Deviants

Every group has the habit of reinforcing a certain level of conformity. Every social group has deviants, people who don’t conform. Group acceptance is never so magnanimous as to accept and support everything. Of course for “nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” Deviants essentially are neither good nor bad, but that does not help their standing in the group. The group generally does not consider deviants as good. A group makes use of deviants to reinforce its own limits of acceptability.

The creation of an in-group automatically also creates an out-group. As long as there are groups then there will be those who are labeled as deviants. It would be impossible for any group to accept everyone as part the in-group.

I think that deviants are the ones that are always on the frontier of reality. Society always has certain things that are considered socially acceptable. Deviants push the limits of social acceptability until what was once unnacceptable becomes common practice, after which deviation becomes more extreme. I think that as long as human beings still exist, deviants will push the limits, further exanding humanity upon new horizons of interest.

I totally agree that deviants push the limits of social acceptability.

Abolitionists were deviants for a time. Deviants stood on the frontier of women’s suffrage. Deviants supported racial equality in the last century.

My concern was not what deviants do, but rather how they get treated. Deviants get treated poorly. Intensely conservative evangelists, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell now make efforts to scapegoat homosexuals. They play on people’s fears, discomfort or disgust.

There is a stigma associated with being a deviant. Even the word itself “deviant” has a pejorative connotation.

This is an unfortunate part of group behavior. Deviants often get treated poorly.

We can all say they should be treated fairly. We can say that every human being deserves to be treated with basic human dignity. But this doesn’t often happen.

i’d only like to point out that sociopaths, murderers, pedophiles, etc are deviants; the do not conform to the norms of society. Deviants are not just heroic outsiders pushing the awful constraints of society… some societal constraints should be there, and some (harmful) deviations from the norms should be punished…

in the case of these deviations, some deviants can push society further back into its norms. They can just as easily make people afraid of what is outside of the bounds of society as they can push the bounds of societal norms into encompassing the new

An Imaginary Man,

A very good point. Some devants are really weird. Some are terrible monsters. Out on the edge there are devils and madmen as well as visionaries and pioneers. There is some good to following the norms.

If there were no deviants, neither the society nor the law would have progressed, it would have simply come to a standstill.

The concept of “deviants” has a distinct negative effect on society in my opinion. There’s a lot of empirical evidence that shows that when you (society) treat an individual as a “deviant” they often incorporate that role into their own personal identity. In other words, your personal identity is constructed by creating your own internal biography and that biography is influenced if not formed by your social identity in that, the way in which people view you affects the way that you view yourself. This is especially important when you consider the way society views “deviant children” as labelling a child a deviant can often result in the individual assuming that deviant role in adulthood.

Most of the problems of the deviater come from the labeler, not the oddball. The exception being the deviant that damages things.
Gays have more trouble from society than society has from gays.

The handling of the misfit causes more problems, in my opinion, than the deviater himself.