The Most Dangerous Word in Culture Is “Normal”

In 1986, not long after I moved from Hawaii to Los Angeles, I ended up at a house party.

I don’t remember whose party it was anymore. I don’t even remember why I was there or who invited me.

But I remember the kitchen.

I had been wandering through the house, getting my bearings, when I came across a small group of young guys standing around showing one another the knives they carried.

Fixed blades. Folding knives. Different sizes. Different styles.

I liked knives. Still do.

For a minute I was just admiring them the way you admire tools somebody clearly put thought into choosing.

Then something occurred to me.

I looked around the group.

Every one of these guys was considerably bigger than I was. Physically bigger.

Yet they all apparently felt enough concern about their safety that carrying a knife seemed like a normal, reasonable thing to do.

I was not carrying one.

That was not because I had somehow gone through life untouched.

I was a small kid.

I had been bullied.

I knew what it felt like to be physically vulnerable and what it felt like to take a hit.

But I had grown up with a different calculation about physical conflict.

If somebody wanted to fight me, getting punched was bad.

Taking a beating was worse.

But pulling a knife could turn something bad into something irreversible.

A punch hurts.

A blade can sever an artery.

A stab can kill somebody.

Suddenly two idiots having an argument are not dealing with bruises anymore.

They are dealing with:

• an ambulance;
• a courtroom;
• a funeral;
• maybe all three.

So I asked them about it.

Did they really feel like they needed to carry those knives to feel safe?

They looked at me like I was the strange one.

And that is the part I have remembered for almost forty years now.

We were standing in the same kitchen.

Looking at the same knives.

Looking at roughly the same physical world.

But we were not standing inside the same world at all.

Something that seemed obviously unnecessary to me seemed obviously sensible to them.

That is when the interesting question stops being:

“What’s wrong with these guys?”

and becomes something more useful:

“What kind of world makes carrying that knife feel normal?”

When “Normal” Changes Depending on Where You Stand

I had recently moved from Hawaii to Los Angeles.

Growing up in Hawaii had given me a different mental model of physical conflict.

I do not want to romanticize Hawaii.

People get seriously hurt there too.

Weapons exist there too.

Violence is violence no matter where you are standing when it happens.

But one idea that felt familiar in the environment I grew up around was that two guys might throw blows, get whatever stupid thing they were carrying out of their systems, and eventually move on.

Maybe even have a beer afterward.

There was a cultural space between:

“We have a problem.”

and

“One of us needs to die.”

At that house party, I realized these guys might be operating from a very different calculation.

Maybe they had experienced things I had not.

Maybe their neighborhoods were different.

Maybe people around them carried weapons, so they believed they needed one too.

Maybe it was status.

Maybe it was fear.

Maybe it was habit.

Maybe some combination of all of those things.

I did not know then.

I still do not know now.

But I also couldn’t conclude that they were crazy or cowardly simply because their calculation was different from mine.

I didn’t know what experiences, fears, habits, or environments had shaped their choice.

What I could see, even then, was that carrying those knives felt normal enough to them that my question sounded strange.

The calculation changes when the environment changes.

And fiction had already begun teaching me to see that, long before I had the words for it.

What Arrakis Teaches About Normal

Look at the Fremen in Dune.​

Their relationship with water is extreme by almost any standard you could apply from the outside.

They recycle bodily moisture through stillsuits.

Even spitting can be a gesture of respect because giving another person some of your body’s water means something in a place where every drop matters.

From a comfortable chair in a wet climate, the Fremen can look obsessive.

Maybe even a little deranged.

But Arrakis is not comfortable.

And it is not wet.

Water is not something you turn on at the faucet.

It is survival.

• The environment creates a constraint
• The constraint shapes behavior
• Repeated behavior becomes custom
• Custom becomes culture
• Culture creates norms

Eventually those norms become woven into identity.

ENVIRONMENT → CONSTRAINT → CULTURE → NORM → BEHAVIOR → IDENTITY

Once you understand Arrakis, behavior that first looked extreme becomes much more intelligible.

Their world changes the calculation.

You might still decide some of their practices are harsh or extreme.

But you cannot pretend those practices came from nowhere.

They came from an environment that rewarded certain behaviors and punished others with absolute consistency.

That does not mean every behavior produced by a culture is good.

It means you cannot understand the behavior intelligently while ignoring the world that produced it.

Heinlein Gives Us the Outsider

​Robert Heinlein plays with the other side of this in Stranger in a Strange Land.​

Valentine Michael Smith is human.

But he was not raised inside ordinary human culture.

He encounters Earth society without automatically knowing any of the things everyone around him accepts as obvious.

He does not know that:

“That’s just how things are.”

He has to be taught.

Which means he can do something extremely valuable.

He can make the familiar strange again.

Michael asks questions that insiders have stopped asking because insiders stopped noticing there was a question to ask.

• Why do you people do that?
• Why do you assume that?
• Why is that important?
• Why does that upset you?
• Why is that considered rude?

That is what I was accidentally doing in that kitchen in 1986.

I was not trying to be a philosopher.

I was just a guy from Hawaii who had not yet absorbed the calculation these men had absorbed.

And from their perspective, they could just as easily have asked the same question of me.

Why would you not carry something that could protect you?

