If your best friend is correct and you are indeed crazy how would you ever know? An especially difficult question, particularly if your 'craziness' consistently provides the answer. The point being made is quite simple in that the more insane you might be, the less likely you are to recognise your insanity. Therefore what happens when the majority of people within a society become too insane to recognise their insanity? If you think this an extreme improbability, google some pics of the Nuremberg Rallies, in Germany of the late thirties, or recall how a society sanctioned the mass extermination of millions of fellow human beings, or recall the tale of weapons of mass destruction, that filled a hundred thousand body-bags. Economies have collapsed, wars have been fought and countless books have been written on the hysteria of the masses; so much so that we might soon recognise that 'mass-hysteria' is not an isolated occurrence, but rather an ongoing and evolving phenomenon. What are the hysteria's, what are the madness's of today? The madness to which we all, (to a greater or lesser degree) believe to be the coordinates of our normality, our sanity?
This evening on my news feed the three top stories were:
1) Brother of Gerry Adams, convicted for raping his daughter over several years when she was a child.
2) Garda's Anonymity not to be preserved in respect of his Child Pornography conviction.
3)Two men arrested in connection with the abduction and rape of two children (Ages 6 and 9yrs) in Athlone.
Irish society is in melt down, grown men are raping little children and more, and we remain too insane to recognise that these perversions are not 'isolated incidents', but are the product of a society that has lost its way, of a society that has become insane.
Given the state of the world, of politics, the mass media and society at large, it might not be entirely unreasonable to suggest that those of us who declare their sanity with the confidence of a zealot, are perhaps least likely to hold a monopoly upon that illusive substance. Conversely, those who are aware of their insanity, of their individual contribution to the collective (and entirely self evident) insanity of our species, are amongst the least insane of all of us.
In this sense, if we are to save ourselves from ourselves (we ourselves are the greatest threat to ourselves) then we have no choice; we must seek the council of the insane. That is not to say that we should have institutionalised mental patients running the state (despite the possibility of a better job being done), rather it is to state categorically that the correct solutions to our public and private malaise will initially and invariably be perceived as 'madness'. That the real solutions to our unhappiness are to be found amongst those ideas that we have already or might readily dismiss as crazy. In this modern world of horrors of untruths and bizarre contradictions if we are to think, we must first pause and think again.
We must look to the radical and the revolutionary if we are to revolutionise our society, we must hope that deep down, beyond the 'Fakebook-self', beyond the materialism and the superficial existences we have meticulously created for ourselves, that we might retain some of that capacity that distinguishes us from all other creatures; our intellect, our rationality, our capacity for independent thought, and above all our honesty in a world that rewards only the inverse. We must see beyond the market-forces that everyday try with renewed success to suppress those qualities. We must re-visit and analyse those 'solutions' that at first appeared to us to be insane, or ridiculous, and when something sounds crazy we must stop and think carefully, for the insanity may not be in what is heard but rather who is listening.
We might recall that Christ was an iconoclast, a revolutionary, and he was not crucified because his views were in keeping with the majority, with the media and the established doctrines of the day , but rather were the opposite. His teachings were against the law, against the establishment, they were the ravings of a madman. As were those of Gautama, Pearse, Socrates, Einstein, Marx and Freud.
Personally, as disturbing as the plethora of child abuse, (undoubtedly greatly influenced by the extreme nature of pornography that is readily available on the Internet under the guise of 'free speech'), was the news that 91 Elephants were found dead in a national park in Zimbabwe this week. The elephants were killed by poachers who spread cyanide crystals about a watering hole, where Elephants (and countless other animals) would go to drink. The poachers followed the poisoned elephants and hacked off their tusks as soon as the animals were too weak to defend themselves. The tusked lumps of keratin (the same substance of hair and toe-nails) are doubtless destined for the Chinese market where idiot-millionaires treat their erectile dysfunction with ground up tusk or rhino horn.
