When the average was first introduced into society, many educated Victorians recognized right away that something vital was under threat by their strange new approach to understanding people, driving many to warn, rather prophetically, of the perils of ignoring individuality. In an 1864 essay, a well-known British poet named William Cyples acknowledged the ostensible triumphs of a new generation of average-wielding scientists and bureaucrats, before endowing them with a moniker as distinctive as it was disparaging: averagarians. This term is so useful and apt that I employ it to describe
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