and they fly by because she's such a great communicator.
Her channel description made me instantly subscribe:
Socialist video essays connecting concepts like usability, cognitive science, the arts, disability, and philosophy to socialist history and theory.
I'm a neurodivergent queer Marxist with a master's degree in human factors/human-computer interaction, a bachelor's in cognitive science, and a dream (a stateless, classless, moneyless society after a socialist transition period). Come join me in imagining a better world for everyone!
Hell yeah!
Thank you for the recommendation!
I'm sure this is fine but fuck me dead I hate the rise of video essays so much
"Hey OP I see you're passionate about this video! Too bad it's a shit format!"
Go away
Well yeah, it is? More people would be able to enjoy if it was also in text.
Revolutionarythot also went to the trouble of getting a transcript for subtitling (which I appreciate), so the only barrier is the pricing mechanisms of ~ content creation ~ in the 2020s
Go away
Nah mate
Nothing makes me feel older than how much content on the internet these days is video. Bring back blog posts, man. Let me read your thoughts. I know this is mostly a symptom of monetization practices, video is much more lucrative, but I dislike it so much.
sometimes i really just want a searchable tidbit of information that was usually in a longer blog post. video makes it so annoying to find and parse information.
i'm not even counting all the ceremony that has to be made of it (ads, long winded intros, begging for interaction, announcements every video yadda yadda yadda)
there is a videos community on hexbear, they like this kind of thing there
Good video, I've posted half of it below
Intro and part 1
Are you just a little bit weird? When you were a kid, did other kids make fun of you for some supposedly weird thing about you that really isn’t even that weird in retrospect? Maybe you have freckles, or frizzy hair (which just means you have a curl pattern), or glasses, or you’re really tall or really short or neurodivergent or queer (which kids can apparently pick up on) or have some other thing about you that stands out that put you on the receiving end of antagonistic comments as a child.
Whatever the case is, I assume you’re not completely average and are at least just a little bit weird or outside the norm because the average person simply doesn’t exist. In fact, the idea that there’s such a thing as the average or normal human wasn’t even adopted until the 19th century and has been disproven numerous times, yet it continues to permeate the public consciousness as if it were some timeless concept.
In this video essay, I’m going to debunk the utility of the concept of averageness and attempt to answer some questions, mostly using information from Robert Chapman’s fantastic book Empire of Normality: How did this normality paradigm come to be? Who does it serve? And what can we do about it? Normality is viewed both as something to aspire to if you want respect but also something that people intentionally avoid to attract attention or fulfill some secret agenda. You can see this view reflected in comments like, if queer people want to be accepted as normal, then just be normal! Don’t make it your entire personality! Or, all these people on TikTok are faking their autism and ADHD for attention, stop trying to feel special when you’re just NORMAL! rolls eyes in queer auDHD Or, media about people who aren’t cishet white men is the woke agenda at work because Brad over here with the khakis and grey polo is the peak of human normality and every video game and movie and everything should be about HIM!!!
Because to those people, other people who are outside of the general conception of what they deem to be “average” simply don’t exist! But actually, it’s normality and averageness that doesn’t truly exist. They’re not very useful concepts but they keep sticking around because it’s useful to some people, and to a particular ideology that we’ll talk about later.
1. The average person does not exist
In the late 1940s, the US air force started to become acutely aware of how averages don’t exist and aren’t particularly useful when its pilots kept losing control of their planes, leading to as many as 17 crashes in a single day at one point. Of course the initial blame was put on the pilots for their “human error” but the pilots denied that that was the case. I mean, you can’t really blame an individual participating in a system for that system being bad.
The real problem was actually the design of the cockpit, which was designed to accommodate the “average pilot,” whose dimensions were based on the average physical measurements of hundreds of male pilots taken in 1926. In 1950, researchers at Wright Air Force Base in Ohio figured that maybe that average was out of date and maybe pilots were larger now, so they measured over 4000 pilots on 140 dimensions like thumb length, crotch height, distance from a pilot’s eye to ear, and more, then calculated the average, believing that the updated average calculation would create a better fitting cockpit.
That is, until Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels, inspired by his own undergraduate thesis research in anthropology, used the data he gathered from measuring these pilots to determine if any of them actually were average. He found that of the 4063 pilots, none of them were average on all 10 dimensions that were deemed to be the most relevant for design. Also, if you picked three of the ten dimensions measured, only 3.5% of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. The average pilot simply did not exist and designing a cockpit for this “average pilot” meant designing a cockpit that fit absolutely no one.
When Daniels published his findings in a 1952 Air Force Technical Note entitled The “Average Man”?, he argued that if the military wanted to improve soldier and pilot performance, they would need to redesign the environments they interacted with accordingly.
This concept is universal - if you want the individuals within a system to function better, you should redesign the system rather than blaming the individuals who had no say over that system or its faults. That’s like, what you learn on day 1 of human factors grad school. I’m low key giving you my masters’ degree for free here. You're welcome. In his Tactical Note, Daniels wrote that “The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder. It is virtually impossible to find an average airman not because of any unique traits in this group but because of the great variability of bodily dimensions which is characteristic of all men.”
