“What’s your deal?” said a woman I went on a few dates with three decades ago, in my late-20s.
“What do you mean?” I asked casually, thinking she’d something specific in mind.
She stared at me intently. “What’s your deal?” she repeated. We didn’t have much of a conversation about her question, and the relationship was on its way out anyway. But in her implication of a generalized weirdness on my part, I think she had a point.
It’s a tricky thing to assess unusualness, especially when it’s in oneself. What constitutes the norm is a function of what variables one’s looking at, and what range of circumstances one’s considering. I was put in mind of that by an exchange between two writers I admire, Brink Lindsey and Virginia Postrel, in an interview of her on his Substack. They’re talking about how American culture became more amenable to “nerds,” and Lindsey expresses a concern that movement in that direction—giving intellectuals such as themselves more prestige—could lead toward a technocratic authoritarianism.
Postrel: “I'm always very aware of how weird I am. And so, I want a world that is hospitable to me without having to conform to me, because we don’t want a world where Virginia Postrel is the dominant life form.”
Weirdness takes many forms, good and bad. Social scientists coined an acronym, WEIRD, for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic,” expressing a concern that people studied by researchers, as well as the researchers themselves, tend to come from an uncharacteristic subset of the human population, likely biasing social science’s conclusions. The term’s received some pushback lately, on grounds that it too can skew research findings, such as when the W’s misconstrued to mean “White.”
“Weird fiction” and its offshoot “new weird” are genres of speculative fiction that cut across sci-fi and horror boundaries, often involving monstrous entities and shifting perceptions of reality. These genres are sometimes represented by the tentacle, an appendage generally not found amid the castles, claws and blood of gothic horror. The outlandish is unavoidable in hard science as well as in bizarre fiction. The counterintuitive phenomena of quantum physics are labeled “quantum weirdness.” The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once remarked: “We find the world strange, but what’s strange is us.”
My own unusualness takes various forms. I’m fascinated by things few people know or care about, such as the evolution of German typefaces. I took an immediate interest in the trivia-focused magazine Mental Floss when I saw it on a newsstand in the early-2000s, going on to write for the outlet with my friend Alex Bayer. I’ve little patience for watching televised sports, with a partial exception for the Olympics. I’m a member of the Episcopal Church, now one percent of the U.S. population. I think Joe Biden’s done a good job, fostering economic growth and industrial retooling along with environmental protection, while rebuilding alliances and preventing Ukraine and Gaza from becoming wider wars.
In a healthier political environment, I’d be considered right-of-center. I’ve written extensively about leaving the right, but that’s been a slow-motion process, arguably still-incomplete. I’ve zero affinity for the leftist “decolonization” narrative, which reaches a culmination in arguments that the U.S. should be dismantled. The U.S. is the country that saved the world from totalitarianism—repeatedly—and enabled my family to escape oppression. In any case, I’ve long thought of my political views as unusual, whether as a libertarian-conservative in Manhattan, or as a Democrat in my suburban town.
It's bad for a politician to be perceived as weird, which was a problem for Ron DeSantis, and which some critics have sought to wield against Donald Trump. I’ve mostly gotten over surprise at political developments of recent years, recognizing instead that populism, authoritarianism, disinformation and willful ignorance are trends that have gained salience across multiple nations, and which have gotten momentum from the internet and social media. I’m not particularly concerned about having unusual or unpopular opinions, especially at a time when so much of the population is so badly-informed.
—Follow Kenneth Silber on Threads: @kennethsilber