We had different answers because we were carrying different assumptions about danger, pain, escalation, and what a physical confrontation even meant.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to ask the question everybody inside the culture has forgotten to ask: “Why do you people do that?”

Understanding Is Not Agreement

There is a trap here.

And I want to be clear about it because otherwise this whole line of thinking can drift somewhere I do not intend.

Understanding why a behavior makes sense inside someone’s world does not mean approving of it.

I still think introducing a deadly weapon into an ordinary physical confrontation is usually a terrible trade.

My view has not changed much in forty years.

If the choice is between taking some punches and making a situation potentially lethal, I would rather absorb the bruises and walk away.

I do not need to prove I am tougher than anybody.

And I especially do not want to gamble somebody’s life over an ego contest.

The fact that I can understand why those men carried knives does not mean I have to agree that carrying them was wise.

But leadership requires something more difficult than simply announcing:

“My rule is better.”

It requires asking:

• What experiences taught this person that this behavior is necessary?
• What danger are they anticipating?
• What does their environment reward?
• What does it punish?
• What are they afraid will happen if they do not behave this way?
• What assumptions am I bringing from my own culture that they might not share?

Only then can we start separating what is useful from what is merely familiar.

Diagnosis comes before prescription.

You cannot intelligently evaluate a behavior until you understand the environment, assumptions, incentives, constraints, and history that are producing it.

After you understand all of that, you may still conclude the behavior is:

• harmful;
• outdated;
• no longer useful;
• in need of change;
• something that should be opposed.

But now you are responding to the actual system instead of simply condemning the person standing inside it.

Every Group Has a Kitchen Full of Knives

The principle goes far beyond weapons.

Every culture has things insiders barely notice.

A construction crew has them.

A dojo has them.

A family has them.

A marriage has them.

A company has them.

A country has them.

We swim in norms so thoroughly that we mistake the water for air.

Things we say without thinking:

• “That’s how apprentices learn.”
• “That’s how a black belt behaves.”
• “That’s how men handle problems.”
• “That’s how our family talks about money.”
• “That’s how a good employee proves commitment.”
• “That’s how you show respect.”
• “That’s just how things are done around here.”

Eventually the explanation disappears.

All that is left is:

“It’s normal.”

And normal may be one of the most dangerous words in a culture.

Because once something earns that label, we often stop examining it entirely.

The rule survives its original purpose.

The habit outlasts the environment that made it reasonable.

And anybody who questions it gets looked at the way those men in the kitchen looked at me.

Fiction gives us a way to start asking again.

Stories let us cross borders without passports.

They let us inhabit societies with different:

• religions;
• technologies;
• hierarchies;
• dangers;
• resources;
• histories.

And when the writer is good, something strange happens.

At first we ask:

“Why would these people behave like this?”

Then we learn enough about their world that the behavior begins to make sense.

And eventually the question comes home:

“What do I do only because my world taught me it was normal?”

That is not a literary question.

It is a personal-leadership question.

And it is also one of the most useful questions you can ask whenever somebody else’s behavior seems incomprehensible.

Before deciding they are irrational, weak, ignorant, immoral, or crazy, try asking:

You may still disagree.

You may decide the behavior is destructive.

You may even decide it has to be confronted.

But now you are responding to something real instead of aiming your judgment at the person standing inside a world you never bothered to understand.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Pick one thing in your own life that feels completely normal.

Something from your:

• family;
• workplace;
• marriage;
• dojo;
• neighborhood;
• profession;
• generation;
• culture.

Something you have never seriously questioned.

Then ask:

1. Where did this rule come from?
2. What problem was it originally trying to solve?
3. What environment made it reasonable?
4. Does that environment still exist?
5. What would an intelligent outsider find strange about it?
6. If I encountered this practice for the first time today, would I still choose it?

Then try the opposite exercise.

Think of somebody whose behavior makes no sense to you.

Ask:

“What world would make that behavior make sense?”

Not to excuse them.

To see them.

Step Far Enough Away to See

I still remember that kitchen.

A little guy from Hawaii standing in a circle of bigger guys in Los Angeles, looking at their knives and wondering why they all thought I was the strange one.

They taught me something they probably never intended to teach me.

Normal depends on where you are standing.

Sometimes you need to travel somewhere else to discover that.

Sometimes you need to move from Hawaii to Los Angeles.

Sometimes you need to meet somebody raised inside a completely different family.

And sometimes you can open a novel and travel to Arrakis or to Mars.

The destination is not really the point.

The point is coming back able to see your own world with slightly different eyes.

Before deciding someone’s behavior makes no sense, ask what world it makes sense inside.

And every once in a while, ask the harder question:

“What have I been calling normal simply because I have never stood far enough away from it to see it?”

📚 Leader’s Library

​A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens​

Why?

Dickens begins by describing a world filled with contradictions:

• Wisdom and foolishness
• Belief and disbelief
• Light and darkness
• Hope and despair

He was writing about the turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, but that opening survives because human beings keep discovering the same truth:

An age can contain extraordinary progress and extraordinary danger simultaneously.

That is worth remembering whenever somebody tells you that everything is getting worse.

Or everything is getting better.

Usually, reality is more complicated.

It is often both.

And leadership begins with learning to see both clearly.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck