“Define Normal”: The Socrates Meme and Why Definitions Are So Hard

Last updated: November 3, 2026

The Socratic “what is X?” question asks for a definition that covers every case of X and only cases of X, and in Plato’s early and transitional dialogues Socrates asks it relentlessly: what is piety, what is courage, what is virtue. In the Euthyphro, he tells a man who has offered him an example that he did not want examples, he wanted “the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious” (Benjamin Jowett’s translation). Most of these conversations end without an agreed answer. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates says his questioning earned him “many enemies of the worst and most dangerous kind”, and he blames that resentment for the prejudice that brought him to trial in 399 BC.

Put that habit in a car and you get the meme. In the top panel, a woman at the wheel shouts “Why can’t you just be normal?” In the bottom panel, the boy in the back seat has the head of a marble Socrates with glowing eyes, and the caption reads “Screams DEFINE NORMAL”. The template is a still from the car scene in the 2014 horror film The Babadook, a meme since 2017 according to Know Your Meme. The Socrates version works because it is exactly what he would have said, minus the screaming.

Why Socrates Became the Face of So Many Memes

Socrates is one of the most memed philosophers on the internet, and the reason is partly his face. The marble heads used in nearly every Socrates meme are Roman copies of Greek portraits made after his death, the best-known type often connected with the sculptor Lysippos. Nobody knows how faithful they are, but they all agree on the essentials: a broad snub nose, thick lips, bulging eyes and a forehead that seems to go on forever. Next to the idealised heads of Greek athletes and gods, he looks like a man who has wandered into the wrong museum. That contrast is meme fuel. Give him glowing eyes, as in the define normal version, and the face does the rest.

His contemporaries made the same joke first. In Plato’s Theaetetus (143e) the geometer Theodorus says, as a compliment to a gifted boy, that he is not handsome at all but looks rather like Socrates, with the same snub nose and protruding eyes. In Plato’s Symposium (215a to b) the drunken Alcibiades compares Socrates to the Silenus figures sold in sculptors’ shops: grotesque little statues that open up to reveal images of gods inside. The ugly outside, the divine inside, is exactly how Alcibiades wants his friends to see the man who refused to sleep with him.

Xenophon goes further. In his own Symposium (chapter 5) Socrates enters a mock beauty contest against the handsome young Critobulus and argues, with a straight face, that he should win. His bulging eyes are better because they can see sideways as well as forwards. His snub nose is better because its nostrils open upwards and catch smells from every direction. His thick lips are better for kissing. He loses the vote, of course, but he wins the argument in the only way that matters to him: by forcing everyone to say what they mean by beautiful. It is the define normal move two and a half thousand years early. Asked to accept that he is ugly, Socrates asks for a definition of beauty, then shows that the definition everyone was using does not survive contact with a nose.

That is why the meme lands. Socrates is not a random old Greek pasted onto a horror film. He is the patron saint of answering a demand with a question about its terms, and he was already the funny-looking one in the room. The glowing eyes come from a separate internet convention, the laser stare that marks a character who has reached a state of unstoppable enlightenment or rage, and Socrates, who at the end of Plato’s Symposium argues all night and then spends the next day as if nothing had happened, qualifies on both counts. For the other famous Socrates memes, including the hemlock jokes and David’s painting of his death, see our post Socrates Memes Explained.

Socrates Asked for One Thing and Got a Swarm

The Socratic method begins with a request for a definition and usually ends by showing that nobody in the room, Socrates included, can give one.

In the Meno, Socrates asks what virtue is, and Meno gives him a list: one virtue for men, another for women, others for children and slaves. Socrates replies that he asked for one virtue and got “a swarm of them”. If he asked what a bee is, he says, he would not want a list of bee varieties but the thing that makes them all bees. Meno tries again, fails again, and finally complains that talking to Socrates is like being stung by a torpedo fish, which numbs whatever it touches. Socrates accepts the comparison only if the fish is numb as well: he perplexes others, he says, because he is perplexed himself.

Most of the early dialogues run this way: a confident interlocutor, definitions that collapse, and a conversation that ends in aporia, the state of being stuck. The Meno goes a little further. In the episode with the slave boy who is asked to double a square, Plato presents being stuck as progress, because you cannot look for something while believing you already have it. Socrates’ line about the boy is roughly that he is better off now that he knows he does not know.

The Question That Still Bothers Theologians

The Euthyphro asks a question about definitions that outlived its setting: does a thing have its property because someone approves of it, or do they approve of it because it has the property?

