Deviance Quotes

I fucking love you!” He grabbed each side of my face, slamming his lips against mine. “I love you so much, Pigeon,” he said, kissing me over and over. “Just remember that in fifty years when I’m still kicking your ass in poker,” I giggled. He smiled, triumphant. “If it means sixty or seventy years with you, Baby…you have my full permission to do your worst.” I raised one eyebrow, “You’re gonna regret that.” “You wanna bet?” I smiled with as much deviance as I could muster.

Yeah, well, I'm crazy, but I'm not stupid, hopefully. And I think we're all a bit crazy if we do anything that's deviant. I've studied a great deal on deviance and aberrant behavior. Most of the interesting people I've ever met have been deviant in one form or another.

It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting.

The deviant and the conformist...are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination.

Normal is the average of deviance.

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

Not all deviance is negative; without it, we'd never change the world.

You shut up. I'm older and I'm not going to stay at your palace of decadence and deviance." --Brody to Erin.

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.

Deviant' is the weapon of the normative to discredit and demonize the Other.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you. The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’ As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’ So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him. -San Angelo Letters to an Incipient Heretic

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial of women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, on from another, by defining "respectability" and "deviance" according to women's sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.

Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors

The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances, and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking.

Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.

One of the deadliest tools of powerful systems is narrow definitions of what is "normal" and the reduction of difference to deviance.

Deviation from the word of God is sentimentality and says 'you're right' to this one, and 'you're right' to that one, and the guy in the middle is an ass-hole.

The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed. I don't suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.

Almost every variation of Christianity had been in the business of suppressing sex and its enjoyment, but suppressed desires didn’t just disappear. They festered. They created guilt and shame and, in the worst cases, deviancy.

When you're accustomed to being considered 'normal', difference feels like a perversion.

Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.

I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away.

If someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, belittle them. It's better to be an asshole than look stupid.

Progressives' don’t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.

What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?" I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. "Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Melphi relplied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

All social groups groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as "right" and forbidding others as "wrong".

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.

all witches must keep up a certain level of deviance in their personal lives, or we should be expelled from the union.

But the rhetoric of deviance was far from extinct.

One man's deviance is other man's lunch break.

We have decided to lock people up for social deviancy these days. We tell ourselves that we’re not running debtors’ prisons, that this isn’t Dickensian

Deviance is woven into the fabric of a person’s genes, as is intelligence and moral fortitude. I would ask you how

I think with any characterization there's a point where you empathize, no matter how much of a deviance his or her actions may be from your understanding of humanity.

Illness is used to define wellness. Abnormalcy marks the boundaries of normalcy. Deviance demarcates the limits of conformity.

I’m just grateful they found each other in the Warthu Bera, rather than a place like Irfut, where they would have been beaten, then forced into servitude as temple maidens for deviancy.

In other words, groups use ostracism as a tool to discipline and minimize deviance. Not surprisingly, being at odds with their in-group is something most people would rather avoid altogether.

Therapy labels as sickness what might otherwise be judged as weak or willful actions; it thus equips the patient to fight (or resign himself to) the disease, instead of irrationally finding fault with himself. Inappropriately extended beyond the consulting room, however, therapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning of the capacity for self-help—in the categories used by John R. Seeley, between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence. "What says 'you are not guilty' says also 'you cannot help yourself.' " Therapy legitimates deviance as sickness, but it simultaneously pronounces the patient unfit to manage his own life and delivers him into the hands of a specialist.

Madonna Kolbenschlag suggest that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, if she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance. I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence. This stance can be assumed from the inside or the outside. Whichever place we choose, the important thing is having the sustained will to be, act, and speak from the ground of our feminine souls.

What a beautiful madness, to explore the darkness in one's own soul and find joy in the unearthing of such wicked thoughts.

You just asked me to marry you,” he said, still waiting for me to admit some kind of trickery. “I know.” “That was the real deal, you know. I just booked two tickets to Vegas for noon tomorrow. So that means we’re getting married tomorrow night.” “Thank you.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re going to be Mrs. Maddox when you start classes on Monday.” “Oh,” I said, looking around. Travis raised an eyebrow. “Second thoughts?” “I’m going to have some serious paperwork to change next week.” He nodded slowly, cautiously hopeful. “You’re going to marry me tomorrow?” I smiled. “Uh huh.” “You’re serious?” “Yep.” “I fucking love you!” He grabbed each side of my face, slamming his lips against mine. “I love you so much, Pigeon,” he said, kissing me over and over. “Just remember that in fifty years when I’m still kicking your ass in poker,” I giggled. He smiled, triumphant. “If it means sixty or seventy years with you, Baby…you have my full permission to do your worst.” I raised one eyebrow, “You’re gonna regret that.” “You wanna bet?” I smiled with as much deviance as I could muster. “Are you confident enough to bet that shiny bike outside?” He shook his head, a serious expression replacing the teasing smile he had just seconds before. “I’ll put in everything I have. I don’t regret a single second with you, Pidge, and I never will.

This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance.

Deviance of any type, she argued, was no more than a mismatch between an individual’s way of navigating through life and the catalog of behaviors and emotions that her society tended to prefer and value. Normalcy in any society was only an edited version of the grand text of all possible human behaviors; there was no reason to expect that every society would do the editing in precisely the same way. Ways of being in the world were abnormal only in the sense that the local context created “the psychic dilemmas of the socially unavailable.

All that is really necessary to hate someone is not to give a shit about what happens to him. And when we don’t give a shit about what happens to a whole group of Americans because of the color of their skin, that is racism.

