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All in good humor here, but I had no idea this was even a thing. I just thought it was a lifestyle choice. Positive deviants are born, not made. It is hardwired right into my very DNA. I live there.
I jest a wee bit. If you want to know about positive deviants, Wikipedia gives a brief rundown. The concept is rather simple, people are kind of herd animals who will go along with the crowd, who need social favor and belonging. One problem with this is that collective illusions can form that nobody challenges, that nobody questions, and so everyone starts behaving the same and so everyone now suffers from the same problem. The thing is, no matter what is going on around us, there are always going to be a few outliers, deviants who don’t seem to be following the rules.
I so resemble this remark! I could be neurodiverse or it could be the result of having grown up in so much isolation and trauma, but regardless, I just never seem to get the darn memo. Nobody ever forwards me the social rules. I never get invited to any of the mass formation psychosis parties.
Positive deviance first came into people’s awareness in food and nutrition programs, and was a concept eventually utilized in the 90’s by Save the Children in Vietnam. A good chunk of the children were badly mal-nourished, but a handful were not. Everyone was poor, but a few people seemed to have well nourished children anyway. Rather then coming in with a top down approach and dictating a solution, they studied the outliers, the positive deviants, those who seemed to have healthy children. They discovered that at some point most of the culture had just collectively decided shrimp and crab was bad for children, could make them really sick. It was a collective illusion. Almost overnight everyone just stopped feeding their kids the only source of protein available. Well, not everyone. The outliers apparently never got the memo and had just continued to feed their kids what they had always fed them.
A lot of kids will also get parasites and all sorts of bacteria that can give them chronic diarrhea which helps to cause dehydration and malnutrition. It wasn’t the traditional food that was making them sick, it was a lack of hand washing leading to chronic reinfection coupled with no longer having access to the most nutritious foods. You can come in to fix it, try to lecture people and act all authoritarian, attempt to create feeding programs…..or you can believe that a community is best at solving their own problems, and simply empower the outliers, the positive deviants, give them a voice to go and teach the others.
Needless to say it is far more effective (and cost effective) to look for the positive deviants, identity the collective illusion at play, and empower the outliers to go teach the others.
Collective illusions can be really powerful, life threatening even, anti-survival. We all suffer from some of them at various points in our life and the internet may have made it so much worse. One way to break the power of a collective illusion is to actually talk to one another. It is also how we can work together to break off our individual illusions, the lies we have swallowed that may be impacting our lives in unhealthy ways.
To apply some positive deviancy to our modern West with all it’s division and disunity, we really need to refuse to swallow the lies. “It’s the end world,” is a collective illusion. “We’re all doomed,” is a collective illusion. “We’re going to hell in a hand basket,” is a collective illusion. Recently there has been a nasty bit of psy/ops floating around about gangs of black folks attacking children. It is a transparent and obvious bit of bovine poo designed to get people all amped up. There were quite a few recently about needing to riot in support of Trump that were absolutely phony. Don’t be a useful idiot. Learn to discern.
Now there may be elements of truth in some of those and ample evidence you can scrounge up to demonstrate your collective illusion is at least partially true, but if you want to be a real radical, a total deviant, you will simply reject any and all collective illusions on sheer principle alone. Doubly true of any obvious, malignant psy/ops. Step away from the narrative.
One of my favorite sayings is, “Christians don’t take the temperature of the room, they set the whole thermostat.” In fact, one might even say being a positive deviant operating outside of the norm is the name of the game.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
Always reject groupthink. Think for yourself.
Where I live, this puts me in a small minority who believes that the economy will go down the toilet.
Sometimes not following groupthink makes you a positive deviant and sometimes it makes you a negative deviant.
I’ve been a deviant (in the sense you describe) for most of my life.
I differentiate between assessing a situation as negative and between acting negative.
Acting positive, even in negative situations, is the goal.
” One way to break the power of a collective illusion is to actually talk to one another. It is also how we can work together to break off our individual illusions, the lies we have swallowed that may be impacting our lives in unhealthy ways.”
Good advice.
