“Weird” is currently the favorite adjective of the American liberal left to describe Republicans. I think it started with an attack on Donald Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance. He was “weird” because he cared about birth rates. He was “weird” because he despised women without children. He was “weird” because he had a kind of goofy face.
I'm not American, so I won't discuss this accusation in the context of the US presidential election. (It seems a bit odd that a party that has worked tirelessly on elder abuse would call someone a “nut,” but hypocrisy is not a political blunder.)
I may not be able to prove you wrong or bad, but I can call you a “weird” without any argument, which is a boring and unhelpful way of poisoning the well.
Still, it's an interesting accusation, one that veers away from the “bigot” accusation into more obscure but perhaps more persuasive territory.
Strange Way
I think that appeals to the Democratic Party as the side that is popular with women. “Weird” is not just different from “normal.” It can be an uneasy middle ground between “safe” and “unsafe.” This is more important to women, but of course it's important to men too.
The strange thing about being “weird” is that it can be a good thing or a bad thing. Few people want to be called “weird,” and even fewer want to be called “normal” or “ordinary.” Being “weird” means standing out from the crowd in the freshness and originality of your thoughts and actions. But it can also mean standing out from the crowd in being unusually unattractive.
I know this. As a teenager, I embraced being weird. I thought it made me fun and interesting. And sometimes it did. But the more I embraced weirdness for its own sake, the more unpleasant and disagreeable I became. (Later on, I became mentally ill and weird just wasn't enough.)
In politics and cultural life, being weird can be a good thing. Telling the truth when others lie? That's weird. Embodying virtue? That's weird. Breaking new intellectual or aesthetic ground? That's weird. Almost everything that is great intellectually, morally, or artistically must have seemed “weird” at some point.
Are you eating normal food?
Online, the accusation of being “weird” — or the exhortation to “touch grass” or “do something normal” — can become a coward's way of belittling someone's claims without working hard to explain why they're untrue or immoral. I may not be able to prove you're wrong or bad, but I can call you “weird” without any argument. It's a boring, completely unhelpful way of poisoning the well.
Don't be ashamed of your weirdness. Probably the most-read article I've ever written is a column about evangelical Christians who portray themselves as totally boring mainstream “Christianity with a twist.” This seems self-defeating. How can the Christian faith — the idea that God became man and died for our sins — not be weird today?
“If anyone has a faith worth following,” I Written:
Their beliefs make them feel uncomfortable that I don't, and if they share 90 percent of my lifestyle and values, there's nothing particularly inspiring about them, and it seems like they want to be more like me, rather than me wanting to be more like them.
Weirdness doesn't always have to be a cause for loathing; it can also be a cause for admiration.
Blunt Violation
And yet we should understand, as I struggled to understand as a teenager, that just because intellectual, moral, or artistic genius may seem “strange,” it doesn't mean that it's great because of its strangeness. Just because genius is often eccentric doesn't mean that eccentricity entails any intrinsic virtue. Isaac Newton was “strange,” but so is the world's most boring stamp collector.
There is still “good weird” and “bad weird.” For example, telling a harsh truth can be good weird. But context matters. Telling a child on their birthday that their mother's cancer is terminal, something we would all find acceptable, is not good weird.
To take a smaller but more generally relevant example, the fact that physical attractiveness tends to decline gradually with age doesn't mean it's not weird (in a bad way) to tell a random young woman that you're “hitting a wall.”
I defend the right to study unfashionable ideas about biology, but at the same time, talking about geneticism at a charity fundraiser for abused kittens is probably a bad idea. These examples make it clear that breaking with the norm is a sign of indignant instability rather than courageous insight. Where does the strangeness come from? Is it something moving, or something unsettling?
Moreover, our obsession with the concept of the bold truth-teller, as opposed to our obsession with the truth, tends to mislead people. Few things are more bizarre and unattractive than someone who is vain and arrogant when they are obviously wrong. This is especially problematic in online subcultures, because falsehoods are easily spoken of as sacred dogma. (This is why people should be careful with the term “normie”; there is an important difference between being in a spiritual community and being in a cult.)
Moreover, people who are self-aware of their weirdness tend to be very boring; many of them aren't “weird” at all in the sense of being original or interesting. Those of me age may remember the days when, at the height of The Mighty Boosh, teenagers would call themselves “weird.” This amounted to nothing more than saying “cheese” at inappropriate times or wanting to hang out with/sleep with Noel Fielding. Those were the dark ages.
Weirdness is neither something to run from nor something to embrace. It is, at best, a by-product of courage, innovation, and humor — those initial sensations of surprise. Without those, it's a bad surprise.
This essay was originally zone.
