Life out of balance

After a cold and rainy few days in Brisbane the weather has returned to normal. I'm looking out the window as the warm afternoon sun glints through the trees, and following an exhausting session at the gym (a couple more plates on the squat bar today) I am suddenly in a writing mood.

It seems as though our culturally determined end/beginning date of our orbit around the sun has arrived once more. It always makes me reminisce about New Years eves gone by. The last one was in London - not long after the shortest day of a cold, dark winter and some light snow - and was one of the best days/night during that 11 month stint in the UK.

This year I am back in Brisbane of course. No firm plans yet about what I will do. Heather is working the night shift (it had to be Christmas or New Years) and a lot of people are out of town. There are a couple of little gatherings going on and mum and dad are also coming up for the night to see the fireworks at Southbank. I'm not too fussed about what I do - really I just want to reflect on the past two years (something I have been doing a lot of lately) and quietly welcome in the New Year while thinking about what everyone I've met overseas might be up to in their various parts of the world.

Amongst the daydreams I've been having of South America there have also been some little questions I've been pondering, such as the issue of 'extremism'. The most common definition of 'extreme' refers to the excessively large divergence of behaviour or belief from an 'average' or 'norm'. Which can only lead to the most important question - what is normal?

For non-statisticians (and people who can't remember their Year 10 maths) there are generally three ways for determining a middle ground. Mean, Median and Mode.

MEAN:

The Mean is your classical 'average' - add everything up and divide by the number of people/things - only possible if you can create a Belief Index (100 = the utmost extreme in one direction of belief and 0 = the utmost extreme in the other direction) and then using a large enough sample of mankind and a clever enough survey to accurately calculate a person's Belief Index score.

MEDIAN

The Median is the middle number - more specifically - if you could put everyone in a line starting with the most extreme person at one end (Osama bin Laden maybe, closely followed by George W) and the other most extreme person at the other end - such as Jesus or Karl Marx - you would find the person who is exactly in the middle of the line and they would be the median.

MODE:

The Mode is simply the most common. So again using our Belief Index, whichever score occurred the most frequently would be considered the mode belief.

As you can see it would be utterly impossible to calculate what is 'normal' accurately using statistical methods - and that's not even mentioning the complexity of a persons 'beliefs' and the ways in which conservatives can sit in left wing camps sometimes and religious extremists can promote equality and socialist ideals. But if you keep those methods in the back of your head and do some generalisations about what we know of the world and its demographics, some estimates of what is 'normal' would be very suprising to a lot of us wealthy white folk.

It could be that 'normal' is a Mandarin speaking Sunni Muslim who works in a manufacturing job to support his elderly parents.

Just a minute. I've totally lost the thread of my discussion. Getting back to my Belief Index. And applying it specifically to attitudes towards capitalism, consumerism, tax, and government intervention more generally. I think that we would find that what we believe currently to be normal would actually fall at the lower (or upper) end of any index. The consumer economy in its full glory (sarcasm) is only a recent phenomenon. If people abhor extremism then why do they allow advertising to infiltrate every corner of our lives and constantly live to the extent of their wealth instead of giving back to the world (not state/country) that provided them with that opportunity for wealth. How much more extreme could our consumer lifestyles become?

Know your scales before talking of balance.