Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
Because I think it is a very insightful commentary. I take it to be an observation that insanity is an emergent phenomenon whenever groups of people begin to cede their individuality to society, that whenever society grows to become an entity or an agent rather than merely a collection of individuals, inexplicable behavior emerges despite the sanity mportance than any judgment about what is "good for society" or "the way things are done."
I take it to be an observation that insanity is an emergent phenomenon whenever groups of people begin to cede their individuality to society, that whenever society grows to become an entity or an agent rather than merely a collection of individuals, inexplicable behavior emerges despite the sanity of the previously independent individuals.
Powerful stuff! Thank you for posting that story. Reminds me a bit of Kafka’s
The Trial.
I think it does not just apply to the socio-political arena, but could, for example exhibit itself within a family. So, in a sense, I might say “cultural” rather than “social” (although “social” can be broadly enough defined, so that might be a quibble).
One of the problems is that such cultural/social insanity becomes defined as the norm—and hence “sane”. I lately liken the process of such cultural/social conditioning (which can begin pre-verbally) to hypnosis, with a whole complex of deeply-set, recursive, reinforcing post-hypnotic suggestions. That is why it is so difficult to break out, and why the breaking-out may take a long, long time as more and more of the reinforcing suggestions are identified. One can think that one has broken free, just to later realize that one has simply fallen into a different loop in the same complex. (“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is, for me, not just a political slogan.)
I call that complex the soap-opera (or the melodrama). That is why I think TV soaps (daytime and prime-time) are so popular: they accurately portray (with the heightened accuracy of caricature) the real soap-opera which is the cultural norm, and reinforce it, even as people laugh at the caricature.
If one begins to speak a language of sanity, most people are unlikely to even understand what he is saying—it might sound foreign before it sounds threatening (although likely both at the same time). Anyone who begins the journey toward sanity is likely experience great upheaval in their lives. (I didn’t begin that journey until I was 40 years old or so.)
I recently told my wife that I have personally known only two really sane people in my life—and that I still wasn’t sure about her! 😉 (And I wasn’t including myself: I’m still working on it.) I mean that: two people—although I have met others who had traveled pretty far down the path. I was fortunate enough that one of those persons was willing to invest considerable time to help me identify my own insane thinking; and so much of the time, I really couldn’t comprehend at first what he was saying. Most importantly, he gave me tools to continue the process—the eternal vigilance comes in because the hypnosis encourages a kind of forgetfulness, an easy default into the old patterns of thinking, or not-thinking.