Euthyphro, on his way to prosecute his own father, defines piety as what the gods love. Socrates asks whether the holy is “beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved”. If piety is just whatever the gods happen to love, it looks arbitrary. If the gods love it because it is pious, then piety must be something independent of their approval, and “what the gods love” names a feature of it rather than defining it. The same fork, now called the Euthyphro dilemma, turns up in debates about divine command ethics and, more quietly, in plenty of arguments about whether a category is discovered or decided. Ask it about “normal” and it gets practical fast: is a behaviour abnormal because experts classify it that way, or do they classify it that way because it is abnormal?

Try Defining a Chair

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy suggests that Socrates may have been asking for something many words do not have: a single feature shared by everything they apply to.

In the Philosophical Investigations (published 1953), Wittgenstein takes the word “game” and asks what board games, card games, ball games and children’s games all have in common. Don’t assume there must be something, he advises; look. When you look, you find “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (§66), which he calls “family resemblances” (§67), as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises. In the earlier Blue Book he had criticised the “craving for generality” and Socrates in particular, for brushing aside examples when he asked what knowledge is.

Try it with a chair. Four legs? Some have one, some have none and hang from the ceiling. Something to sit on? So is a rock, and a designer chair in a museum may never be sat on. We still use the word without trouble. Wittgenstein’s conclusion is that, for a large class of words, knowing the meaning is knowing the use, not being able to state an essence. Socrates would not have been satisfied, and philosophers still argue about whether Wittgenstein dissolved the problem or simply declined to solve it.

“Normal” Is One Word Doing Three Jobs

“Normal” can mean statistically common, healthy, or socially expected, and the senses slide into each other. Many arguments about being normal trade on the confusion.

The French philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem made this slide the subject of The Normal and the Pathological, first written as his 1943 medical thesis and reissued with new chapters in 1966, as a 2022 review in Philosophy of Medicine recounts. He criticised the nineteenth-century idea that disease is merely a quantitative deviation from a normal state. Health, for Canguilhem, is the capacity to cope with a changing environment and to follow new norms of life; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on concepts of health and disease summarises his view as health as flexibility, with abnormality defined only relative to a context. Left-handedness is statistically uncommon and harmless. Tooth decay is extremely widespread and still a disease, an example the SEP itself uses against purely statistical definitions. When the woman in the meme says “normal”, she most likely means “the way I expect you to behave”, which is neither average nor healthy, just familiar. No wonder Socrates screams.

The Average Man Nobody Is

The statistical sense of normal is younger than it sounds. In 1835 the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet published a book on man and the development of his faculties in which he introduced l’homme moyen, the average man. Quetelet had noticed that measurements of human chests and heights fell into the same bell-shaped pattern that astronomers saw in their measurement errors, and he drew a bold conclusion: the average was nature’s target, and individual variation was a kind of error around it. The average man was not just typical. He was, in a sense, what humans were meant to be.

Even the bell curve’s name carries the confusion. The statistician Karl Pearson helped popularise the label normal curve and later regretted it. Writing in 1920, he admitted that the name had the disadvantage of leading people to believe that all other frequency distributions were in one sense or another “abnormal”. A mathematician’s convenience became a moral vocabulary, and people whose measurements sit in the tails of a perfectly ordinary distribution have been hearing the echo ever since.

The philosopher Ian Hacking traced what happened next in The Taming of Chance (1990). During the nineteenth century the word normal acquired its double life: it came to describe what is usual and, at the same time, to suggest what ought to be. That double meaning is exactly what makes “just be normal” such an effective sentence. It sounds like a description, borrows the authority of science, and functions as a command.

The twentieth century then ran two famous experiments on the average and got the same result twice. In 1945 the Cleveland Health Museum put on display Norma, a statue of the average young American woman, sculpted by Abram Belskie from measurements gathered by the gynaecologist Robert Latou Dickinson. A newspaper contest invited women to submit their own measurements to find the real Norma. As Todd Rose recounts in The End of Average (2016), thousands entered, and not one matched the average on all nine dimensions. A few years later the US Air Force, troubled by pilots losing control of their planes, had a young researcher named Gilbert Daniels measure more than four thousand pilots on ten body dimensions relevant to cockpit design. The number of pilots who fell within the average range on all ten was zero. The cockpit built for the average pilot fitted nobody, and the Air Force responded by making seats and controls adjustable.

The philosophical point is sharper than it first appears. The average is a perfectly real property of a population and a fiction when applied to an individual. Quetelet’s average man is a statistical object, like the family with 1.6 children. Asking a person to be normal in that sense is asking them to be a summary. Socrates would have enjoyed the cockpit. It is a definition that looked precise, applied to every case, and turned out to fit none of them.

