What’s Wrong with Them?
When Abnormality Becomes an Explanation
*last updated on September 27, 2026
In another essay, I wrote about a familiar way of explaining people whose behavior disturbs us. They are mean. Or they are stupid. Moral inferiority and intellectual inferiority provide two convenient answers to the question of why somebody would do something we find cruel, destructive, or incomprehensible.
But there is another answer we reach for surprisingly often: there must be something wrong with them. We call people crazy, insane, psychopaths, narcissists, mentally unstable, not normal. These descriptions are not all equivalent. Some borrow loosely from psychological or psychiatric language; others function mainly as insults. What interests me here is what they can have in common: they place the person somewhere outside what we imagine to be normal human behavior.
The underlying logic can be simple: Someone behaves in a way I find unacceptable. I would never behave like that. Therefore, there must be some fundamental difference between that person and me. Whether we locate that difference in moral character, intellectual ability, or psychological abnormality, the result can be the same: reassuring distance between “people like that” and people like us.
In another essay, I wrote about a familiar way of explaining people whose behavior disturbs us. They are mean. Or they are stupid. Moral inferiority and intellectual inferiority provide two convenient answers to the question of why somebody would do something we find cruel, destructive, or incomprehensible.
But there is another answer we reach for surprisingly often: there must be something wrong with them. We call people crazy, insane, psychopaths, narcissists, mentally unstable, not normal. These descriptions are not all equivalent. Some borrow loosely from psychological or psychiatric language; others function mainly as insults. What interests me here is what they can have in common: they place the person somewhere outside what we imagine to be normal human behavior.
The underlying logic can be simple: Someone behaves in a way I find unacceptable. I would never behave like that. Therefore, there must be some fundamental difference between that person and me. Whether we locate that difference in moral character, intellectual ability, or psychological abnormality, the result can be the same: reassuring distance between “people like that” and people like us.
But “normal” is a surprisingly slippery category. Sometimes it means statistically common. Sometimes it means socially acceptable. Sometimes it means psychologically healthy or free of a psychiatric disorder. These meanings overlap, but they are not the same. Human beings vary enormously in temperament, emotional intensity, cognition, impulse control, social behavior, and ways of interpreting the world. The more closely we know actual people and their histories, the harder it becomes to imagine a single, neat model of the “normal person” from which some people simply deviate.
This does not mean that psychological differences or psychiatric diagnoses are meaningless. Some conditions genuinely affect perception, emotional regulation, judgment, empathy, impulse control, or other aspects of behavior, and these differences can matter when we try to understand why someone acted as they did. A diagnosis, when there is one, can therefore be an important part of an explanation.
But it is not necessarily the whole explanation. Having a psychological condition does not mean that every process involved in a person’s behavior is unique to people with that condition. And when there is no diagnosis at all, declaring someone “insane” may simply fill an explanatory gap: I cannot imagine how a normal person could do this, so this person must not be normal. And further: I am normal, so I would never behave like that.
Consider Thanos, the villain at the center of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. In Infinity War, he decides that half of all living beings should disappear because he believes this will solve the problem of insufficient resources and restore balance. By Endgame, his thinking becomes even more extreme: confronted with resistance to his solution, he decides that the entire universe should be destroyed and remade. His actions are so extreme that it is tempting to stop with a simple explanation: he is mad.
If Thanos does what he does because his mind is fundamentally unlike ours, we do not need to look very closely at how he thinks. His violence belongs to his abnormality, and supposedly normal people ("like us") can remain safely outside the problem.
Yet much of his thinking is disturbingly recognizable. He believes that he understands a problem other people refuse to face. He becomes convinced that his solution is necessary. He sees suffering as an acceptable price for a greater good. He stops questioning whether he might be wrong. He treats other beings as objects inside an abstract calculation while imagining himself as someone willing to make difficult choices.
Obviously, most people will never erase half of all life in the universe. The point is not that everybody is secretly Thanos. It is that the processes involved in harmful behavior do not necessarily become alien simply because the outcome is extreme. Certainty, fear, resentment, rationalization, loyalty, obedience, ideology, the desire for control, and the ability to suppress empathy when something else feels more important are all recognizable human possibilities.
And this is where the idea of abnormality can become comforting. If destructive behavior belongs mainly to a fundamentally different kind of person, then we have little reason to look for smaller versions of the same processes in ourselves. We may make mistakes, but we remain on the safe side of the boundary.
If that boundary becomes less secure, the realizations become more uncomfortable. I can become convinced that I am right and stop listening. I can interpret another person as a problem rather than a human being. I can justify hurting somebody because I believe something more important is at stake. I can fail to notice suffering that does not fit the story I am telling myself. None of this means that my behavior is equivalent to extreme violence. It means that some of the psychological building blocks may not belong exclusively to people I have classified as abnormal.
This is why asking “What is wrong with them?” is not helpful. More useful questions might be: What is happening here? What experiences, beliefs, emotions, relationships, pressures, habits, psychological conditions, and circumstances are shaping this behavior? Which of these factors are unusual, and which reflect tendencies that are much more widely shared? What might I recognize, in very different proportions and forms, in myself?
These questions do not erase real psychological differences, and they do not excuse harm. They simply prevent abnormality from becoming a stopping point—an explanation that allows us to place harmful behavior safely outside the boundaries of ordinary humanity, outside ourselves.
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