Part one:
The present human society gives much importance to the value of being normal, to this value there are a bunch of qualities: Among them: being stable, responsible and so on. It includes having good marks at school, a steady and good work place, having a family in a relatively young age, to have at least two children and so on.
And if there is a norm and normality, there are deviations from the normal standard; a deviations which is still close to being normal are mood swings, in the far end from normality we find criminality, madness etic. This deviation always decreases the value of the deviant, the decrease of the value depends on the degree of the deviation, the greater is the deviation – so would be the stigma.
But there are two kinds of deviations; upwards and downwards, the examples written of here are of low deviation, but there is a high deviation; it contains a sharp and deep view of reality, and in some cases it is the personality of a great creator and even a genius.
In the term: downwards deviant it is meant a deviant in the direction of madness, restarted, crime etic. In deviation upwards is a deviant that his abilities and contributions are above the average. He is not just talented.
And indeed genius, wisdom or truth – cannot exist in the normal end, in there, there are mainly: averageness, conventional and superficial -thinking.
Here, it will be written about the high level deviants.
High level people are more frequent amongst the deviants, rather than with the consensus and the norm – inhabitants.
And when examining the life of those upwards deviants – we find suffering, and the question is: does it have to be that with being an upwards deviant he has to suffer?
A researcher by the name: Lewis Madison Terman – put 20 years in studying gifted children, and he found that there is a direct relation between high intelligence and an inadequate social function. Most of them suffered from psychological difficulties when reaching the age of 30, it was found that there is a direct relation between the level of being gifted and psychological vulnerability.
Another researcher named: leta hollingworth who also studied the gifted, found that most of them suffered loneliness, also they can develop criticism and rebellion against the normal world.
One of the abilities of the gifted is his ability to penetrate beyond the exterior and get at what is really there.
But what is the reason for that high deviation?
Well maybe it begins with the fact that our society put into normal life – contents, such as repression, adjust to the norm and to the majority, and escape from reality, by turning the real reality to be hidden and created above it an alternative reality, or reality which lives in the image of itself. About this image of reality, wrote the philosopher: Jean Baudrllard, in his term: Simulacra . And whoever lives according to the relief reality is considered to be normal.
There is no way to understand the fact that most of those who discovered something about the truth of humanity, lived most of their lives when they are either miserable, moving from crisis to crisis. What it says that the truth about human reality is in exile, and who ever goes to exile looking for it gets excommunicated from the consensus and pays a heavy price for it.
The alternative reality is a social reality, whereas the real reality is an inner reality. The normal adjusts himself to the silent majority, whereas the one on the opposing pole yearns all his life to be authentic.
Whoever could adjust will adjust, but those who could not do it (the upwards deviants) are the ones that write and create and talk about the exiled truth. (And their words are dripping wisdom).
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Simulacra and Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
delineates the sign-order into four stages: By Jean BAUDRILLARD,
- The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality” (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called “the sacramental order”.
- The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence”. Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
- The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the “order of sorcery”, a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
- The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Bibliography
• Minton, H.L. (1988). Lewis M. Terman: pioneer in psychology testing. New York, NY: New York University Press.
• Vialle, W. (1994). ‘Termanal’ science? The work of Lewis Terman revisited. Roeper Review, 17(1), 32-38.
• Human Intelligence: Lewis Madison Terman
• Autobiography of Lewis M. Terman. First published in Murchison, Carl. (Ed.) (1930). History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 2, pp. 297–331). Republished by the permission of Clark University Press, Worcester, MA.
• Memorial Resolution Lewis Madison Terman via Stanford University
• Shurkin, Joel (1992). Terman’s Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston (MA): Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-78890-8. Lay summary (28 June 2010).
• Lippman, W. (1922). The Mental Age of Americans. New Republic, 32 (412-417), 213–215, 246–248, 275–277, 297–298, 328–330, 9–11.
• Benjamin, L.T. Jr. (1975). The pioneering work of Leta Stetter Hollingworth in the psychology of women. Nebraska History, 56, 493-505.
• Hergenhahn, B. R. (2001) An Introduction to the History of Psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thomson Learning.
• Hochman, S. K. “Leta Stetter Hollingworth.” Webster University. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20080105203603/http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/letahollingsworth.html
• Barbaro, R. W. “Leta Stetter Hollingworth.” FSU Faculty/Staff Personal Page Web Server Index. Retrieved from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/letastetterhollingworth.html.
• Kral, E. A. (2008). “PROFILE: Leta Stetter Hollingworth.” Retrieved from https://archive.is/20080821130628/http://nsea.org/news/LetaHollingworth.htm.
• Shields, S.A. (1991). Leta Stetter Hollingworth: “Literature of opinion” and the study of individual differences. In G. A. Kimble, M. Wertheimer, and C.L. White (Eds.) Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum (pp. 243–255)
• White, W. L. (2014) America’s First Gifted Program: Hollingworth and the Speyer School Experiment, Royal Fireworks Press, Inc.
Gabriel