A Deviance Advantage - Breathing Space Blog

Below are some notes I gleaned from a book with an unusual perspective:

Deviance Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets
by Mathews, Wenty, and Wacker (Crown Books)

* Over the past several years, deviance, not reasoning, began to drive the social and commercial agenda. The result? Things that we found pungent only yesterday, we lionize today.

* Deviance migrates from the fringe to the social convention, rapidly creating markets, and changing the rules of the social and commercial game.

* The pace of change has picked up to the point where the functional distance between the fringe and social convention has all but disappeared.

* Markets form and dissolve in unanticipated places and in record rates. Yesterday's pariah is tomorrow's market darling, and what was once beyond the social pale is suddenly a hot commodity.

* The pace of deviant change is so intense and so relentless that we are beginning to witness compound deviance. The rules of the game keep changing before we have a chance to write them down.

Jeff's comments: It all seems kind of sad, doesn't it? Deviance rules, whereas goodness, purity, and wholesomeness are on the fringe. I hope society, and the popular media in particular, wake up soon.