Like that breeder-woman sitting at the bar, who thinks it's a buzz to go into a gay joint and has no doubt heard somewhere that this is one. Her lurid get-up's a joke, ludicrous. She's the type who dons the camouflage-green combat trousers, wraps a bandanna around her head and paints herself with black lipstick, imagining all the lesbians in the joint'll have the hots for her. Not so much imagining as secretly hoping. Naturally, no one goes and sits with her. She's been here before, and everyone gives the ice-cold shoulder, yet she still turns up again and again. Someone might argue we're zoo animals for her. But I've another theory. For her, we're noble savages, a kind of grey area outside the respectable, minutely organized community, an untamed wilderness it takes a lot of guts to step into. But if you do dare, there's a glorious smell of freedom floating around your trousers and giving the finger to society, making whoever an instant anarchist. Certainly, for her, coming here is like putting a washable tattoo on your shoulder : there's the thrill of deviance with none of the dull commitment - and she'll never have to wonder whether she's too weird to be seen out before dark.

The public debate plays out in an infinite regress of blame over who’s responsible for those who fail to fit the standard erotic mold. This is variously ascribed to the people choosing to be the deviants they are, porn, the Devil (always a shoo-in), bad parents, poor role models, our sexually repressed culture, or the psychiatrists who keep needling sexual minorities by branding them mentally ill. It’s a rabbit hole of endless (and usually endlessly bad) arguments. Morally, all that matters—and allow me to reiterate that because I feel it’s quite important, all that matters—is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it’s not, and we reject the person anyway, then we’re not the good guys in this scenario; we’re the bad guys.

I’ll deliberately order a jasmine tea and a fruit plate just to make a point to the client that I’m a serious and disciplined professional. I usually accompany that with a quick line about how shitty the hotel gym is. “The treadmill shakes too much at high speeds” is a fan favorite. The client is almost always impressed.

Maybe perversion was not illness at all. Maybe every form of deviance was just a potential force of union and community, one that had not yet organized itself into political lobbies, self-help groups, bowling leagues...Once you grant legitimacy to one sexual proclivity, what's to stop the others from demanding their rights too?

Social normalization of deviance means that people within the organization become so much accustomed to a deviant behavior that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety,” Vaughan said in an interview. “But it is a complex process with some kind of organizational acceptance. The people outside see the situation as deviant whereas the people inside get accustomed to it and do not. The more they do it, the more they get accustomed.

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

Unless a theologian has the inner fortitude of a desert saint, he has only one effective remedy against the threat of cognitive collapse in the face of these pressures: he must huddle together with like-minded fellow deviants⁠—and huddle very closely indeed. Only in a countercommunity of considerable strength does cognitive deviance have a chance to maintain itself. The countercommunity provides continuing therapy against the creeping doubt as to whether, after all, one may not be wrong and the majority right. To fulfill its functions of providing social support for the deviant body of "knowledge," the countercommunity must provide a strong sense of solidarity among its members (a "fellowship of the saints" in a world rampant with devils) and it must be quite closed vis-à-vis the outside ("Be not yoked together with unbelievers"); in sum, it must be a kind of ghetto.

if you’re dumb enough to get caught cheating, you probably don’t belong on Wall Street.

(Never stay on the same floor as a client; a

I don’t need to be told how handsome I am every twenty feet; I just want to drink. There

For a generation of kids who grew up without a home phone, basic telephone etiquette is increasingly an issue.

Organised religion is the heroin of the masses. The unforgiving singularity of the desert allows for no deviance.

men: their petulance, their sexual deviance, the way they resorted to violence when they wanted to control

Such helplessness shouldn’t turn me on so fucking much, but it did. Always had. My dad’s efforts to teach me right from wrong hadn’t touched on sexual deviance.

in a society concerned primarily with process, the notion of deviance might have much less, if any, significance.

Work burns the sickness from a man's mind," Warden Worth proclaimed. "It is the philosopher's stone that transmutes the base metal of deviancy into the pure gold of obedience.

I've always loved girls, and our insufferable town sees this love as deviance.

Deviance, like pretentiousness, is in the eye of the beholder, in the gap between one individual’s baseline of acceptable behaviour and the actions of another.

Hip-hop has had the most sophisticated vocabulary of any American musical genre. I read endlessly its poetic text. But parents and grandparents did not see us listening to and memorizing gripping works of oral poetry and urban reporting and short stories and autobiographies and sexual boasting and adventure fantasies. They saw—and still see—words that would lead my mind into deviance.

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

Look around. The hantavirus is waiting for you. Ebola and the tropical rainforest is cooking up all kinds of brews to make sure that the population is kept in control. All these things are necessary. Why is there an increase in sexual deviance right now? Because it goes against procreative sex. Mother Nature does not want more children. This is not a time of birth. It is not a time to give birth, it's a time to die. The Bible says all things under heaven and that includes death as well as life. You out there, you comfortable ones, you point the finger. You say the junkie is the problem, you say the sexual deviant, serial killer, racist, and the man who hates his fellow man is the problem. But they ain't the problem. You're the problem. The sexual deviant, the murderer, the serial killer, the taker of human life is the cure, you're the problem.

In fact, psychiatrists expanded the scope of social deviance, pathologizing almost everyone in the process, effectively closing the chasm between sanity and insanity by showing that “true mental health was an illusion,

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

I don’t suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.

