Skip to main content

The Sanity of Insanity

Socrates accepts the poison
Image from masshumanities


Today [10 Oct] is the world mental health day. Who is mentally healthy and who is not? It’s not very easy to determine anyone’s sanity. Men and women who were considered insane by significant numbers of people eventually turned out to be geniuses or saints or something similarly eminent. Mahatma Gandhi’s thoughts and views were quite insane by the world’s normal standards. Joan of Arc was considered an insane woman and bunt at the stake for her alleged collusion with the devil before being canonised as a saint by the same Church that burnt her as a witch.
Geniuses and saints are insane by the world’s average standards. Psychologist-philosopher William James wrote candidly that religious experiences can have “morbid origins” in brain pathology. Religious experiences are often irrational but nevertheless are largely positive by their outcomes. Geniuses are initially perceived by people as lunatics.
A genius sees reality differently from the average person. A genius sees farther and probes deeper. He has a different set of ethical valuations and has the ‘insane’ energy and guts to pursue his valuations even if the whole world stands opposed to him.
Socrates was killed by people who regarded themselves as sane. Socrates was insane by their standards. He corrupted the youth of Athens, according to them. What he actually did was to expose the stupidities of the common people so that his disciples would live saner lives. Superior minds like Socrates usually fail to understand the fury roused by their exposures of the stupidities of the people who run the social, political and religious systems. Every time Socrates opened his mouth, these eminent leaders of the systems were shown up as idiots. The philosopher probably never understood that. It is most likely that Socrates drank the hemlock without knowing exactly what his offence was: that he was saner than the majority.
Napoleon was a great ruler. When he was asked how the world would take his death, he said it would heave a sigh of relief. Superior minds arouse the envy of the mediocre ones by wounding the latter’s vanity. Not only that: the superiority frightens them. So the death of the superior mind is a relief to the common man.
The superiority of ordinary leaders like our common politicians is founded on their position, on the power resting in that position. People may fear that power since it can be dangerous. But such fear is limited. The fear roused by great minds is different. That fear makes the common man feel too small, too insignificant. People like Jesus aroused this fear. Jesus’ demand for love was too inhuman. Too insane for the ordinary soul. Hence Jesus deserved the cruellest punishment. The sanest person was killed in the cruellest way possible.
Sanity continues to be crucified to this day. The methods are different, that’s all.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more