Is Everyone Crazy? by Erehwon It's all about perspective. If you think about it, everyone's crazy. Nobody deals with reality as it is. We work with our perceptions, what we see or think we see; how reality appears to us depends on our own paradigms, and preconceptions. No two people see something the same way. For an example, take the event of a baseball player sliding into home, and the catcher attempting to tag him out. The catcher knows that he tagged the runner out, while the runner is just as certain that he was safe. The umpire saw the player as clearly safe, while most of the fans in the stadium saw something different. One fan may have been so engrossed in his curvaceous female companion that, by his perceptions, the event never happened. One event, many perceptions, and most people being sure that they are right. How can we tell which is right, and which is wrong? Aye, there's the rub. Since none of us see reality as it objectively is, since everyone's views are colored by their subjectiveness, we can never truly be certain. We all live life in our own personal realities; none of us sees the world as it really is, and thus are we all insane. "But," one protests, "surely I'm more sane than the people we lock up in the asylums!" Now, this may or may not be true. However, we can never know for sure if it is, because none of us know what "reality" really is, only what we perceive to be reality. So, objectively, the delusions of the drooling nutcase in the padded room have just as much of a chance of being the true reality as anything else. Mark Twain once said, "Sanity is a form of madness commonly practiced by the majority." However, in order for us to deal with the world in a competent fashion, we assume two things: first, that there is a truly objective reality, as opposed to one created solely by our own perceptions, and second, that we see this objective reality as it truly is. These are untrue assumptions, but they allow us to interact with the world in what is commonly referred to as sanity, a method which society has deemed acceptable. Sanity is only the most commonly held view of reality. However, if we assume that there is an objective reality, and that, even if we do not see it perfectly, we can see it somewhat clearly, then there are varying levels of insanity. This is true because one's version of reality will differ from the objective reality by a certain amount. For comparison, let us say we have an orange, a simple piece of tangible, "real", juicy citrus fruit. If there are two observers of this orange, they will see it differently, depending on how far away they are. One who is close to the orange will see it clearly, although they will still miss details, and the perspective from certain sides of the orange. However, the observer farther away from the orange may see only a fuzzy colored dot, perhaps not see the orange at all, or even see something different, as the distant colors blur together. Those who see the orange in this way would be the "truly insane". They are the people whom we feel, through our society's perceptions of reality, are unable to deal with reality as it is. They do not perceive reality as clearly as we do, or so we convince ourselves. Remember, though, that madness is closely linked to brilliance. In order to create something completely new, to truly be a genius, one must also be somewhat mad. This is because brilliance is a result of a different view, of seeing something which others cannot see. In order to see reality more clearly, to look at the entire kitchen, one has to move away from the orange a little bit. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, states that time changes as one travels faster. When you walk across the room, or drive to the supermarket, time slows down for you. Now, this goes against every "law" of common sense, of everything which we "know" to be true. We might discount his ideas as the ravings of a madman. However, scientific experiments have shown his ideas to be completely true, more so than any classical physics which were proposed before him. By looking at things in a different way, by going slightly crazy, Einstein saw objective reality a little bit better than most people. Since our perceptions of reality, what we have been trained to think we see and feel, are not truly reality, we have to go a little bit crazy to become more sane. While this sounds like nonsense, it makes sense, when one thinks about the terminology. Let us define sane as being able to see clearly the objective reality, which we must at this point assume exists. However, as it is usually used, sanity is defined by the "normal", or average way of thinking, of seeing reality in a certain way. So, insanity, craziness, is seeing reality differently from the normal way, of perceiving things differently. Thus, going crazy, as it is defined by society, as different from the normal way of thinking, may let us see reality more clearly than our current view, and thus become more sane. So, by my reasoning, the nutcase in the asylum may be seeing reality more clearly than we are. He might be sane, and it's the rest of us who are deluding ourselves. This statement frightens people, or confuses them, because it challenges their view of reality, their very sanity. It should, because by holding onto our perceptions of reality, we're only deluding ourselves. Only the people who are willing to open themselves to a little bit of insanity are truly "sane". What sane person would talk like this? Only a mad one, perhaps a truly sane one. So you see, I'm crazy. You probably are, too. But you shouldn't worry about it. Insanity's all in your mind.