The WHO Tried, and the Word “Complete” Became the Problem

Medicine needs a working definition of health, and the most quoted one, from the World Health Organization, is criticised for setting the bar so high that almost nobody clears it.

The WHO Constitution, adopted on 22 July 1946 and in force since 7 April 1948, describes health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being” and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The WHO meant this as a deliberate move away from defining health as the absence of illness, and the definition is still widely cited. In 2011, Machteld Huber and colleagues noted in the BMJ that the word “complete” is the trouble: taken literally, it would leave most people unhealthy most of the time, and it fits badly with ageing populations living with chronic conditions. They proposed thinking of health as the ability to adapt and self-manage in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges. Like Canguilhem, they define health by what a person can do rather than by a list of things that must be absent. Adapt to what, and by whose standard, is left as an exercise for the reader.

When a Definition Changed, a Diagnosis Disappeared

Definitions in medicine have consequences that philosophy seminars rarely do: whoever writes them decides who counts as ill, who gets treated and who gets paid for.

Philosophers of medicine split roughly into naturalists and normativists, with hybrids in between, as the SEP entry lays out. The naturalist Christopher Boorse defined disease in 1977 by biology: functioning more than a certain distance below the average for a reference class, such as age and sex. Normativists hold that calling something a disease is always partly a value judgement. Jerome Wakefield’s influential 1992 account combines the two: a disorder is a failure of a mechanism to do what natural selection designed it to do, and the failure must also be harmful.

The most cited test case is homosexuality. In December 1973 the board of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a decision upheld by a membership referendum, though a residual category for people distressed by their orientation survived until 1987, as the psychiatrist Jack Drescher documents in a 2015 review. Drescher names gay activism as the main catalyst, alongside sex research that psychiatry had long ignored. The definition moved, and with it the line between ill and well.

Foucault, Hacking and the Power to Make People Normal

Canguilhem had a famous admirer. Michel Foucault, who wrote the introduction to the English translation of The Normal and the Pathological, took the question out of the clinic and into society at large. In Discipline and Punish (1975) he argued that modern institutions, from schools and armies to hospitals and prisons, exercise what he called the power of normalisation. They do not simply forbid things, as a king’s law did. They measure, rank and compare, and the measurement itself becomes a kind of pressure. An exam does not tell a student what to do. It places him on a scale, marks the distance between him and the norm, and leaves him to close the gap himself.

On Foucault’s reading, “why can’t you just be normal?” is not a private exasperation at all. It is the voice of the whole apparatus coming through the mouth of a tired parent at the wheel. That is a powerful idea and also an easy one to overuse. Not every norm is a disguised instrument of control; a norm against hitting people is not oppressive just because it is a norm. Critics have long asked whether Foucault leaves himself any standard from which to say that one set of norms is better than another, which is, once again, a request for a definition.

Ian Hacking offered a more precise tool. In an essay called “Making Up People” (1986) and in later work he described what he called looping effects. When we classify human beings, the classified notice. They change their behaviour in response to the label, by embracing it, resisting it or organising around it, and the changed behaviour forces the experts to revise the category. A classification of rocks does not affect the rocks. A classification of people is a conversation with the people classified. The history of homosexuality and the DSM, described above, is a textbook loop: a category applied to people, people who answered back, and a definition that moved.

This gives the meme one more layer. The boy in the back seat is not only demanding a definition. He is refusing to be a passive object of one. Socrates did the same in court, where he was asked to accept the description of himself as a corrupter of the young, and answered by cross-examining the man who brought the charge. He lost the case and won the argument. Most people demanding a definition of normal will settle for a less dramatic outcome.

“Just Be Normal” Is a Preference Wearing a Lab Coat

“Just be normal” usually smuggles a preference in as if it were a fact, and the Socratic question exposes the smuggling. That does not make every definition arbitrary.

Diagnostic manuals are built precisely to stop diagnosis by gut feeling. The DSM-5 usually spells out criteria sets with minimum symptom counts and durations. The WHO’s ICD-11, by contrast, mostly avoids fixed cut-offs and leaves more to clinical judgement, as its developers explain in World Psychiatry. Two manuals, two ideas of how precise a definition should be, and both get revised as evidence and values shift. The useful lesson of the meme is narrower than “nothing is normal”. It is that “normal” names several different things, and an honest conversation says which one it means. Socrates didn’t get his definitions, at least not in those dialogues. He did get people to notice that they had been relying on words they could not explain, which is more than most seminars manage.

For what Socrates thought he actually knew, read our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge.