Solve et Coagulum: "Homosexuality is not normal"

For the purpose of this post we shall be using the Hermetic Magic maxim "Solve et Coagulum": disassemble to its parts and re-assemble.

(What we won't be considering is the far more important question of why do people aspire to be average and what does that say about modern society?)

But what exactly are young people questioning?

Recently we examined why young people are dumb; a wise person would simply walk down the street through a mixed gender group and it should be readily apparent whether you are heterosexual or homosexual. I can't give you the answer for your self, but it really cannot take more than a couple of minutes to work out. Done? Great, let's move on to something that actually matters.

Why is this even a question?

I was shocked to see on page 1 of my local paper, the Jersey Evening Post, on the 28th March a statement from the XYZ group that "there is a reported increase in the number of people questioning their sexuality and that is a good thing".

I fail to see how doubt and/or fear can ever be a "good thing"; my natural conclusion was that the particular representative, personally, believed it to be a "good thing" which is of course revealing of their thought processes, their aspirations for society, but very little else. They wish to be "normal", or more precisely they want everyone to be the same as them. That would seem to be a very self-centred attitude and not one based in Love.

There is, to my mind, no such thing as "good" or "bad", because I have freed myself from other's expectations and societal impositions - there is only that which brings me joy and that which does not. I have lived long enough to always choose joy without making a song and dance about it. But unlike the person quoted, that other people have shared the same experience as me, would not be a source of joy.

Before discussing the results let us break down the search term first; clearly we would first need to define the term "normal".

We could define normal in two different ways; the literal and the personal.

The Mathematical Answer

Literally "normal" means conforming to the "norm" which is a mathematical term for average. There are of course three different forms of average; mean, median and mode.

The mean is calculated by adding all the numbers together and dividing by the number of numbers. Clearly since one is either homosexual or not, this is not an effective method in this case.

The median is the number in the middle if you place all the numbers in sequence. Clearly the median person is not homosexual.

The mode is the most represented number and here again the modal person is not homosexual.

 Mathematically therefore homosexuality is not normal.

Normative Bias

The Personal Answer relies upon the phenomenon of normative bias.

It was written on the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi "Know Thyself"; this is slightly superfluous because the only thing that any being can ever truly "know" is what it is to be one's self. You cannot know what it is to "be" another being. Which is why only you are truly qualified to make decisions for yourself. Indeed the very idea that anyone knows better than you about you is plainly ridiculous, yet many people seem to think that they cannot look after their self.

Any definition of "normal" is therefore limited to a definition of self and variance from self. For each of us, our being is the norm, the average, after all it is what we experience for the greatest part of time.Other people are therefore measured by degree of variance from the self.

By this measure for me personally, homosexuality is also not normal.

What Did Google Say?

I put the term "homosexuality is not normal" into a google search, just to see what would come up. It was all rather disappointing, I do understand that the question itself is somewhat non-sensical because unless as an expression of self, the whole idea that there is a "normal" human being is somewhat laughable.