It was easy to show that criminals sometimes clustered in families. But it was a great leap to claim that the essential traits of criminality or deviance were the products of families—much less that these traits were transmitted from parent to child, as Goddard had tried to show with the Kallikaks. After all, societies differed on the basic definition of what constituted criminal behavior. Criminologists, for example, tended to pay scant attention to rich criminals or well-placed miscreants: the tax cheat, the unscrupulous businessman, the corrupt politician. Their theories of innate criminality seemed to be based exclusively on the poor: the pickpocket, the public drunkard, the street prostitute. That fact was itself evidence of how culturally determined the definition of crime was in the first place.

for most of us, television’s overpowering images of Black deviance—its regularity and frequency—are impossible to ignore. These negative images have been seared into our collective consciousness. It is no surprise that most Americans wrongly believe that Blacks are responsible for the majority of crime. No doubt, many of the suspects paraded across the nightly news are guilty criminals. The onslaught of criminal images of Black men, however, causes many of us to incorrectly conclude that most Black men are criminals. This is the myth of the criminalblackman.

The changeover from one medium to another presents both opportunities and challenges. New technologies empower us, to be sure; but never without some cost which we universally fail to anticipate. We must avoid celebrating the advantages too enthusiastically, lest we miss the meaning of the challenges. For once the changeover is complete, the opportunities and challenges fully assimilated, we will certainly be impotent to undo them.

Has she noticed any frightening pattern of deviance? “Oh, please,” she said, smiling. “Among trainers, pit bulls are considered cheap dates, actually. They have a reputation for being incredibly easy to train. They’ll pretty much do whatever you want. Some of us want a bit more of a challenge.

Antigay activists have historically maintained that same-sex sexuality is a lifestyle choice that should be discouraged, deemed illegitimate, and even punished by the culture at large. In other words, if lesbian/gay/bisexual people to not have to be gay but are simply choosing a path of decadence and deviance, then the government should have no obligation to protect their civil rights or honor their relationships; to the contrary, the state should actively condemn same-sex sexuality and deny it legal and social recognition in order to discourage others from following that path. Not surprisingly, advocates for gay/lesbian/bisexual rights see things differently. They counter that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice but an inborn trait that is much beyond an individual's control as skin or eye color. Accordingly, since gay/lesbian/bisexual individuals cannot choose to be heterosexual, it is unethical to discriminate against them and to deny legal recognition to same-sex relationships. (...) Perhaps instead of arguing that gay/lesbian/bisexual individuals deserve civil rights because they are powerless to change their behavior, we should affirm the fundamental rights of all people to determine their own emotional and sexual lives.

question this in the Blue Church is to out yourself as a heretic. Deviance from the myth, especially backed with science from credible sources, is prohibited. Even though Google asked for his feedback, they didn't really want it. His paper challenged the world view of those in charge and therefore it deserved only shame, ridicule, and a purge.

This produces teen vulnerability to peer pressure and emotional contagion. Moreover, such pressure is typically “deviance training,” increasing the odds of violence, substance abuse, crime, unsafe sex, and poor health habits (few teen gangs pressure kids to join them in tooth flossing followed by random acts of kindness). For example, in college dorms the excessive drinker is more likely to influence the teetotaling roommate than the reverse. The incidence of eating disorders in adolescents spreads among peers with a pattern resembling viral contagion. The same occurs with depression among female adolescents, reflecting their tendency to “co-ruminate” on problems, reinforcing one another’s negative affect.

If you don't like my queer ways you can kiss my fucking ass

the acquisition of, and failure to discard, possessions which appear to be useless or of limited value.”4

What counts as too much stuff? When do overflowing cardboard boxes spill into insanity? What is useless trash and what is valuable treasure?

Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

a primitive mirror-on-a-stick bomb detector, the mascot of the third world.

It’s hard to accuse someone of not working hard when he’s got that earpiece as a constant reminder of how busy he might be. He

Goldman Sachs is famous for rigidly refusing to hire someone and promote them at the same time. For

to wall cross [where investors agree to receive nonpublic information, keep it confidential, and not trade on it] every

gardening leave—a legally required paid vacation to prevent conflicts of interest or sensitive information from passing from one bank to another.

Perhaps it is the realization that I am going to take this toilet’s virginity with a fury and savagery that is an abomination to its delicate craftsmanship and quality.

(a thousand hearings aren’t worth one seeing, and a thousand seeings aren’t worth one doing).

Seeing trumps hearing, but doing trumps seeing!

It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.

[The] excited, angry, upset, or calm choreography of fingers fluttering is simultaneously medicalized and moralized: re-encoded as '[an] odd or repetitive way of moving fingers.' The quiet play of a lone child in a busy playground is now seen as a pathological sign pointing not to personal choice or preference or even to social exclusion but to (medical/moral) deviance.

Nothing blunt remained within him for bludgeoning deviancy to death. What should be did not exist. Deviancy prevailed. You can’t stop it. Improbably, what was not supposed to happen had happened and what was supposed to happen had not happened. The old system that made order doesn’t work anymore. All that was left was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing.

Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with them, since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any place or space-time, they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia.

When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.

Despite our many foibles, the Filipina helper community loves working for the gweilos. And by foibles, I mean behavior that is in complete disregard for all societal norms and basic human decency. My

Darkness must not be confused with light. Grace must not be confused with license. Unchecked sin must not be confused with the good news of justification apart from works of the law. Far from treating sexual deviance as a lesser ethical issue, the New Testament sees it as a matter for excommunication (1 Corinthians 5), separation (2 Cor. 6:12–20), and a temptation for perverse compromise (Jude 3–16).

In 1993, New York's Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart from shared standards. When unwritten rules are violated over and over, Moynihan observed, societies have a tendency to 'define deviancy down' - to shift the standard. What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

If we expand our definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted on women, if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized. Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners.

Since the late 1990s, scholars in disciplines as diverse as literary studies, anthropology, sociology, museum studies, and marketing have raised collective eyebrows at hoarding’s pathologization. Together they concentrate on the diagnostic politics of material deviance, the social constructions of an aberrant relationship with your things. One finds extreme accumulation to be “a psychiatric concern with deviance in terms of material culture.

