I like Pink Floyd’s perspective on how many pressures in life can lead you astray from a “good and proper” life, whatever that means to you.
Songs like Brain Damage and Eclipse offer an interesting perspective on how all the events one experiences each and every day can lead you to conclude that life itself is mad (as in crazy).
I know I am speaking quite broadly here, but it makes for a good conversation, particularly when you are thinking in terms of “the bigger picture” and how details in that picture often make little sense, if any.
How do you view Madness in your life? Would you limit “madness” to people who are in psychiatric facilities, or would you go further and suggest that madness is in all of us?
Not all of us. I’ve had to deal with a couple who were not all there. They work as baggers at the local supermarket. Usually just seem slow, but simple things will set them off, like dropping a bag of oranges that scatter and send them running to hide.
I don’t have a lot of patience with the romanticization of “madness”. If you substitute a real word for the ill defined “madness”, perhaps you will see my point. Let’s take schizophrenia. Are we all a little shizophrenic? No. No we’re not. Schizophrenia is a crippling, painful disease. You are conflating madness with eccentricity. They are worlds apart.
When you say that we are all a bit mad you are part of a long and revered literary tradition that has its origins in a time when “madness” was even more poorly understood than it is today. As a literary tradition it has a certain value when it inspires us to look at our actions and beliefs in a different perspective, but when it devolves into the “who is truly mad, the insane asylum inmates or us?” meme, I start to lose interest (a good example of this is the movie King of Hearts, which I loved when I first saw it and still think of with some affection, but after having come into contact with true “madness”, it now makes me uncomfortable.)
One person having irrational thoughts is called crazy. Two people having shared irrational thoughts is called a cult. Three or more people having shared irrational thoughts is called a religion. The “sane” among us just happen to belong to the accepted religion.
Someone can check my facts on this, but I believe that in the US if you claim to have had visions of Virgin Mary, that’s enough crazy to get you locked up and at least evaluated. Make the same claim in various Latin countries south of the border and you’ll be revered as a visionary. Much like retail business, the secret to sanity is location, location, location.
Here is what I believe. There exists an objective reality. I’m sitting in my appartment building right now. It is a real physical structure, as real as the boxers I am sitting around in, the jars of urine and feces, Abe Lincoln, the giant 80foot dragon, Carman Elektra and rest of my lunch guests as well as the army of marching fascist Pink Floyd hammers I have at my command ready to unleash on the world…Ok, scratch everything after “boxers”.
Anyhow, my point is that people have a relamrkable ability to delude themselves when their particular world view does not jibe with the way things are. They can invent their own reality or they might just shut down and isolate themselves (like the dude from The Wall). Sometimes people will defend their reality violently.
Crazy isn’t anything that deviates from the norm. It’s anything that fails to recognize what is real and act accordingly.
No, not really. Those days are gone. “Crazy” is not enough to get you locked up. “Dangerously crazy” will often get you arrested for the dangerous part. Merely seeing the Virgin Mary makes you a colorful character, and if you’re eloquent, you can be an annoying street preacher. Some people may even fall in with you in a prayer group.
The kind of crazy that’s called post-traumatic stress syndrome can make it hard or impossible to hold a job. That’s why some of our homeless people are veterans. They’re not conventionally sane enough to find help from the VA. That’s not easy for the sane, let alone the ones who need the most help.
I would say that when it gets to the point where a person is having trouble functioning in society then they have left mere cognative disonance and have entered crazytown.
Except I suppose that begs the question what happens when society has gone mad.
Works for me. As for society having gone mad, maybe our version of sanity is just being in sync with whatever version of madness is in vogue at the time.
IME, there’s a pretty big difference between odd and quirky and “whoa, this person’s head does not mesh with objective reality at all”. My Mum’s bipolar, and I’ve had a few friends with bipolar and depression. I’ve never seen schizophrenia up close.
I really like, and fall back on, Chesterton’s description of dealing with someone who’s crazy, which is someone who has lost everything but their logic (paraphrased). It means talking with someone whose world is very, very small, who starts from completely false principles, and spirals endlessly, making connections that no-one with common sense or an ability to admit they might be wrong would see.
The sane stand outside, and are appalled at the mental gyrations and stifling inability to communicate.
With my mother, it was easy to pick up on signs of mania and paranoia gradually developing. It didn’t look like odd beliefs, or eccentricity, or a different sort of personality. It was a gradual failure to mesh at all with other people and the world.