I'll skip out the horrendous details of the motherf***ing bulls**t of a Taxonomy exam I just flunked took a few days ago, along with all the lump of exams clustered around the next few weeks, to rid my mind of all these ideas that have been festering inside my empty skull for quite some time now.
Lately, I've been stumbling across more lunatics (as in hardcore loonies) than usual, which have prompted me to reexamine my own crumbling notions on sanity. (But then again it could just be that I'm only beginning to notice things I usually take for granted now that I'm more aware of nutcases, given that all those consecutive exams seem to be beginning to take their toll lately. The seeming incoherence of my statements, along with the extensive use of parentheses and strike-outs, only further drives the point home.)
While it might seem brain-dead easy (so easy in fact that "getting it wrong" is enough for you to be convicted by some as insane) to gauge whether a person is sane or not using what may seem as definite and concrete criteria, things start to get murky when you consider how exactly people define normal.
1. Sanity, or being what is called normal, can simply be seen as akin to falling under the mean or the general mindset. Think about it this way, statisticians didn't name that hump of a curve the "Normal Distribution" for nothing.
In a way, this reflects the general view (or what I perceive to be as general, as I'll explain later) on sanity, with the sane people falling under the big hump. As for why there are two skewed ends for the insane ones instead of only one, one guy sarcastically pointed out that when you're filthy rich and powerful, you cannot possibly be regarded as insane, but you would only be eccentric. All this seems obvious, since most of what our society would deem as radical or deviant does indeed seem insane to most of us. But then remember that Darwin and Copernicus were branded as lunatics during their time, yet at the present age we acknowledge that they were reasonably, in fact undoubtedly, sane. If you were to step in their shoes, you'd think you'd have no reason to call yourself insane, since in our era their ideas are, at least to a certain degree with regards to evolution, scientifically proven. This goes to show just how fluid the notion of sanity can be, and also brings us to my next point.
2. Remember how it is often said that a clear indication that you're truly out of your mind is when you don't think there's anything insane about your line of thoughts or pattern of actions? It turns out that it does have some basis, but only in the sense that you probably can be forgiven for thinking that it's the people around you who are acting or thinking strangely.
There's a concept in Psychology they call the "General Consensus Bias", and it has a lot to do with what our perceptions on what is normal or generally acceptable. It is a given fact that we think of ourselves as normal. What the General Consensus Bias simply states is that are line of thinking often goes:
a. I am a normal and perfectly sane person.
b. Therefore, through a, any normal and sane person should think, act, and behave like me.
c. Consequently, in accordance with b, people who think and act differently would probably have to be insane.
Okay, that might seem a bit too straightforward, maybe even crazy, but that is simply a distilled version of the General Consensus Bias, and most of us would have to admit that we usually apply that line of thinking in our everyday lives.
The notion of sanity is more fluid than what we think, or would like to think, it is. In summary, it's simply an overlap between your views and that of the general (or, again, what you perceive as general) populace. It goes without a doubt that the two influence one another, one way or the other. So the next time you see that filthy and smelly guy talking to plastic bags, try to put yourself in his shoes and