I’m having yet another dinner, but this time with more of the working-level capital markets origination bankers. These guys are considerably more risk averse; they don’t have the stomach for sales and trading and lack the smarts for M&A.

Half a decade after Frost and Gross’s “The Hoarding of Possessions,” an article in Comprehensive Psychiatry found that “the disorder belongs to a similar category of social deviance as homelessness, which does not necessarily represent mental illness.”9 In their efforts to puzzle out the phenomenon, the authors approached hoarding as less of a mental illness located in the brain and more of a socialized phenomenon located in the world-at-large—the inverse of its current reception.

Basis points,” or “bp,” represent one hundredth of a percent, in reference to the yield, or cost of borrowing. “Area” is a term that simply means “plus or minus”; sometimes it is quantified and sometimes it is left intentionally undefined. This

The last person into their respective office the next day, as measured by their Bloomberg login status, has to pay for the liquid lunch that follows, where we spend three hours nursing our hangovers and reliving the events of the previous evening.

the sociology of deviance – specifically, the way that human groups use seeming statements of fact the way baboons use bared teeth and threat postures, to stake out territory and drive off outsiders. As far as we know, baboons don’t try to use their territorial displays to make sense of their world, and this is to their credit. Human beings, alas, are not always so clever, and the resulting confusions play a massive though rarely recognized role in mangling communication in any complex society.

Only now the words coming out of her mouth are news to me. “But in return for this unprecedented request, Soldier Everdeen has promised to devote herself to our cause. It follows that any deviance from her mission, in either motive or deed, will be viewed as a break in this agreement. The immunity would be terminated and the fate of the four victors determined by the law of District Thirteen. As would her own. Thank you.” In other words, I step out of line and we’re all dead. Another force to contend with.

Intrigued by how people became intrigued by this topic, The Hoarders is a book about how some people’s things unsettle some accepted conceptions of material culture, why documentaries, articles, and websites dedicate themselves to eradicating this activity.

Therapy entails the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent the “inhabitants” of a given universe from “emigrating.” It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual “cases.” Since, as we have seen, every society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomenon. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psychoanalysis, from pastoral care to personnel counseling programs, belong, of course, under the category of social control. What interests us here, however, is the conceptual aspect of therapy. Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the “official” definitions of reality, it must develop a conceptual machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that includes a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the “cure of souls.

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

Media are really nothing more than extensions of us. It is we, not the media, who are metaphysical. Metaphysics is part and parcel of an organ – the human brain – that processes information both propositionally and presentationally, in words and in images; in reason and in imagination. We believe and refuse to believe. We believe in things that have no physical nature, no material reality, and we refuse to believe in them. We believe in things that not only have a physical, material nature but are also empirically measurable, and we refuse to believe in them. And our media play a role in all of this.

There’s this thing called the competence-deviance hypothesis,” she explained. “It says that the more competent an individual is in his field—the more respected he is in the community—the more his eccentric behavior will be tolerated by others. “But the opposite is true for young people, because they have not done anything to earn respect in a community. So when they do weird things they are treated like dangerous animals and hustled into cages. It seems unfair when older, respectable members of the community do stuff that’s even stranger and people just shake their heads and smile at their eccentricity.” I

As Muller thought about the future of eugenics and the possibility of altering human genomes, he wondered whether Galton and his collaborators had made a fundamental conceptual error. Like Galton and Pearson, Muller sympathized with the desire to use genetics to alleviate suffering. But unlike Galton, Muller began to realize that positive eugenics was achievable only in a society that had already achieved radical equality. Eugenics could not be the prelude to equality. Instead, equality had to be the precondition for eugenics. Without equality, eugenics would inevitably falter on the false premise that social ills, such as vagrancy, pauperism, deviance, alcoholism, and feeblemindedness were genetic ills-while, in fact, they merely reflected inequality. Women such as Carrie Buck weren't genetic imbeciles, they were poor, illiterate, unhealthy, and powerless-victims of their social lot, not of the genetic lottery. The Galtonians had been convinced that eugenics would ultimately generate radical equality-transforming the weak into the powerful. Muller turned that reasoning on its head. Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.

the “management flight.” The management flight is when you intentionally pick flight times in the middle of the day, so that you can have a leisurely morning, then lounge, drink, eat, and sleep your way through the meat of the day, finally arriving at your destination just in time for late-afternoon team drinks.

The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

The second story tells of how the malignity of that clericalism has been laid bare in recent years by the scandal of priests sexually abusing children, while bishops have protected the predators instead of their victims—a deviance so deeply driven into the Catholic culture that not even the brave and charismatic Pope Francis has been able or willing to uproot it. And the third story is my own—how Jimmy, how I, became a priest; then a writer, and an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe, even as that paper’s Spotlight team broke the Church’s sexual abuse scandal; and, finally, a shattered believer forced to confront the corruption at the heart of my faith.

Higher education is, after all, in the business of producing professionals (or wives of professionals), and there are a limited variety of dies from which they can be cut. As in any other factory, the jobs are specialized and standardized for efficient production: write the paper this way, type the letter that, dispense funds this way, grade the student that. … Academia brooks only token deviance from its norms, just enough to demonstrate its democratic principles or its ‘innovative’ atmosphere. It offers survival and acceptance (graduation, a job, prestige) to those who will quietly take their place on the assembly line or who are themselves willing to be mutilated into professionals.

Prior to the HD diagnosis, instances of hoarding have also been referred to as Collyer Brothers syndrome, chronic disorganization, pack rat syndrome, messy house syndrome, pathological collecting, clutter addiction, Diogenes syndrome, squalor syndrome, senile recluse syndrome, and syllogomania (stockpiling rubbish). Some of these terms remain in use.