Not only did the elephants die but countless animals that fed upon their poisoned carcasses, and countless more who drank from the waterhole that had been laced with the seed of human materialism. We don't like to consider the fact that the money that pays the poachers and empowers the idiot millionaires, comes from our purchase of cheap Chinese product; most of which we rapidly dispose of and have no real need for in the first place. Our products are made cheaply in those countries where human rights, minimum-wage and environmental protection have no meaning. We live in our democracies with our human-rights and environmental protection, whilst the third world does our dirty-work, our poaching and pollution. We are all party to theses crimes, we confirm our guilt with each cent we spend. The unhappiness and psychological dysfunction that defines the perversity of child abuse is a product of a society that is equally sick. An unpalatable truth that is rarely encountered on the mind-wash of modern media.
A cardinal ingredient to the qualification of insanity is a greater or lesser measure of delusion, of belief in that which a majority cannot see or recognise to be true. How many people actually realize that the 'self' on 'Fakebook' is not real? That the self in the suit heading to the office, or the professional self dispensing advice with confidence and self assurance, is not really the self?
How many of us know or are even willing to entertain the notion that the majority of us amount to little more than what Holden Caulfield referred to in Catcher in the Rye as..Phonies! Look about at your friends and family and ask yourself how many real people do you see, (do as Michael Jackson advises and start with 'the man in the mirror). For each and all of us (myself included) the space between our real and our portrayed self (our public and private Gar) is always trying to expand. The greater the distance between the two, the greater is our unhappiness and our dissatisfaction with life.
That the world is crazy, that it is governed by a collection of governments driven by economic self interest and guided by a philosophy that is derived from the God of the markets, is self-evident. The state of our environment, the collapse of morality, the demise of those species who share the earth with us, global poverty and the squalor and depravity that defines the lives of the great majority of our race, all speak of an unsavoury 'real' that we are increasingly blind to.
The intellectuals, the thinkers and philosophers who might afford an antidote, are everywhere under siege, purged from society with an effectiveness as brutal as the Nazi purge of a Jewish Ghetto. The very capacity for freedom of thought, or intellectual analysis is threatened and brutalised by a mass media concerned with moronic-millionaires, Kardashians, supermodels, materialism, sex, and super-idiocy. Never before has mankind been in such desperate need of a revolution or a Superman.
President: What I do now, I do for the sake of the people of Earth. But there is one man on this planet who will NEVER kneel before you.
General Zod: Who is this imbecile? Where is he?
President: I wish I knew.
http://youtu.be/jUORL-bvwA0
Our Uberman must also go inside the crystal chamber and reverse the process so that all on the outside are stripped of the superpower of consumption and consequent destruction. To impoverish and enrich equally, or perhaps more realistically to attach our wealth and consumption to its consequence, and cultivate the intellect needed to spend and consume responsibly, that is the task for our Supermen, for Nietzsche's philosopher of the future.
We might ask (if we cared enough), and the future will certainly ask: Were we stupid? Or were we insane, that we should have sanctioned or remained oblivious to the real cost of our 'freedoms' our wealth and our consumption. That our priorities were up our arses, that the greater became our power, the greater our potential for good...... the greater is our desire for more and more. That we had the technology to do so much good and yet our legacy should be one of destruction and misery?
A plea of insanity would necessitate that we remained blissfully ignorant of the consequence of our consumption, ignorant of what we were making of the earth and of our fellow man? The mass media is doing its utmost to preserve this plea, in the ongoing promotion of mental retardation (Yes Lord Sugar) and the depression (or more correctly suppression) of the human intellect or our diminishing capacity for independent thought and analysis.
This subtle campaign has not yet been entirely successful. Here and there a few men and women retain the capacity for independent thought, beyond the reaches of globalisation and the relentless stupefaction of the masses. These lepers are called philosophers, they have yet to be rounded up and concentrated in a camp. They endure the worse fate of being ignored by the media and labelled as insane by the masses. In Ireland RTE (the national brainwashing agency) exercises an explicit ban on intellectual dialogue. Its presenters representative of the worst and most intellectually redundant elements of mass psychology, each groundhog day they contaminate and erode our fading capacity for reason. