What Does "Weird" Even Mean?

Witch Hunts, Nerds, Cliques, and Cultural Hegemony

I’ve spent much of my life taking pride in being “weird.” I grew up as a nerdy kid in a stultifying suburb of Portland. I took pride in the progressive, environmentalist identity of metropolitan Portland (“Keep Portland Weird!”), despite spending hardly any time in the city. I found suburban “normies” who cared too much about children’s sports and keeping up with the Joneses to be distasteful. But of course I thought that, because I had no athletic talent, and my family lived frugally. Taking pride in being weird is in part a natural defense mechanism against the very real social downsides of being weird.

This is the difficult position of the word weird in contemporary usage: by being both an insult and a point of personal pride, it is obstinately undefinable. Everyone kind of wants to be normal and fit in, and yet would find it a little bit insulting to be called normal. To be normal is to be boring and unremarkable, and everyone wants to stand out, to be noticed. Just not in a bad way. To weird, but not too weird. So there’s a lot of room to muse about what the hell it means when Democrats start calling Republicans “weird.”

I. “Wyrd”

The word weird comes from “wyrd,” referring to fate or destiny, or directly to the mythical Greek personifications of destiny, “The Fates.” The word gradually expanded in scope to mean fortune-telling, and then other forms of magic and the supernatural—in short, witchcraft.¹

Across history and across cultures, people hunt witches. When things go wrong—the crop fails, the plague comes through town, people are losing trust in the tribal leadership, whatever—the tribe finds a scapegoat. They identify someone who doesn’t quite fit in, who has some subversive thoughts about the tribal norms, who no one really likes too much, who’s a little weird. When troubling times create a complicated web of blame and mistrust, this ill will can be redirected towards a singular victim. Through sacrificing the witch, the tribe can move on from tragedy without lingering resentment.

The first people accused in the Salem Witch Trials were weird in various ways: a destitute widow, a woman who hadn’t attended church in years, and a Native American slave. The second of those women, Sarah Osborne, particularly highlights the extent to which being on the right side of the elite is a crucial defining point in who’s in danger of being scapegoated. Sarah Osborne’s first husband was from the prominent and elite Putnam family, and when he passed he willed their farm to their two sons. Osborne remarried and refused to honor her late husband’s will, keeping the farm for herself and her new husband. So she drew negative attention to herself not only by not attending church, but specifically by being on the wrong side of her late husband’s elite family.

We’re intuitively afraid of being judged as weird, because it is dangerous. Whether they were scapegoated and burnt at the stake as a witch, or simply excluded and ostracized, being seen as too different from the tribe would get our evolutionary forebears killed. In-group preference and tribalism are so baked into human psychology that no matter how much a culture tries to counteract those tendencies by explicitly affirming inclusivity and freedom of thought, we care about fitting in. In trying to define “weird,” this is the historical foundation: to be weird is to be excluded. To fit in is to be safe. Weird is bad.

II. The Weird Nerd and American Individualism

This raises the question, how exactly did our tribal brains ever arrive at the social technology of accepting, and even lionizing, weirdness? Ruxandra Teslo has written a couple of pieces on the category of person she dubbed “The Weird Nerd.” Weird Nerds “are distinguished by their unyielding devotion to Truth, often placing it above social graces or conventional norms.” She loosely associates the Weird Nerd with autism, which fits right alongside the association of autism and “giftedness,” or of the “autism horseshoe.”

The Weird Nerd’s devotion to truth and disregard for accepted assumptions makes them especially well-suited to make paradigm-shifting philosophical, scientific, and technological breakthroughs. They also make them kind of annoying to be around, as well as a subversive threat to the social order, i.e., “weird.”

Socrates was a Weird Nerd who devoted his life to challenging assumptions and seeking truth. The hegemony of the time thanked him for his intellectual contributions by executing him for impiety and “corrupting the youth.” (The trial against Socrates was initiated after a time of plague, war, and internal political strife. Yep, this checks out so far with the scapegoat theory.)

Thus began the long lineage of Western Philosophy, an unending chain of Weird Nerds saying increasingly subversive things while trying to not get executed. Blah blah blah, eventually John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers wrote about stuff like consent of the governed, religious tolerance, natural rights, separation of powers, and the moral obligation of revolution against tyranny. (The hegemony of the time tried to thank him for his intellectual contributions by implicating him in an assassination attempt against King Charles II, so he fled into exile.)