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Thank you, artaxes. Yes, even if a situation appears to be negative on the surface, one can still do the polar opposite. A bunch of people around here have backyard chickens, which is a bit funny if you think of it as an insurance policy against a collapsing economy, but it’s very effective.
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That’s exactly what I mean. Accept reality and make the best of it. For yourself and, if possible, for others.
Producing your own food is even better than gold. Eventually you’ll run out of gold but being able to produce your own food is a blessing that ensures survival and a measure of independence.
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So… now the ability and willingness to think and act for yourself is “deviance”? Only collectivist, socially controlled society. No worries about “losing our freedom”. Those in power already act as if they’ve already taken it and the majority of people have already assumed they no longer have it. We’ve already lost it and the “deviants” are the one who’s still protest and defy that loss.
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Well, one thing that often goes along with positive deviancy, many are not “thinking” about it at all, it just seems to flow that way. It is often happenstance more then critical thought. In fact, sometimes it’s the result of outright foolishness. Least anyone boast of our superior ways. 🙂
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The ferocity with which the Progressive Left and the Media attacks such “deviants” should tell you all you need to know about who really run the country.
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It may well have always been this way? At least in a philosophical context, the outliers have never really run the world. That’s why they are outside the norm. Being outside the norm can be a really good thing.😊
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“We’re all gonna die!”
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Lol! Right?! That is only funny when Monty Python is doing it! As a way of life, it is just pathetic.😊
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And then there’s Mom’s Famous Question: “So, if Everyone is jumping off a cliff … are you going to want to do what Everyone is doing??”
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Amen! We really need a lot more mom wisdom in the world right now. 😊
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Deviance? Oh great. Romeo oh Romeo let me count the ways. A huge elephant in the room is the daily/ incessant verbiage of all things ‘globe.’
In your face. Constantly. Naturally my antenna rises to the point of ‘why?’ And why do the high priests of science refuse/ reject to debate whether the Empire State Building caroms round and round going who knows where….
I am certain the earth has foundations- you know, a foundation which any smart builder engages. And when I build things, I rely on the principle that the foundation is stable.
So yeah, lots of assumed deviance 🙂
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Yep! God bless our outliers, Colorstorm. I’ve always been a fan of those who question the narrative. It is kind of weird how emotionally invested and defensive people can get about challenging such things.
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Yep. Facebook/ instajunk/ tripper/ googs/ most tv media/ all set a narrative/ who can forget the Covid hysteria where people lost 3 years of their lives listening to the priests of science while they pointed at You for questioning the spoon fed conditioning. Then we wonder why there are mass shootings of innocents. People’s minds are loaded with so much crap and disinformation….
How many years were we lied to re. How/ who killed JFK? Epstein hung himself?? Cameras were turned off… Rest assured, if the majority believes something, it’s prob. wrong.
After all, the most deviant example of this was a certain throng shouting ‘crucify him….’ and mob rule won the day. But great thoughts by you here-
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Look… let’s face a measure of truth. Every action, every opinion, every movement… is all based upon something to fear. Roosevelt was more correct than he though… the real thing we should fear is that we humans are extraordinarily vulnerable to the element of fear itself. The best part of that, we find it very easy to point to the other guy for being afraid…. and we actually expect no one to believe that it’s our own fear doing the pointing. It’s not limited to America. Fear exists where humanity does. Brexit was entirely about fear. Putin invaded Ukraine out of some perception of fear. “Rocket Man” of North Korea plays with his nukes out of fear. Authoritarian leaders lead from fear, and gain submission from their people using fear. The French are displaying their fears of a shift in their retirement age. The Israelis fear reforming their judicial system will shift their freedoms. Heck.. those of us who blog do so out of some idea that we are afraid no one will hear us… or we fear the loss of some level of relevancy in life… or we fear saying what we want to say in real life for fear of repercussions in real life. Fear of dying gave us a vaccine for Covid. For others, fear of Covid felt better “blaming” other humans, then blaming attempts at solutions out of fear of losing some level of freedom, or we fear the off-chance someone sneaks into the system to make our guns illegal. We want guns for fear of other humans, and we fear other people with guns because of a fear they will use them on those of us without guns. We fear other people who do not share our politics, or religion, or social status, will threaten our way of life. We fear other humans who do not look like us, act like us, or think like us. We even fear people like that moving into the house next door to us.
