Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) was founded by Irishman Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who wrote, "The normal consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits." The committe claims that there is no such thing as "normal," and there are no existing "normal" people (i.e., people existing in the average). For example, no one has 2.3 children.
The Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one million Irish pounds (around $700,000 American) to anyone who can produce "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."
Robert Anton Wilson is the American director of the committee.
The name of the committee resembles that of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and it may be a parody.
The Origin of the Committee
CSICON began with a conversation Finnegan heard in a pub between two men named O'Brian and Nolan. They were discussing the strange weather. Another man named Sean Murphy interjected, "Ah, Jaysus. I've never seen a boogerin' normal day. And I never met a fookin' average man neither".
This inspired Finnegan, and the next day he wrote a two-page outline on a new science he dubbed patapsychology. The paper began with the sentence, "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolf Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed."
References
- Wilson, Robert Anton. Robert Anton Wilson | CSICON (http://www.rawilson.com/csicon.shtml) Retrieved Feb. 27, 2005.
- Disinformation: The Complete Series Disc 2: DisinfoCon. (1999) Lecture by Robert Anton Wilson. Distr. Ryko Distribution.
