In many ways, being able to pretend is the definition. The normal is a game that works for many people, a shared arrangement that keeps the lights on. But the normal has now grown for millennia and it’s become a personality of its own, and that personality views the myriad personalities as threats to itself. Hence we don’t just follow protocol to trade and handle tasks, we follow it in every moment of our lives, and we can only safely express the non-common part, the insane part, when we’re out away from the group.

These days the operations protocol refuses to coexist with the personal styles, except it strictly defined containers where variation is permitted and encouraged.