[mym1990]

You are misunderstanding. I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal. Family is a part of someone's life, and if you choose to define that person based on their family relationships, that is a mistake. There are so many people who are perfectly normal, and do not have close ties to a majority of their family. I have friends who are absolutely like brothers and sisters to me, and my kids will know and hear about them as well.

If you think people having abnormal families is a exception, you need to step outside your front door. I would say almost every family has people that other family members would not go out of the way for, and the circumstances are all that can define those situations, not a blanket "family is everything" statement.

[skissane]

> I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal

I'm abnormal, in various ways. Some of those are (at least partially) my fault, some of them are entirely the fault of people other than me, some of them are nobody's fault. Everyone is abnormal, in at least a few ways. All families are abnormal–in some respects. Whether anybody should be ashamed to be abnormal depends entirely on the details of the specific abnormalities we are talking about.

People don't have relationships with their families for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, their family deserves all the blame, and they are an innocent victim. Sometimes, they deserve all the blame, and their family is an innocent victim. Sometimes, everyone is to blame. Maybe, sometimes, nobody is to blame. All those situations are abnormal (in the sense that normatively they should not occur), and a person or family in an abnormal situation is (in a certain sense) themselves abnormal. But, as I said, whether anyone ought to be ashamed of that abnormality depends on all those details, of how exactly they ended up in that situation.

[mym1990]

The initial sentiment was not discussing the details in which people are normal or abnormal, but the aggregate understanding of what a "normal person" might be. You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline, which could just be what this whole discussion boils down to anyways. Otherwise, I agree with all of your points.

[skissane]

> You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline

You can't meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in the same way.

You can meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in lots of different ways, if for each of those individual ways, only a small minority of people (say <5%) is abnormal in that way.

Consider the variable "number of deceased older siblings at time of birth". For most people, that's zero. For a small minority of people, that's 1. For me, it is 5. That's extremely abnormal, I expect there'd be less than 0.001% of the population for whom that variable is so high. I'd be rather surprised if you were abnormal in that particular way, although surely there are other ways in which you are abnormal but I am not.

[mym1990]

I am saying when you walk up to a person, know nothing about them, what actions do or do not make them normal in general...not in a very very specific parameter? If that person says "I don't really talk to my family"...does that make them an abnormal person in the most general sense?

[skissane]

Are we talking prescriptively (normatively) or descriptively?