Tolerance does explain an escalating pattern of sexual addiction. Tolerance occurs in either fantasy or behavior. For example, an addict using benign fantasies to become sexually aroused may progress to needing sadomasochistic fantasies. Or the addict may switch from fantasies to behavior when the addict reaches a level of tolerance to fantasies alone.

There is absolutely nothing surprising about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. Psychologists have long observed that when people feel hopelessly stigmatized, a powerful coping strategy–often the only apparent route to self-esteem–is embracing one's stigmatized identity. Hence, 'black is beautiful' and 'gay pride'–slogans and anthems of the political movements aimed at ending not only legal discrimination, but the stigma that justified it. Indeed, the act of embracing one's stigma is never merely a psychological maneuver; it is a political act–an act of resistance and deviance in a society that seeks to demean a group based on an inalterable trait. As a gay activist once put it, 'Only by fully embracing the stigma itself can one neutralize the sting and make it laughable.

In Rochester, New York, I was accused of “sexual deviancy,” so I attended the pretrial hearing in a Vivienne Westwood tartan plaid suit that featured penis-and-balls buttons that blended in so well you would have had to really look hard to see them. No one noticed, and I denied being a “sexual deviant,” but indeed that was exactly what they had on their hands. In this case, I was trying to get a girl out of my hotel room by saying she could only stay if she made it with the other girl I’d let in, who just happened to be younger and better-looking. When she wouldn’t, and why not I don’t know, I told her to leave and ended up throwing her out of the room, which was a mistake. I should have called the road manager. Later I would have a security guard, but back then I was on my own. The girl’s case was thrown out, but the fact is, I should have known better.

The need for challenge and exploration arises mostly out of the blockage of fulfillment of lower level needs, giving rise to a pervading restlessness. Out of this restlessness there arises much pathology as searchers collide with established structuring and functioning of the environment. Out of this restlessness there also arises a small cadre of creative deviants whose insights and inventions have provided the leverage which has enabled man to increase his standard of living and his compassionate concern for his fellows. Our success in being human has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. Template changing has always gained a slight, though often tenuous, lead over template obeying. Now we must search diligently for those creative deviants from whom alone will come the conceptualizations of an evolutionary designing process which can assure us an open ended future -- toward whose realization we can all participate.

Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual "cases". Since ever society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomena. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psycho-analysis, from pastoral care to personal counseling programmes, belong, of course, under the category of social control. [...] Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the "official" definition of reality, it must develop a machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that include a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls".

...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.

DSM-5 pathologized those who hold on to their stuff for too long, who clutter their homes too much, who do not clean that often, and who harbor too many things. The manual labeled these activities “hoarding disorder” (HD, as it is sometimes called) and gave them an International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM, to be precise) code of 300.3. Legitimized as a psychiatric disease and categorized under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, this diagnosis rendered unsound certain relations to certain personal property. Hoarding, it seems, had arrived.

Based on the balancing act of the golden mean, bourgeois marriage mixed moderate but continuing sexual attraction, a mutual social and economic interest in living together, respect for the wife, a will to create a lineage, significant socio-cultural similarity, hypocrisy for dissimulating and managing adulterous liaisons (hence the importance of legal prostitution), and the building up of a patrimony to be transmitted. When the couple gets old, this leads to a habitual tenderness much stronger than the passionate and ephemeral simulation of today’s young couples.

Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) philosophy – heavily influenced by Rousseau – altered the idealized group from the ‘tribe’ to the ‘worker’ and argued that a worker’s dictatorship must inevitably develop to ensure equality based on Marx’s fate-based understanding of History. Again, dissent was not to be permitted and dissenters were ‘enemies,’ ‘imperialists’ and so on. Its culmination was the world-historical horror of twentieth century Communism, and its descendant Political Correctness, in which ‘the worker’ is replaced by supposedly oppressed or more natural ‘cultural’ groups. Dissenters are ‘racist’ and other catch-all, highly emotive terms (such as ‘hater’ or ‘denialist’) employed to discourage dissent, such that even the slightest deviance from orthodoxy is termed ‘racist’ in order to reprove it and intimidate the deviant into silence.39 These ideologies can distilled down to three essential dogmas: (1) Those who have power – whether financial or cultural and whether deserved or not – are bad and should repent by giving it to those who lack power and creating ‘equality’ (2) Those who lack power – on whatever measure is seen as important – are superior to those who have it because they are somehow more genuine and (3) Those who dissent from this view are wicked.

You have doubtless read Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, Mister Bond. Well, I am by nature and predilection a wolf and I live by a wolf’s laws. Naturally the sheep describe such a person as a “criminal”. ‘The fact, Mister Bond,’ The Big Man continued after a pause, ‘that I survive and indeed enjoy limitless success, although I am alone against countless millions of sheep, is attributable to the modern techniques I described to you on the occasion of our last talk, and to an infinite capacity for taking pains. Not dull, plodding pains, but artistic, subtle pains. And I find, Mister Bond, that it is not difficult to outwit sheep, however many of them there may be, if one is dedicated to the task and if one is by nature an extremely well-equipped wolf.

The principle purpose of marriage is perverted as soon as one assigns ‘love’ as its ultimate end. Reasoning in an Aristotelian manner, one could say that love and sex are a component of marriage but not at all its necessary telos. Sex and love are means that have been inappropriately transformed into ends. The principle telos of marriage is the construction of a lineage by means of procreation, and not simply the union of two beings who ‘love and desire each other’, even if romantic desire may have its place. A lasting couple that forms a family, the building block of a nation, is not based on ‘love’ in the adolescent sense, nor on a passing sex fantasy, but on a partnership which evolves with time, based on ethnic, cultural and social commonality; on shared values and a family strategy.

Over the seven years that I chipped away at this topic, I found hoarding to be a historically intricate lattice of worry about the unsuitable roles that household furnishings, mass-produced whatnots, curiosa, keepsakes, and clutter play in our daily lives. The majority of these apprehensions over the stuff of normal life originated in the twentieth century, and they are not so far removed from other cultural anxieties. As much as a hoard might be about depression and impulsivity and loss and misplaced stacks of paper, it is also about fears of working-class blacks in 1930s Harlem, post-1960s New Christian Right literatures, and emerging models of appropriate aging in the 1940s and 1950s. Though neglected in the current rhetoric of chronic savers, these unlikely sources each fed into definitions of HD.

Britain is a country that, since World War II, has been on a managed decline. The men live vicariously through their favorite soccer team, celebrating its success with “a few pints” and commiserating over its failings with “a few pints.” And the women—walking muffin tops. Yet they stride around with a terribly misplaced sense of entitlement. Even their TV shows are emblematic of their mediocre mentality. EastEnders and Coronation Street are all about fat, dumb, ugly, poor people. And there begins the vicious cycle of complacent underachievers. Maybe I’m biased because, despite being born in England, I grew up in the US. At least our equivalent TV shows are full of good-looking rich people doing big business deals and dating glamorous women. I wouldn’t mind my kids growing up wanting to be J. R. Ewing, but who the fuck wants to be a pub landlord in Essex?

The Internet sites (Facebook, Meetic, and thousands of other sites) are based on a virtual and simulated second-hand sex through a screen interface. The first encounter is not natural; it occurs in solitude, in front of a machine interface, and everything else flows from there. Dialogue in front of the screen falsifies and misguides the rest of the relationship, because it suppresses the direct emotion of the first meeting and establishes the relationship on lies, even if these are involuntary. The accident of the first meeting — in a bar, at a party, an office, a friend’s house — is replaced by calculated effort in front of a cold screen. Imagination supplants reality. Romanticism or desire are transmitted in computer files. Psychologically, a contact receives a certain bias if it originates from a computer search. If you later happen to meet the person, you understand quickly that she does not correspond to the electronic persona with which one chatted.

It is absolutely fascinating to see how far educated, intelligent, self-proclaimed feminist women end up submitting to the authority of psychotic and mediocre men. It is as if these highly evolved women struggled intellectually with machismo but, in their daily life, end up submitting to a man. Women who have been beaten, even raped, forgive their attackers. One must ask whether they do not love them because of their brutality. Cases of men submitting to women exist, but are far more rare. What is extraordinary is that many of these submissive women who allow their lives to be degraded are economically independent and have no need of a man. The explanation of female submission by violence or economic dependence (as in traditional societies) does not hold water, since mistreated women today could easily take off. One explanation could be that women tolerate loneliness less well than men, and that they end, even after a free and emancipated youth, by needing a guardian — even if a disagreeable and hateful one. One often gets the impression that the idea of freedom is less important for women than the fear of loneliness.

It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two decades as public elementary schools, public and private high schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers, monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the demands” of this new technological workplace. "We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? – that those technological investments have coincided with a decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore, then let’s blame the teachers...

As an alternative, Foucault turned to two figures from the Surrealism of the twenties, George Bataille and Antonin Artaud. Bataille and Artaud united Nietzsche’s iconoclastic nihilism with the images of death and violence contained in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and that of his Decadent disciples. They argued for rejecting all forms of reason and morality as intolerable restrictions on the individual’s creative freedom. Sadism, sex, violence, and even insanity have a fundamental value in themselves, Artaud and Bataille proclaimed, as raw expressions of man’s vital instincts, which bourgeois society tries to contain and repress. Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values became for them, and ultimately for Foucault, an endless program of “transgression,” a declaration of war against society through a celebration of crime and sexual deviance. The French Nietzschean man turns the world into what Artaud called “a theater of cruelty.

[...]One positions an Axis of Evil where there is none. Good is directive, directional; it has a finality in principle and therefore constitutes an axis. Evil is more of a parallax. It is never directional, and is not even opposed to Good. There is always some kind of diversion, a deviation, a curve. As Good goes straight ahead, Evil deviates. It is a deviance, a perversion. You never know where Evil is going, or how. It cannot be mastered. In almost topological terms, it is merely a deviation. Only Good could lay claim to being an axis. But this axis is projected on Evil; an imaginary Axis of Evil is created to justify the Axis of Good. This is a strategic mistake. When you try to target Evil in its unfindable axis, when you fight it militarily, with a frontal attack, you can only miss it.

[T]he definitional shift away from the medical/individual model makes room for new understandings of how best to solve the “problem” of disability. In the alternative perspective, which I call the political/relational model, the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being. For example, under the medical/individual model, wheelchair users suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility. These impairments are best addressed through medical interventions and cures; failing that, individuals must make the best of a bad situation, relying on friends and family members to negotiate inaccessible spaces for them. Under a political/relational model of disability, however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.

Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment. Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts we take to make quick decisions. Product designers can utilize many of the hundreds of heuristics to increase the likelihood of their desired action.

Number of Ingroups If only one ingroup is present, it dominates social life. It provides the only source of norms, identity, and social support. Collectivists may have relatively few ingroups, but they identify very strongly with them. The ingroups of collectivists provide social insurance, protection, and a relaxing atmosphere. The presence of many ingroups encourages individualism. For example, the separation of church and state in the United States automatically creates more than one ingroup and is a premise upon which multiculturalism and democracy are based. It is also the foundation for social movements because each ingroup can potentially become a social movement. Multiple ingroups are especially important in large urban centers, where the social controls of small ingroups are often weak. The social structures of these communities are loose, and several of the factors we have discussed converge to put more emphasis on personal responsibility and less on norms. With more ingroups and looseness there is an increase in social diversity, tolerance for deviance, and multiculturalism. Thus the factors that make cultures loose and allow many choices favor individualism. Conversely, collectivism is maximal in tight cultures, where there are few choices.

