Author’s Note
This article continues our exploration of humanity’s tools—only this time, we’re not reaching for hammers, code, or a mirror. We’re reaching for the ruler. Not the literal kind, but the conceptual one. The one tucked quietly inside our institutions, our algorithms, our self-worth. A measurement so common, we forget it isn’t neutral.
“Normal” is not a fact. It’s a framework. A map drafted by statisticians and sharpened by industrial efficiency, then handed down as gospel. What began as mathematical shorthand became a weapon of conformity—one that doesn’t punish through force, but through friction. Not exile, but erasure. You won’t be jailed for being different. You’ll just be asked, again and again, to smooth your edges until they disappear.
Some tools build. Others constrain. This one does both—by rewarding sameness and sanding down deviation until the median becomes a moral. But averages are not virtues. And what’s easy to design for is not always worth aspiring to.
This isn’t just a post about statistics. It’s about the quiet violence of the baseline—who it serves, who it excludes, and what happens when we mistake efficiency for equity.
We built the ruler. Then we used it to build a world that punishes anything it can’t perfectly measure.
~Dom
We, as a species, have a long standing and sordid love affair with precision, myself not excluded.
Not just as a convenience, or relationship of utility, but as a kind of worship. The cleaner the edge, the tighter the fit, the more we marvel. A master machinist can grind a steel block to a tolerance of less than a millionth of an inch. These “gauge blocks,” once pressed together, don’t separate easily—not because of magnets or glue, but because the smoothness is so exact that the very atmosphere clamps them in place. The air can’t find a way in. Engineers call this wringing. It’s not magic. It’s math, made tangible.
We build our world on this kind of precision. Bridges don’t hold without it. Jet engines don’t spin. Satellites don’t stay in orbit. Fiber-optic cables won’t carry a single syllable of data if the tolerances are off by a margin too small for the naked eye to detect. The exactness of measurement is what makes complexity possible.
So it’s no wonder we started applying the same logic to ourselves.
We built rulers for bodies, benchmarks for minds, baselines for behavior. We standardized health, beauty, intelligence, productivity. We began to believe that if we could just define the ideal human spec sheet, society could run as smoothly as a Swiss watch. But society is not a watch, and our neighbors are not precision ground gears and sprockets.
It’s dangerous to equate mechanical perfection with personal completion. People in a society do not wring together into seamless conformity. We don’t lock into place under pressure, atmospheric or otherwise. And the moment we forget that—when we apply cold tolerances to warm lives—we don’t create harmony, only harm.
Because the quest for uniformity in machines is brilliance, but the quest for uniformity in people is violence disguised as design.
And yet, we keep doing it. Not because we’re cruel, but because we’ve confused measurement with meaning.
Recommended Listening:
The Invention of Average
The idea of “normal” is neither eternal nor inevitable. It has a history, and like most systems of control, it began with observation, then evolved into judgment.
In the 19th century, Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet coined l’homme moyen—”the average man.” He intended it as a statistical tool, a way to understand population dynamics by aggregating data points across height, weight, lifespan. What began as a mathematical simplification quickly metastasized into an ideal. The bell curve stopped describing people and started defining them.
Soon, anything that drifted too far from the mean was seen as deficient. Deviance, once a neutral term, became a scarlet letter. And society, newly equipped with its ruler of normalcy, began measuring everything—from morality to body size to intelligence—against a line that no actual person ever really touched.
The Ruler and the Ruled
A ruler is a tool of both measurement and power. The genius of normalcy as a control mechanism is its subtlety. No baton, no barking orders—just quiet social pressure, reinforced a thousand times a day, whispering: You’re too loud. You’re too quiet. You’re not enough. You’re too much.
Michel Foucault called it biopower—the regulation of bodies and minds not through law, but through norms. It doesn’t jail you for thinking differently. It simply convinces you that different is wrong.
The “average” becomes the holy grail: average beauty, average income, average sex life, average opinions. Anything outside that is suspect or in need of correction. The ruler doesn’t just define what’s acceptable—it quietly redraws the borders of belonging.
