The negative meaning of the word "marginal" has become entrenched in our society. This is probably due to a direct translation from Latin: "located at the edge, on the border." He gave the word a touch of something declassed, almost rootless. The marginal is the one who is on the sidelines, not adjoining either those in front, or those who seek to stop time.
That is, such a person falls out of the main at the moment, stereotypical
perception of everything that happens in cultural or social life.
This definition can fit both completely uneducated, degraded people living with primitive desires, and those whose creations and statements in many years will become something like the Bible. Because at the moment they are only them. And they do not have a generally accepted position in relation to the world around. Marginals are too strange, incomprehensible. They do not fit into the framework, and this scares, makes you wary of such an individual.
Arguing about who is such a marginal,you understand that it cannot have a clearly defined positive or negative connotation. Indeed, along with the homeless, drug addicts and "gopniks" who failed to adapt to society and rejected its rules, among the marginalized may be such as Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein or Count Tolstoy. They, too, were "people in themselves", those who lived by their own rules.
So, a marginal is someone who falls outside the usual, generally accepted, understandable. This is a state of “borderline”, intermediate between the understandable and the great, that which will shine in the future, or between the understandable and the worthless, obscene, that which will disappear with the death of its bearer.
The most amazing thing in the concept of marginal is the unpredictability of the further development of events for any person who does not fit into the everyday life of his contemporaries. After all, the carriers of such an attitude to the world initially go out of step. This means that no one and nothing can influence their future fate. Time itself decides what lives and what must sink into oblivion.
After all, even those who proclaim themselves oppositionists continue to think by generally accepted criteria, obeying the norms of behavior, language, thinking, finally. For a marginal, by definition, there can be no criteria by which we could evaluate his legacy. After all, he is out of time and situation. Therefore, it is very easy to take someone's quackery for innovation, and consider "a person from the future" to be insane.
This is the tragedy of the situation. It is very difficult for true prophets to reach out, and it is easy for false prophets to give incorrect, false guidelines. No, there are no clear criteria in both art and culture to determine the truth of a phenomenon.
The marginal is the one who accumulates, develops features of thinking, principles that will be adopted in the next generations. He is a kind of yeast on which a new image of humanity will rise. What is now considered extra-systemic, tomorrow may become the dominant opinion and norm of perception. But maybe not!
So, speaking about who is a person who has left some ideas about the world and, according to his contemporaries, has not joined others, we will understand that this is a marginal. The meaning of the word itself suggests that this is a rather complex indefinable phenomenon that only our descendants can rightfully appreciate.