The result of all that is that we fear to trust each other… because we fear they are up to something that will threaten us, our lives, our pursuit of happiness. With that means we do not trust compromise… or the ability to govern ourselves.
When Roosevelt first uttered those words our fears were more immediate given Fascism and Japanese imperialism were threatening our existence, and being separated by water from our enemies was not a barrier anymore. Well, we are way past that simple threat, and fear is now consuming everything and anything in its path. The funny thing is, fear is the one thing we all share together. You’d think with fear binding us all together we’d have a bit more Kumbaya between us. But even with that, my fear is more important than your fear… right?
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Wow Doug that is some comment. I’m afraid I don’t know what to say. 🙂
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That is a great comment, Doug. There is a lot of truth there!
The Bible says “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” In studying “why” that might be true I concluded that it serves to slay all our other fears and puts them back in perspective. Once we are no longer enslaved by a myriad of petty fears and simply reacting to them all, you start to gain some clarity. We simply can’t think clearly, we can’t see situations for what they really are when we are ruled by fear, and we certainly can’t relate to one another successfully, either.
Fear of the Lord is an odd thing too, because God is good and He wants what is right for us, so in theory we shouldn’t fear Him, but for our own well being, for our sense of security, we benefit by acknowledging His power, by understanding He is so much greater than our fears.
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I’ve evolved from my Lutheran upbringing to a more.. Lutheranism tainted with a sprinkle of agnostic. That being said, the Bible says we are to fear God, presumably that fear is to garner faith and loyalty. Hmm.. I am sure someone will tell me “that’s not meant literally” because nothing in the Bible is to be taken literally. I am human.. but I can’t take humanism literally. If you don’t do what the Bible says, then you fear not going to Heaven.. or more to the point, you fear being condemned to the depths of hell for eternity. Oh.. and just in case, we point to others for not “playing along”.. out fear they are getting away with something.
My whole point… trying to find a solution that’s meant to “fix” anything brought about by humans starts with looking in a mirror and working on the fear you have for the reflection of yourself first.
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It is such a bummer that sometimes religion seems to teach that we fear God so as to garner faith and loyalty, or so as to terrify people into obedience, or worse yet, because God somehow needs a compliant group of subservients. Fear of God should be more akin to awe and wonder, to surprise and delight.
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As a business and marketing guy, I would agree that to “sell the product” (in this case, devotion to God) one might want to create a more positive image, other than that usually taught from the Bible, which tends to be a collection of mixed signals (that’s just me.. I am NOT promoting what I think or believe onto others, nor am I hunkering for some religious debate.)
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Actually Doug, I think you said it best yourself. The world runs on fear. How do you market a product? Exploit the fear. Fear of ageing, fear of death, fear of crime, whatever. A far harder sell is that we have a good, good, Father who loves us, has our best interests in heart, and gave His very life to save us. What a good chunk of people seem to fear is grace, mercy, love, especially towards our enemies.
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Exactly! Fear does sell product, hence we humans sometimes readily acknowledge that weakness because for us it is part of being human… exploitation. I could surmise that we fear “kindness”, even from GOD, simply because we’ve grown accustomed to question the motives behind it. A simple example.. if He is so kind why is there so much misery? Why does a shooter kill children in a child’s safe haven? Yet to question His motives is a heresy.
I think I’ve gone far enough about my religious imperfections, but our natural fears do tend to manifest within our spiritual beliefs.
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It’s so much easier to find approval when we let others think for us. But we must give that up as a price of creativity?
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Yes, amen. Don’t let others think for you and don’t give up your creativity.
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Reblogged this on clydeherrin.
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Love this: “One of my favorite sayings is, “Christians don’t take the temperature of the room, they set the whole thermostat.” In fact, one might even say being a positive deviant operating outside of the norm is the name of the game.”
May we stand out in a crooked generation
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