Book review: Weird
Reviewed: Weird - The power of being an outsider in an insider world.
Why do you live in Russia?
I’ve been asked this question countless times over the last eight-plus years.
My responses tend to be autobiographical and aesthetic: good memories from studying abroad, romanticizing the streets and sites I’d read about in novels, my love for winter.
After reading Olga Khazan’s Weird, though, I think I may have found a better answer.
Khazan, a writer for The Atlantic , comes honestly to the question of what makes a person weird . The daughter of a Soviet father and Finnish mother and an immigrant herself, Khazan grew up feeling like an outsider throughout her childhood, much of it spent in parts of Texas where difference was hardly celebrated. Exploring how Khazan made it out of social isolation into healthy adulthood is part of Weird’s narrative, but the main focus is on other fish who are either out of water or in the wrong pond altogether.
For this book, Khazan interviewed several dozen people who were outliers, either in their professional or personal lives: “they live or work in situations where…almost no one else is like them.” Readers learn about the struggles of a doctor with dwarfism, a transgender politician from Texas (she literally tried it in a small town), a male early-childhood educator, a refugee from a strict Christian sect, and more.
There is no consistent path for these “weirdos: “Some of them ended up seeking out people just like them, while others were happy to be eternal sore thumbs.”
Khazan explores both of these choices, but comes to a clear conclusion:
It’s good to be a weirdo. Being different from other people around you confers hidden advantages that can help you in life and in work. It also behooves you to live and work among weirdos: Groups are smarter and more powerful when their members hold a diversity of views.
While admiring the resilience and outright strength of her subjects, Khazan notes:
There are systemic, horrific problems in our society that the tools of psychology are not equipped to address. The fact that marginalized people have learned to cope with some of them does not mean the fight for equality should ebb.
Khazan makes this observation more than once, and it is to her credit. Weird might look like an airport book with its svelte 200-ish page count, and perhaps its subtitle even evokes Lean In or something from the bootstrap genre, but that’s not at all the book’s project. Rather, it’s an exploration of psychologically and socially trying situations and how these individuals dealt with them.
In the book’s first and longest section, Khazan defines weirdness. In the eye of the beholder it is strangeness, otherness — a threat. To the one so labeled, it is potentially dangerous — even deadly.
Cultural context is key here. “Tight” cultures that are “strict and formal” when it comes to policing its members’ conduct, with grave consequences for those who dare to be different while “loose” cultures allow for more diversity and freedom. Some examples are questionable, though, with “hunting and fishing societies” offered as loose counterparts to tight farming ones, which require more homogeneity and coordination for survival. While the former may well be more individualistic, honor-based codes of conduct and morality still seem to rule in places like Appalachia and the Caucuses.
Khazan also traces society-wide ill-treatment of “others” through history. A thick thread of white supremacist xenophobia in the United States runs from the early twentieth century through to its contemporary MAGA era. White nativist politicians fretting about immigrants “lowering the standard of American citizenship” has been with the public far longer than the 45th president has. Similarly, the mid-century McCarthy era Red Scare, the blacklisting of artists, the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War Two all share the same feature: the dominant social group declaring that you are either one of us or you are the enemy.
One case, the murder of Vincent Chin, illustrates just how flexible and irrational “us versus them” thinking can be. Two white autoworkers mistook Chin for being Japanese “and therefore, a competitor in the car industry.” The culprits here identified themselves not just with what they considered their country, or nationality but with their industry. They were one with a corporation and saw another regular person as a threat to that. If there is a better example of the nefarious nature of false consciousness, I have yet to see it.
Immigration looms large in Weird, with two scholars quoted saying “If assimilation into the host society is a central norm that immigrants are commonly perceived to violate, language is perhaps the most visible signal of that norm.” This helps to explain why during a friendly chat with a colleague at Lone Star College one day, I mentioned how people complaining about having to “Press 1 for English” was ridiculous. She laughed and said “Oh, that bugs me too.”
In Russia today, most migrants speak Russian rather well, having learned it in their post-Soviet countries of origin. That doesn’t stop landlords from refusing to rent to people with a “non-Slavic appearance” or for middle-class IT professionals to tell me, to my face, that they cannot tolerate being surrounded by non-whites in the Metro.
These behaviors are part of called “system justification,” or “wanting things to be the way they’ve always been.” An important wrinkle to this definition is required, though: it’s about wanting things to be the way they’ve always been perceived to have been. At no point in human history have social communities been strictly homogenous.
Forming the imagined communities required for “nation building” takes time — and force — the latter artifact being erased through propaganda and collective delusion over subsequent generations.
What makes people this way?
Drawing on psychology, Khazan reports that studies show “viewing pictures of social outcasts…elicits in many people brain patterns consistent with disgust, similar to looking at a picture of an overflowing toilet.” That disgust is an animating principle of conservatism is hardly a surprise:
People who are more sensitive to the smell of sweat and urine are more likely to support authoritarian political leaders — perhaps because these leaders would be more likely to keep disease-bearing outside groups out.
There are even genetic explanations presented, showing links between expression of certain genes and sensitivity to difference. Such explanations are unpersuasive if not irrelevant: they remove agency from bigots. Khazan doesn’t press these points, though, and just puts them out there in trying to understand why these behaviors exist.
In Part Two: The Weird Advantage, Khazan presents cases where “weirdos” were able to turn their outsider status into a benefit. Being alone in an antagonistic environment can help individuals clarify their own values and more creatively solve problems than can comfortable conformists.
There appears to be something about being a weirdo that uncorks your mind and allows new ideas to flow.
In Part Three: How to be Different, Khazan explores how to live with one’s weirdness. Psychological hacks are presented, such as changing the story you tell yourself about your memories, or refracting hostile comments through an understanding of where your offensive interlocutor is coming from. Bless their heart.
Finally, in Part Four, Khazan asks the existential question confronting weirdos: stay different, or find your own kind? Here, Khazan’s personal story really shines. In an effort to feel less weird, she writes, Khazan tried to connect with other Russians in America. During one interview, she found herself put off by their aggressive white supremacist views. “How is it that someone who is supposed to be so close to me culturally, I thought, could be so incredibly far?” It’s a telling example of how one can fit into a new culture: adopt its hierarchy as your own.
Later in the book, Khazan revisits Texas. She introduces us to Conservative Move, a group that relocates political conservatives from “Blue” states to Texas. When explaining their mission’s raison d’être, the founders bristle at being called racists for supporting Trump and moving to a nearly-all white, upper-middle class Christian community. They were “weird” in California, but they are now among people like themselves; now they are at home. Khazan, in another display of great patience, listens to them politely, but when she’s all but invited to settle in McKinney, Texas, she tells them no.
Weird is an easy read, with colorful characters and relatable situations confronting an important theme. This is a worthwhile book that helps to explain why you may feel like you don’t belong but also what you might do about it.
So, why do you live here?
Sometimes I say “You gotta live somewhere.”
This usually stops the conversation.
Why shouldn’t I live in Russia? Or Mexico? Or Ghana? Or Japan?
What’s wrong with being a foreigner?
Nothing that is human is alien to me.
Weird, huh?
