Differences are Normal

 

I’m The Only One

But I'm the only one
Who'll walk across the fire for you
And I'm the only one
Who'll drown in my desire for you
It's only fear that makes you run
The demons that you're hiding from
When all your promises are gone
I'm the only one

You may be the only one, but no man is an island.

Arguably much of today's turmoil is caused by a misunderstanding of the relationship between the individual, the group, and the absolute. While I am not a certified statistician, statistics does offer some insights to help enlighten this issue.

Man is a sexual, social animal. The Group that is Man requires new Individuals to replenish the Group when an Individual dies. Man as Individual and Man as a Group seeks a relationship with an Absolute. If something is an Absolute, e.g. God, then it has no error. Statistics says that the Standard Error is the square root of the Variance divided by the square root of the sample size. An Individual has a sample size of 1. Thus an Individual can not have zero error unless his Variance is also zero. A group can approach zero error with a nonzero Variance, if the sample size, the size of the group, is increased. A uniform normal distribution is considered to be one where the Variance is 1. Thus a normal group can have virtually no error if the size of the group is large enough. Its error can not ever be equal to zero, but its error can approach zero.

The problem is that individuals try to approach the absolute. They can only appear to do that if their variance is zero. However that is not true of a group. To be normal, the variance should be one. If the variance is one and the sample group size is 100,000 then the Standard Error is only .001 which is almost zero. The problem is that a nonzero Variance requires that every value is NOT equal, even if those values are part of the same distribution, group.

In addition to not being normal, (a  statistical term not an ethical term), if a variance is zero on one issue, then it is unlikely to be zero for every issue. While Evangelical Christians and Catholics may agree on Abortion, they tend to disagree on the infallibility of the Pope. So how can an individual approach the absolute and still be a member of a group whose variance is not one. Einstein elaborated  on an answer to this in his General Theory of Relativity. It is possible to have an absolute i.e. the speed of light, and your relationship to that absolute depends on your frame of reference. Your weight, length, time all vary based on your speed in your frame of reference relative to the absolute that is the speed of light.

Humorists have long tried to tell us that reducing error in approaching the absolute does not mean that only one frame of reference is correct. In Gulliver’s Travel Jonathon Swift describes a silly difference, over whether you should break the eggs at the Big End or the Little End that led to deaths, war, and rebellion. Mark Twain said that “Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.

An individual man can approach the absolute, but a group of men can also approach that same absolute from a different frame of reference. A group should not expect its variance to ever be zero. In fact if it is normal, then it should have a variance of one.

Thus an individual should not expect a healthy group to have a variance of zero. The fact that individuals require different sexes to reproduce does not mean that an individual can not contribute to a group if that individual does not reproduce. Your sexual preference does govern your ability to reproduce, but your ability to reproduce is not the only way in which you can contribute to a group. A variance of one is normal. The willingness and ability to reproduce should be part of that variance.