The path of normalcy is like a smooth ramp—gentle, frictionless, uneventful—for those who align neatly with the expected flow. But for anyone who turns against the grain, it transforms. That ramp becomes a file, a cheese grater, scraping at the skin of your identity. Every divergence catches, tears, demands smoothing. To go your own way is to submit to a slow and constant sanding down of self.
Manufactured Comfort
To be fair, there’s comfort in the middle. Patterns soothe. Predictability makes coordination possible. Designing for the average user, the average student, the average citizen—it works for most, for the average.
But when everything is built for the median, the edges suffer.
Office thermostats are calibrated for the resting metabolic rate of a 154-pound man. Drug trials are disproportionately modeled on white male physiology. Career success is defined by trajectories that assume two-parent households, neurotypical behavior, and an uninterrupted 40-year climb.
The tyranny of normalcy doesn’t require malice, effort, or explicit decision. It just requires a system optimized for averages—and a shrug when the rest are left behind. When the edge cases aren’t worth the trouble.
Off the Ruler
But what about the people who don’t fit?
What about those who simply have less of a sex drive, or even the completely asexual, whose identities are often ignored in a society obsessed with sex as entertainment, sexuality as ‘universal’ marketing tactic, and desire as personal proof of value? Or the aromantic, treated like aliens for not craving coupling and pair bonding in a culture that equates partnership with wholeness?
What about the child-free couples—by choice or by circumstance—who are pitied, questioned, or told they’ll “change their minds or regret it for the rest of their life”? The autistic people asked to mask every day to avoid making others uncomfortable? The introverts praised for pretending to be extroverts? The poor, shamed not only for what they lack, but for daring to need differently?
Even the high-achieving outliers – the gifted, the intense – are flattened. Exceptionalism is rewarded, but only when it can be packaged, monetized, and made relatable. Be brilliant, but be relatable. Be successful, but be humble. Excel, but don’t make anyone feel less by comparison.
The average is weaponized in both directions: pulling people down who rise too high and pressing up those who fall too far behind—until we’re all ground down and faceted to fit the desired silhouette.
The Violence of the Median
The problem with systems built around averages is that they confuse convenience with justice.
Public schools are a glaring example. Curricula are built around a neurotypical, middle-income child. Anyone outside that mold is labeled: special ed, gifted, troubled, behind. But the system isn’t broken because some kids fall outside the lines—the lines were never meant to include everyone.
Healthcare, too. Women’s heart attack symptoms are underdiagnosed because they differ from the “norm”—a norm based on male data. People of color face misdiagnosis, under-treatment, and implicit bias, all rooted in invisible, normalized models of whiteness.
Even morality isn’t immune. Average beliefs become righteous ones. Step outside the consensus, and suddenly you’re the extremist. Dissenters aren’t just wrong—they’re dangerous. And all of this is policed not by the state, but by each other.
It’s a kind of social auto-immune disorder: a population trained to attack itself in defense of a fiction.
Toward a Fractal Normal
But what if we redefined the ruler?
What if normal wasn’t a single line, but a tapestry? What if we embraced a fractal view of humanity—patterns that repeat at different scales, never identical, always valid? In a fractal normal, the patterns aren’t clean or centralized—they spiral outward, branching in self-similar, non-identical ways. There is no one shape to fit, only variations worth recognizing.
The neurodiversity movement offers one such model. It doesn’t pathologize difference—it values it. Queer theory does the same: exploding the binary and making space for fluidity. Even design thinking is beginning to shift, embracing principles like universal design that assume not one ideal user, but many kinds of needs.
There’s no utopia waiting around the corner, but there is a possibility: that we stop measuring ourselves with someone else’s yardstick.
Let people be loud. Let them be silent. Let them parent, or not. Let them fall in love with whoever—or no one at all. Let them stim, let them sit out the party, let them rewrite the script.
The real danger was never in being different. It was in forgetting that “average” is just another name for what requires the least effort to account for.
We built the ruler. And we’re the ones who can break it.
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