From the early development period of the Space Shuttle through the end of 1985, the SRB work group had consistently defined the SRB joints as an acceptable risk. Behind this determination was a scientific paradigm that established the redundancy of the joint. The belief in redundancy and the scientific paradigm behind it were institutionalized prior to 1986. They were crucial components of the worldview that many decision makers brought to the teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch.

Peter Berger notes that the events that constitute our lives are subject to many interpretations, not just by outsiders, but by ourselves.7 When an unexpected event occurs, we need to explain it not only to others, but to ourselves.

Karl Weick observes that whenever people act in a context of choice, irreversible action, and public awareness, their actions tend to become binding;9 they become committed to their actions, then develop valid, socially acceptable justifications. Committed action, justifications, and meaning become linked. Actions “mean” whatever justifications become attached to them.

self-regulation of risky technical enterprise may, by definition, be accompanied by dependencies that interfere with regulatory effectiveness.

unruly technology,

Neither the SSCSP nor the ASAP identified the O-ring problems.

As Leon Ray said, “Safety people are not in a ‘doing mode’; they are in a ‘reviewing mode.’​

shared construction of temperature as a nonproblem,

That paradigm supported a belief that was central to their worldview: the belief in redundancy.

Alone, however, the social affirmation and commitment generated as work group decisions were processed are insufficient to explain the normalization of deviance. The culture of production and structural secrecy were environmental and organizational contingencies that caused the work group culture to persist.

Understanding the culture, as I discovered in the first year or so of my research, is absolutely essential to understanding what went on.

We correct history, reconstructing the past so that it will be consistent with the present, reaffirming our sense of self and place in the world. We reconstruct history every day, not to fool others but to fool ourselves, because it is integral to the process of going on.8 So we would expect that, in addition to the initial failure to register the teleconference fully, the effects of forgetting, the media effect on personal recollections, and the intentional self-protection in response to occupational risk, accounts of that evening would also be affected by the unconscious editing that goes on as people attempt to rescue order from disorder—perhaps driven in this case by a need to be guiltless, a need to have been “correct.

Obviously, mothers are older than the children they birth. They have experienced birth, infancy, schooling, illness, failure, success, dating, marriage, pregnancy, death and other facets of worldly existence. By the time most women become mothers they have already experienced abuse, fear, hatred and envy, not to mention self-loathing, self-condemnation, guilt and shame. Consequently, unless a woman is psychologically empowered it is unlikely that she has come to terms with the effects of these experiences and syndromes. By not confronting the dark sides of her own Anima and Animus she is unable to overcome her moral and emotional deviance and reintegrate her authentic Self-image. Rather than engage in a dragon-fight with her own negative Anima, and heroically emerge, she decides instead to become a terrible mother herself.

norms, values, and procedures that constituted a scientific paradigm.

The belief in redundancy was the product of the work group culture and the incremental accretion of history, ideas, and routines about the booster joints that began in 1977. It was based on a scientific paradigm in the Kuhnian sense: agreed-upon procedures for inquiry, categories into which observations were fitted, and a technology including beliefs about cause-effect relations and standards of practice in relation to it. These traits, reinforced by the cultural meaning systems that contributed to its institutionalization, gave the belief in redundancy the sort of obduracy Kuhn remarked upon.

A scientific paradigm is resistant to change. For those who adhere to its tenets, alteration requires a direct confrontation with information that contradicts it: a signal that is too clear to misperceive, too powerful to ignore.

In American Technological Sublime, David Nye argues that the American reverence for technology is such that we have invested technological masterworks with transcendent, near-religious significance.

The Challenger disaster was an accident, the result of a mistake. What is important to remember from this case is not that individuals in organizations make mistakes, but that mistakes themselves are socially organized and systematically produced. Contradicting

its origins were in routine and taken-for-granted aspects of organizational life that created a way of seeing that was simultaneously a way of not seeing. The normalization of deviant joint performance is the answer to both questions raised at the beginning of this book: Why did NASA continue to launch shuttles prior to 1986 with a design that was not performing as predicted? Why was the Challenger launched over the objections of engineers?

Official launch decisions accepting more and more risk were products of the production of culture in the SRB work group, the culture of production, and structural secrecy.

What is important about these three elements is that each, taken alone, is insufficient as an explanation. Combined, they constitute a nascent theory of the normalization of deviance in

A fundamental sociological notion is that choice creates structure, which in turn feeds back, influencing choice.

work group participants created an official cultural construction of risk that, once created, influenced subsequent choices.

First, the organization of the book places the Challenger launch decision in its proper position as one decision in a decision stream begun many years before.

Here, the chapter 1 version is repeated in boldface type, juxtaposed against another version that restores voices, actions, and details omitted from nearly all other accounts. Reconstructed in ethnographic thick description, this restoration of the confusion, diverse viewpoints, complexity of the technical issue and engineering arguments, and little-known aspects of interaction is, in itself, stereotype-shattering.

Moreover, distortions occurred because people felt their jobs were at risk. As Marshall’s Jim Smith recounted: “A lot of people became scarce when the accident happened. It was very obvious they tried to divorce themselves from much knowledge of any facts and I guess they felt their job was going to be in jeopardy too. It was obvious people were concerned about whether they literally would lose their jobs, or be totally removed from their position and put someplace else, in a corner, or whether there would be a possibility of some legal action.

As historical ethnography, this book is intended to create a social history that reveals how participants interpreted actions and events.

From this primer on the culture of risky decision making, now we turn to the decision making itself and the first of the two questions this book addresses: Why, in the years preceding the Challenger tragedy, did NASA proceed with launches with a design known to be flawed?

work group culture that repeatedly normalized the technical deviation of the joint from performance predictions.

He did not mention the Thiokol engineers’ concerns about temperature—a decision with which A1 McDonald agreed—because no systematic data were yet available that proved the association between the cold and the damage found on STS 51-C. Only “solid engineering data” were admissible in FRR presentation. Recall Boisjoly’s comment that the visual evidence of the black grease at disassembly was not considered “concrete evidence” and McDonald’s comment about “no hard data.

top NASA administrators had lost sight of the concept of “aggregate residual risk” that undergirded the Acceptable Risk Process.

We have an explanation of the normalization of deviance at NASA that includes the production of culture in the work group, the culture of production, and structural secrecy. In combination, they explain how an official collective construction of risk originated and persisted at the space agency,

According to Clarke, a disqualification heuristic is an “ideological mechanism or mind-set that leads experts and decision makers to neglect information that contradicts a conviction—in this case, a conviction that a sociotechnical system is safe.

both the Presidential Commission and the House Committee fully agreed on one point: “Neither NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident.”132 Commissioner Feynman observed, “The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood . . . officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the ‘success’ of previous flights.”133 Only in the wake of the tragedy was it clear they had not understood. At the end of 1985, they believed they did.

In particular, information dependencies affected regulators’ definition of the situation.

This chapter brings home the striking connection between social location, information, worldview, and response to events and activities.

The shared official construction of risk is particularly interesting in light of the way understanding varied with position in the organizational structure

Unfavorable information is lost, not by malicious intent, purposeful concealment, or reluctance to say something superiors do not want to hear (all psychological in origin), but as a collective and systemic consequence of organizational structure and roles: people deliberately do not seek out unfavorable information. He notes, “The technological consequences of such distortions can be disastrous.

It enables them to selectively focus on confirming information while relegating disconfirming information to secondary or even trivial status. In the Exxon Valdez case that Clarke studied, the failure to take into account information that disconfirmed beliefs about system safety led to inadequate preparation for major oil spills.

Bella argues that one way to combat the filtering of unfavorable information is to create checks and balances that systematically force it to surface. This strategy would also be an antidote to the ideological mind set that drives Clarke’s disqualification heuristic.

FRR debates were governed by rules, procedures, and norms deliberately created to seek unfavorable information that challenged the decisions to accept risk and fly that were being presented: a matrix system that brought in a variety of specialists; the “fishbowl” atmosphere; proactive inquiry via “probes,” “challenges,” and Action Items; competition between projects; adversarialism; and the certification at each level that implicated all levels in the outcome.

This paradox—a worldview that survives despite evidence that repeatedly challenges its basic assumptions—is well known among researchers interested in the sociology of science and technology, who often have noted the “obduracy” of established perspectives or paradigms in the face of anomalous information.

ethnocognition: the way members of a particular group produce a definitive mental model as they construct, negotiate, and assemble knowledge to give meaning to an object.

Marcus notes, somewhat ironically, that decisions about all the scientific and engineering problems that affect society lie someplace between the extremes of perfect knowledge and perfect ignorance.50

Although the results may convince a wider audience, the “core set”—the working engineers and scientists most closely associated with the technology—understand the precariousness of this closure, for they are most intimately aware of the test result that does not conform to the others, the limitations of design, the ambiguity surrounding the various engineering interpretations that are embedded in day-to-day engineering work.

The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure.

Failure is inherent in all useful design not only because all requirements of economy derive from insatiable wishes, but more immediately because certain quite specific conflicts are inevitable once requirements for economy are admitted; and conflicts even among the requirements of use are not unknown.

Solutions are always a compromise among a number of standard requirements: safety; reliability; long-term economy; minimum of labor; practicality; ease of manufacturing and installation, maintenance, and operation; and aesthetics.

Safety, too, is integral to the engineering worldview. Engineers design to avoid failure.

Attesting to the nested quality of culture, NASA’s entire Shuttle Program exhibited the “unruly technology” that characterizes the engineering craft when complex technical systems are involved: interpretive flexibility, absence of appropriate guidelines, unexpected glitches as commonplace, “debugging through use,” extensive systemwide problems with technical components, practical rules based on experience that supplemented and took precedence in technical decision making over formal, universal rules, and cost/safety compromises as taken-for-granted.

When technical systems fail, however, outside investigators consistently find an engineering world characterized by ambiguity, disagreement, deviation from design specifications and operating standards, and ad hoc rule making.

In Craft and Consciousness, Bensman and Lilienfeld show the relationship between worldview and the occupational technique and methodology of many occupations and professions.

The public is deceived by a myth that the production of scientific and technical knowledge is precise, objective, and rule-following.

One way to overturn an entrenched scientific paradigm is with contradictory information that is an attention-getting signal, too strong to explain away, refute, or deny.

The structure of regulatory relations created obstacles to social control, limiting information and knowledge about the O-ring problems. It inhibited the ability of safety regulators to alter the scientific paradigm on which the belief in acceptable risk was based.

Regulatory effectiveness was blocked by autonomy, or the fact that regulators and the organizations they regulate exist as separate, independent organizations, and interdependence, or the fact that regulators and regulatees are linked so that outcomes for each are, in part, determined by the activities of the other.

Each strategy has unique advantages, but each also has disadvantages that routinely undermine regulatory effectiveness.