Outsiders just are, they do not choose
Society is a funny construct.
For some reason, after thousands of years of evolution, man has formed this edifice to coordinate the mutual relations between its members, and the edifice stands on the principles of uniformity, common knowledge, customs and traditions and accepted and expected behaviour.
The edifice propagates because each member learns, consciously after teenage years, and unconsciously before then, about these very principles that drive and sustain his society.
But not all people are amenable to these influences. Man is a mysterious creature, insofar as his personal convictions and inner nature are beyond the observational apparatus of society. You could be a cruel, sadistic, heartless psychopath holding malice towards one and all, but if you manage to hide all that beneath an external veneer of empathy, patience and calmness, you are good to go.
Since only your actions (or the lack of them) can affect others, as long as your actions are in line with those that the society expects, you aren’t really considered harmful. Actions take precedence.
Camus breaks this very barrier in The Outsider. The protagonist lacks any kind of filter that could separate his thoughts and his actions. It’s not his actions per se, for you could find many people like him, but the lack of a filter between his thoughts and actions that repulses the reader.
A person’s personality is basically driven by two processes – if we were to look into his brain, each electrical signal would have its unique signature, acting like an input to the chaotic system represented by the entirety of the brain. However, man’s free will provides a counter-balancing force to this randomness and gives a sense of direction to his personality. Man is, thus, a stochastic system.
Each person grows with his own brain configuration. At every step, he is moulded by society, his parents, teachers and his school and home environment. This interplay means, a person is taught to make the choices that society wants him to, and an ideal social man arises. That this should happen in such a huge majority of the cases is the actual surprise.
Given this background, and that seven billion people live on the earth, it is natural to expect some members on whom this process won’t work, some members who will remain outside such influences, the outsiders that Camus is referring to. They are different, and they are not choosing to be so. They just are.
When Meursault does not mourn the death of his mother, he is not choosing not to mourn. He just doesn’t feel mournful. In this sense, there is no malice in his actions, no ill-feelings, and no imaginary feelings of resentment against his mother can be attributed as a cause. He just isn’t what society expects him to be. He is an outsider, and he doesn’t even know.
No wonder such a person will quickly be taken as a threat to the social construct, because he indicates that the social influences approach is not fool-proof. If Mersault knowingly did the things he did, it would have been an indication of his personal choices, and as long as a person is doing things by choice, his choices can be moulded to what the society wants, through one of many means. But if a person has fallen out without exercising his choice, there really is no hope.
Camus raises some pertinent questions.
Honesty is preached as the best policy, but the moment the honesty of a person crosses certain lines, or is not in line with (pun intended) the conventions of society, it is taken as a source of moral revulsion. Meursault, unknowingly, manages to cross this line and disrobe the hypocrisy of our society.
Our social construct will happily accept the most cruel and diabolical person as a member of its own, provided he acts properly and presents a face the society wants, but that same construct will summarily reject a person who, though not in line with the conventions of society, nevertheless doesn’t hold any malice towards anyone. The cunning dishonesty of the bad is rewarded, and the innocent honesty of even a saintly outsider is punished. But, to be honest (ironical, eh?), I’m not sure we can blame our society for that.
Outsiders will always be there. The social engine isn’t fool proof, and even if it were, it cannot predict the internal workings of something as complex as a human personality. Rather than being repulsed and terrified by such outsiders, they should be accepted as a natural consequence of such a system as the human society.
We must remember that man precedes society.