The military surprisingly embraced his suggestion, probably because the alternative was more plane crashes of unknown origin, so they started designing everything based on the principle of individual fit. Instead of making a cockpit for the average person, cockpits were designed to fit pilots with measurements within the 5th and 95th percentile on each dimension.
This design philosophy was officially formalized in 1967 in the military standard 1472 (MIL-STD-1472) handbook that I learned a lot about in grad school for human factors engineering. We had to calculate a lot of 95th and 5th percentiles of things. Also, fun fact completely unrelated to anything, when the military first told airplane manufacturers about this, the airplane manufacturers were like “nooo it’ll be too expensive to create new planes according to your standards!” but the military was like, tough luck buddy you gotta do it, so the manufacturers ended up creating cheap and easy to implement solutions pretty quickly. If you like innovation, you should probably know that limitation is the mother of invention and that innovating to avoid safety issues is a good thing. Much better than m*rdering your people. Again, not related to anything going on right now.
Anyway, although I’m obviously not thrilled with the US military or the US in general, boo US military, the way that we design products that people interact with but that are meant to make it easier for soldiers to perform their duties or to make profits can inform the way we design things within a system that has no need for war and no profit motive. And where workers own the means of production and are in charge of the government. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Though this design principle came about specifically to make things easier for the military, designing for the outliers and ensuring that as many people as possible can use a system is clearly just more effective, efficient, and safer than designing for some mythical average that doesn’t exist.
Part 2
2. Health as normality
So now we know that there’s no such thing as average and that designing for outliers creates better systems. But if that’s the case, why does the myth of averageness and normality persist? In order to answer that, we need to talk about the conditions that gave rise to the concept of normality in the first place. And it all starts with how we view health. For a long time, health was seen as a form of harmony, either within the body or between the body and its environment.
In Ancient Greece, it was about having a balance of your four humours - blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Ayurveda in India, Ancient Chinese Medicine, Ancient Egyptian medicine, Incan oral medicine traditions, and many other ancient societies also had their own conceptions of health as a balance, equilibrium, or harmony. This view persisted under feudalism, which arose from the fall of the Roman Empire, whose growth relied on slavery. Slave revolts led to landlords giving former slaves their own land to live on and till with their families. These newly freed agricultural workers swore fealty to local lords for protection and were able to work their own land, had access to common lands, and had duties to the lord in exchange for protection. Under feudalism, production levels were relatively low, most people worked from their homes or on their own land, and there weren’t set deadlines or quotas. Instead, people worked together as a family to produce what they needed to sustain themselves and lived slower paced lives with more flexible, self-determined hours. Chronic illnesses and disabilities were more accommodated as disabled people could still find ways to contribute to the household. People worked in relation to the seasons and health was thought of as harmony between various factors, including harmony of communities.
Then the Black Death wiped out up to a third of the population and with the new worker shortage, workers rebelled to demand better conditions. Meanwhile, some landowners began making profits from selling their products and accumulating and reinvesting their new wealth. Increased specialization of labor also led to greater production and population growth, and managing a larger population and larger production levels required stricter forms of measurement and quantification from the state.
This led to the formalization of surnames and standard measurements for measuring harvests and profits, which also coincided with classifications relating to ability, leading to a distinction such as the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor who weren’t eligible for help from the state.
The emerging property relations in Europe were also driven by European colonization of Africa and the Americas, during which adapted the early racist ideas Europeans held about the Irish and Slavs to justify their genocide and enslavement of Indigenous and Black people. This led to a new slave trade much more brutal than the Roman Empire’s slavery and out of all this, a global capitalist system began to grow.
The advent of capitalism coincided with the start of health being seen as normality rather than harmony. This context led up to the Industrial Revolution and the normalization of Cartesian dualist thinking - the idea that the mind and body are completely separate entities and that the body is a machine that can be fixed with proper intervention. Cartesian dualism is absolutely awful, I have a whole video about it.
During the Industrial Revolution, the development of new technologies led to labor becoming even more specialized, leading to even higher productivity and profits. Merchant capitalism transformed into industrial capitalism and the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production by definition, were able to invest their profits and accumulate more capital, making them even more wealthy, powerful, and influential than the kings and lords of feudal times. Aside from the aristocrats left over from feudal times, everyone else was now a free worker selling their labor to the capitalists, an enslaved laborer forced to work against their will, or unemployed and part of a new surplus population.
Women’s work, which was mainly unpaid domestic labor, was also no longer seen as real work. Industrial capitalism led to poor living conditions, overcrowding, pollution, new epidemics and diseases, and so on, all of which was already terrible for the human body, and all of which reframed the view of the body from a dynamic organism that could be in out of balance depending on a number of factors, including the environment, to a machine that was either working or broken depending on whether it could fulfill its productive potential. As machines became standardized, the ideal worker was standardized too.
