No commas. Just “Is There In Truth No Beauty.”
I think if you found out some insane conspiracy was, without a doubt, true, but so thorough the chances of getting anybody else to believe you are slim*, you could go pretty insane if the conspiracy were insidious enough.
- I leave the circumstances under which you can find out such an elaborate conspiracy exists with no way for anybody else to figure it out up to you.
''The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen
Eh, nevermind.
It’s an old thought experiment that I have read elsewhere but let’s say you woke up one day and someone told you you weren’t still in the universe you were in the day before but the only difference was the shape of a single leaf on a single tree on the other side of the world.
That would seem okay at first but you would get consumed by the fact that this was your real home and if there was that change what else would be different going forward to the point where you would be driven crazy.
I think if I were told, with absolute certainty, that someone was going to kill me in my sleep in the near future,* but I didn’t know when, and despite any measures I took against it, they’d find a way around, I believe I would become paranoid to the degree of obsession/insanity.
Of course, there is no way someone could guarantee with absolute certainty they’d succeed, but I think even a very good chance would bring on the paranoia.
*handwaving away the specifics.
I think there’s Heinlein story like this. Some guy realizes that he’s in a artifical universe of some kind, and when he starts to think he’s actually insane he’ll notice something that’s a little bit wrong.
Haven’t a few mathematician/science types kinda driven themselves crazy thinking about their problems of interest a bit too hard? Not quite the same thing I guess.
I could tell you…BUT YOU WOULD GO MAD WITH INSANITY!!
The Jaunt by Sephen King, as mentioned above, is a great one for fiction: Living with only your unblinking consciousness, trapped in blackness within your own mind, with no escape for a billion billon years… ::shudder::
Also, can forget what Cobb did to his wife Moll in the movie Inception.
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag
Inception has another fictional example. Although it was less of a “revelation” than it was an idea planted in someone’s mind.
Pantalone’s character from The Matrix had a bit of trouble dealing with his new reality.
In The Adjustment Beureu, Emily Blunt had what I imagine would be a pretty realistic reaction to walking through a door in Soho and ending up in Yankee Stadium and then Liberty Island.
IRL, I doubt there is any bit of knowledge that would cause people to “go mad from the revelation”. People are pretty adaptable. Although there are obviously occassions where people develop depression, anxiety, PTSD or other mental health issues from certain events or information.
IIRC, something like that was supposed to happen to Zaphod in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books. Except all that happened was he came out realizing what he always suspected - he was a pretty great guy!
There was a science fiction short story I read way back in the 70’s. I don’t remember the author or the title.
Humans had been genetically manipulated (not sure by who) to go insane when they try to explore or understand physics beyond a certain point (roughly 20th century tech).
Somehow, this one scientist knew this, and also predicted some kind of global war or attack, and worked himself to insanity, essentially sacrificing himself, in developing an impenetrable force field to protect cities from WMD’s. (He was succesful.)
And in the Heinlein story “Methuselah’s Children”, Slayton Ford, the former administrator of Earth meets the beings inside the temple on the first planet they try to land on, and finds that they are actual gods, or very advanced beings, inside that see the inhabitants of the planet as pets. He goes quite insane for awhile.
I’m actually just now getting around to reading The Man Who Folded Himself, only 2/3 of the way through right now (as Time Travel fiction is one of my favorite genres, I’m shamed to admit), and one of the versions of Daniel Eakins…
Goes insane due to the logical conclusion of the power of time travel, he concludes he’s destined to rule the Universe, and is God. Other temporal versions of himself catch on to his delusions, and lock him away in a psych ward indefinitely, taking away his belt
A couple of my favorites in the genre are:
Charlie Stross’s Laundry Series. Basically, Cthulhu is real and mathematics is how you contact him. Alan Turing was in on it. And so on… Great fun.
Larry Niven’s Draco Tavern story, “The Subject Is Closed.” 5 pages. Go read it. The rest of the Draco stories are usually pretty good too.
SCP-231. The rest of the site is hit or miss, but well done, if you like X-Files type of stories. Isn’t there a Doper or two who’ve contributed entries?
You know those brain teasers/riddles in which one person presents an odd situation and then everyone has to ask questions till they figure out what it’s all about? For example, I present the image of a man dead in the middle of a field holding a small piece of straw, and you have to ask questions till you unravel that
he jumped out of a hot air balloon to lighten the load so that his companions could escape over a mountain, etc.
Well, the crux of one of those puzzles is that an old sailor orders some meat dish in a restaurant, takes one bite then goes insane and kills himself. You are supposed to figure out that
he was previously stranded on a desert island with some people who always fed him what they claimed was goat meat - or parrot meat, or whatever meat it is he later orders in the restaurant. In fact they were feeding him human flesh, which he only realizes once he finds out what real goat meat tastes like, upon taking that one fatal bite. This knowledge drives him to insanity and suicide.
My SO is a philosopher, and we know quite a few philosophers (I mean the real kind, not ethicists or metaphysicists). They are all pretty severely depressed. All of them. I’ve seen it happen so many times, and I really think there is strong connection. Not quite the same thing as crazy perhaps, but similar, I think.
Probably due to the very strong, profound and real conclusion that there is no point to life. As subjective and special as we seem, everything is ultimately doomed to absolute oblivion.
sigh I think I’m gonna draw the drapes now and sleep…
One of the things I have seen that causes mentally unbalanced people to crack even further is the gulf between Reality and the way people insist on seeing the world. It’s a control thing, demanding that reality conform to our insistence on how it should be. If the two are far apart but the person refuses to accept and acknowledge this, the mind…diverges.
This is sort of the way the whole Cthulhu insanity causing knowledge works. You think reality is one way, suddenly you learn it is completely different. Now reasonably, you’d only really go crackers if you were unable to reconcile the change from one to the other, which I suppose is quite possible in fanatics and control freaks - people who with such a strong insistence that Reality is THIS (and ignoring all contrary evidence).