A few decades later, a bunch of Weird Nerds in Philadelphia who really liked Locke’s ideas started a country. It’s not too ground-breaking to say that these ideas of tolerance and freedom of thought are pretty fundamental to American identity, so I won’t belabor the point. What is worth noting is that then, this happened:

Up to this point, most people were scraping out a Malthusian existence out in the countryside, and this or that Weird Nerd’s political theories or scientific discoveries didn’t change the basic question of subsistence. Suddenly, with the Industrial Revolution, Weird Nerds were creating technologies that changed everything. Having the institutional structures to let the Weird Nerd do their thing became the path to prosperity and world leadership.

The Weird Nerd became not merely tolerated, but lionized. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. The science fiction author Robert Heinlein said: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’” At a certain point, it just became obvious that encouraging and supporting Weird Nerds instead of burning them at the stake made us all richer. People just like having technology and wealth more than they hate weirdos.

The embrace of industrialization and capitalism made it high status, at least in adulthood, to be a Weird Nerd, where one's intelligence and out-of-the-box thinking could turn weirdness into money. Being weird itself was still a social liability, but wealth speaks louder than awkwardness.

III. It’s Not High School Anymore

As a scrawny, pimply, and unathletic adolescent, I took great pride in being weird. This was, in fact, completely normal of me. Insecure teenagers who lack status always have and always will adopt an oppositional and defiant pride in their weirdness.

In Noah Smith’s recent piece on the “weird” phenomenon, he describes how “weird” was already an increasingly meaningless label in his own adolescence:

By the time my friends and I were proudly calling ourselves “weird” in the 1990s, the accuracy of the label was questionable; the tide of the culture war was already beginning to turn. Acceptance of gays, marijuana, and atheism was on the rise; there was a feeling that the victory of liberal culture over conservative culture was only a matter of time. My friends and I were a lot less rebellious and pioneering than our Boomer parents had been — it was a lot less socially and economically risky to grow your hair out and listen to rock music and make jokes about Satan in 1996 than it had been in 1966.

Freddie deBoer wrote in a piece on his own adolescent weirdness:

There was never any rigid popularity hierarchy (and I suspect people think there always is merely because of the influence of Hollywood) so no one felt forced to police one. I’m not suggesting that basic elements of crass human social sorting didn’t play a role; they did, they do, they always will.²

Both of these guys are Elder Millennials, 15+ years older than me, and even in their adolescent years, being weird was already normal. There’s a reason every 21st century Hollywood High School has a weird, alienated protagonist, and the “popular kids” are the villains: people who felt like alienated weirdos in high school are a huge target audience—an overwhelming majority, even. That’s just the nature of teenaged insecurity in an individualistic society.

If you’re around the middle of whatever approximate unquantifiable status hierarchy exists, you’ll still feel alienated just because teens are tribal and cliquey, and you’ll never be accepted by everyone. There will always be status hierarchies associated with beauty, competence³, and social charm; and there will always be people who you just aren’t socially compatible with in ways that have nothing to do with status.

In generations past, normality was high-status, and weirdness was policed through physically violent bullying. Now status and weirdness are largely decoupled from one another, and while low-status people are still subject to bullying, it’s mostly verbal, outside of particularly rough neighborhoods. Those who are lower on the status hierarchy will tend to (speaking from experience) identify more and more strongly with being “weird,” and direct their negative feelings about the status hierarchy towards the imagined hegemony of “normies.” By the numbers, most of the cliques any given awkward teenager is excluded from are also full of people who identify as “weird.”

This is the fundamental to our inability to really define what’s “weird” anymore: people will proudly declare themselves weird in one breath, only to condemn someone else for being the wrong kind of weird in the next.

A handsome and gregarious gay theater kid who’s a great actor is probably much more “popular” than the average football player in most American high schools today. In terms of actual widespread social acceptance, there are just as many cliques who will outright socially reject a guy for being too macho and bro-y as there are cliques who will socially reject someone for being too nerdy or queer. The hegemony of one group of “normal” people who can oppress the “weird” people is basically gone, or at least shrinking. Now it’s just different self-sorting tribes, doing their own thing, and leaving each other alone.

The enlightening realization is that social rejection is very often not a reflection of not being “good enough” in the status hierarchy, it’s just a reflection of not being someone’s cup of tea. That’s the basic unspoken premise of a pluralistic society that doesn’t police people’s life choices into one rigid conception of what’s acceptable: “you and I are different in ways that make us socially not the most compatible, you go have a good time hanging out with your people, I’ll have a good time hanging out with my people, no hard feelings.” A lot of people seem to be incapable of grasping the “no hard feelings” part, and think that any kind of social exclusion is hostile and bad. But we’re simply not going to socially engineer away the fact that people have subjective preferences about how to spend their time, what’s important to them, what to talk about, and the style of socialization they like to engage in; people will choose to befriend people who have similar preferences.