Workers had to be able to travel to the factory and work with the pace and production norms of the industrial workplace, and anyone with an impairment that prevented them from doing so came to be seen as broken, thus cementing able-bodiedness as the norm and creating a surplus unemployed population who either couldn’t work or had to compete with other workers for employment. Uh congrats, if you're unemployed, you're part of the surplus. Which capitalism requires Enslaved workers in the American South were the first to be scientifically studied and manipulated to increase productivity and maximize output and thus profit.
This management and study of workers was then expanded to all workers after the slave trade and slavery were outlawed, although the 13th amendment makes slavery legal as punishment for a crime so it wasn’t really outlawed in the US. Under capitalism, workers were now pitted against each other and forced to compete for employment, and once they were employed, their performance was compared to everyone else’s.
So if you hate having to do those annoying performance review things at work, blame Descartes and the industrial revolution. And the French Revolution too!
Wow that's awesome thank you for the transcript! Since it is very long I suggest that you put it in spoiler mode so it is easier for users to scroll the comment section
Part 3
3. The glorification of averages
Statistics was originally invented by astronomers in the 16th century, and in 1801, German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss developed a formula on which he based a bell curve shaped graph, which became known as the “error curve,” where errors were understood as deviations from the norm. This paved the way for the use of statistical analyses of normality in other fields and associated normality with correctness and abnormality with error. Deviation from the norm was not seen as a good thing. During the French Revolution, this concept of statistical normality was first applied to medicine. The revolution aimed to free humanity from religious dogma and the feudal system, which created a new system where everything was quantified and standardized without any of that woo woo spiritual sh*t. (Honestly sometimes I think we should bring back the woo) These conditions led to the creation of the metric system, the standardization of weights, map making surveys, and more things that were purported to be universal and objective.
Also, many people perished or were injured or executed during the revolution, which was much longer, more brutal, and bloodier than any of the Russian Revolutions, I’m just saying, and because of this, physicians in Paris were able to experiment with applying new statistical ideas to patients, bodies, and records.
It was in this context that Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet became the first to propose the concept of human normality as a science, and his work and influence still impact our lives today unfortunately. He was a mathematician, musician, and astronomer, so he was familiar with statistical normality.
During the revolution, his observatory was occupied and used as an armory, which disrupted his work and ultimately leading him to find ways to apply statistics to humans rather than to celestial bodies. Quetelet sought to to quantify and statistically analyze pretty much everything he could about humans and compare those metrics to the larger population. According to Quetelet, the average man was the ideal person, basically the pinnacle of perfection, and anything outside the norm was a monstrosity and a mistake of nature. His viewpoint cemented the idea that being normal or average is good and thus moral and aspirational.
Quetelet’s viewpoint was very convenient for the bourgeois ruling class, as it provided justification for bourgeois hegemony by glorifying the average, moderation, and the middle way of life. It’s good to be in the middle! You should be happy to have a moderate life! The bourgeoisie are doing you a favor by being at the top! Due to Quetelet’s influence, people started to be ranked based on their mental abilities, and this ranking was framed as a timeless natural order rather than a new development arising from the material conditions of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Which is what it was. The idea of normality effectively justified and reified the various hierarchies that arose under capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism and allowed cognitively abled people to establish a monopoly on the means of production. Intelligence became grounded in statistics rather than ancient wisdom, thus categorizing middle-class, cognitively-abled white people as closer to an idealized “normal,” especially compared to disabled people, working-class people, and Black and Brown colonized subjects. Being subnormal became increasingly stigmatized and feared.
Quetelet’s influence also led to the emergence of various fields emerged that attempted to apply statistical methods to the brain and mind in order to reify capitalist property relations, racial nationalism, and the hierarchies of ability, social class, gender, and race. These fields included phrenology, psychiatry, psychology, and psychometrics, all rooted in a Cartesian understanding of the body as a working or broken machine.
Quetelet also inspired Francis Galton, known as the father of eugenics. Galton was obsessed with the concepts of genius and heredity and aimed to study them scientifically. He was also inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, believing that since natural selection occurs due to random mutations in the environment that allow organisms to adapt to their environment over time, that means that individuals could be more or less fit than other individuals, which could be framed as them being more evolved or better adapted. His 1869 book Hereditary Genius combined Darwin’s theory with Quetelet’s statistical methods. He compared heredity among multiple family trees, individuals, and races, judging them in terms of “eminence” and created a ranking system that placed white upper-class Europeans and Ancient Greeks at the top and Black Africans and Indigenous Australians at the bottom. He didn’t even comment on women because according to him, women were unlikely to be geniuses.
Despite receiving criticism about the fact that he ascribed “eminence” to average men who were actually helped along by random incidental advantages, he continued his work and created multiple early forms of psychometric and biometric tests, including intelligence tests, and developed numerous devices for testing abilities like reaction times.
If you hate standardized testing, blame Galton! Because I'm sure he had something to do with those too. Honestly standardized tests don't even test what they're supposed to test, they just test how good you are at taking a standardized test. Which you know, some people are, and that's fine, and some people are not, and that's also fine, who cares?
