Songfacts®:

• As evidenced by some of song meanings listed under the Sepultura category on Songfacts, quite a few of their tunes and titles were thought up by Max Cavalera ("Territory," "Refuse/Resist," "Roots Bloody Roots," etc.). But as he explained in the 2015 book Survival of the Fittest: Heavy Metal in the 1990s, there was one tune on the group's classic 1993 album, Chaos A.D., that he admittedly "borrowed" from elsewhere.
  
  "The album had really cool things, like 'We Who Are Not as Others,' is almost like an instrumental," he explained. "It said, 'We Who Are Not as Others' on a book – it was a book about freaks. That was the title of the book, and we just decided to make a song about that. So there were weird things like that on the record that came out of nowhere."
• The book that inspired this song was written by Daniel Mannix and published in 1976. It's called Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others, and subtitled "A fantastic gallery of human freaks - their lives, loves, dilemmas, and achievements."
  
  In the book, we meet the Elephant Boy, a set of co-joined twins, and the Human Torso. Many of these people were circus performers.