Even the aforementioned high-status, popular theater kid will experience some social rejection. Some people just think flamboyance and theatricality are kind of annoying and not their style. Some people just want to play sports and talk with the bros about which girls are hot. Some people will be intimidated by his competence and confidence, and reject him out of a defensive insecurity. And sure, some are genuinely homophobic. All these kinds of people will prefer to hang out with “their people,” despite this hypothetical theater kid’s many winning qualities. Whether he takes these rejections in stride or develops a persecution complex about evil homophobes is up to his interpretation.

A lot of participation in the social-justice/progressive coalition seems to implicitly revolve around this conception of oppression that says: “I’m in solidarity with the oppressed because I was bullied a bit as a kid.” So smart kids get bullied a bit at some point in school, feel a vibes-based affinity for oppressed groups based on the principle of standing up to bullies, go on to be wildly financially successful because the market rewards intelligence far more than athleticism, and then go on to identify with socialism and “the party of the working class,” while condemning the huge swathes of the working class who vote for the other party.

At a small party with some friends here in San Francisco a short while back, I asked people about how they interpret the word “weird.” All of these friends said something about taking pride in being weird, and not generally caring to associate with people who are too “normal,” with an implication of having been bullied or excluded by normies in the past. And of course they said that, because my friends are people I’m socially compatible with.

Just like in high school, the Democratic coalition is full of people who exclude each other—just look at San Francisco progressives disparaging San Francisco’s “tech bros” or “startup bros,” despite tech nerds also overwhelmingly being left-leaning Democrats. (In San Francisco, the self-proclaimed city of love and acceptance, one must simply call nerds “bros” in order to make it socially acceptable to make fun of them.)

IV. Witch Hunts

The hegemony of the indigo blob in academia, journalism, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, government bureaucracy, and all such other highly influential arenas is a reversal of the old hegemony. People who valued tradition and conformity used to be on top, but now they’re the weirdos who must be ostracized. This story is a decades-long Revenge of the Nerds.

The aforementioned Salem Witch Trials bring to mind a more recent partisan valence to our conception of who’s a witch: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible uses the events in Salem as an allegory for McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

In the 1950s, Republican figures were able to accuse cosmopolitans, college-educated elites, Jews, and other “weird” people, of being dangerously subversive—even Soviet or Chinese spies. By the 20th century, our scapegoating witch-hunts may have evolved beyond execution, but people’s reputations and careers were still in danger. Victims of the witch hunt stood up for their first amendment right of freedom of association. The more things change, they more they stay the same.

Democrats have been the party of weirdos for a long time, and so there’s a lot of talk about how much it is a subversion of expectations for Democrats to call Republicans weird. But viewed through the lens of “weird=burn the witch,” this reversal in language has been a long time coming. Now, Democrats are the party of the elite. We hold the cultural power, and many in our coalition have been using that power to hunt witches for years.

Greg Lukianoff writes that under our contemporary reverse Red Scare, more professors have been fired, and more professors report engaging in self-censorship, than during the 1950s Red Scare. Academia is just one microcosm of enforced ideological conformity.

Of course Republicans feel sensitive about being called weird: they used to hold cultural power, and now people who have cultural power want to burn them at the stake. It seems obvious to me that if Republicans are lashing out and becoming politically dangerous because they feel they’re being denied access and representation in elite spaces, actively purging more of them out of elite spaces might not be great for social cohesion and national good will.

I’m quite in agreement with Noah Smith’s, and Matt Yglesias’ understanding of the political strategy of calling Republicans weird. The political climate and social unrest since 2016 has been aberrant and unpleasant. It will be good for society if we can turn the temperature down on extremism and social unrest, and it’s good and true for Democrats to say that a vote for them is a vote for stability. But in order to make good on that promise, we must be less tolerant of bullies within our own ranks.

In an ideal world, I’d hope that this acknowledgment that cultural hegemony has changed hands might provoke some soul-searching amongst us self-proclaimed weirdos. Vengeance, even Revenge of the Nerds, is not good for society. Holding cultural power comes with great responsibility.

In a pluralistic society, we don’t need to all personally like each other, or want to hang out. But, y’know, no hard feelings.

1. See also: the three witches in MacBeth being the “weird sisters,” or the Bene Gesserit “witches” of Frank Herbert’s Dune using “the weirding way.”

2. FdB also wrote, “I know this is the origin story for every self-involved jerk with a mechanical keyboard, but it is the case that in elementary school I was a strong student and also considered for special education.” Just more validation of the comorbidity of Gifted and Weird.

3. Keeping in mind that athletic competence is more highly valued in high school, and cognitive competence is more highly valued for the rest of your life.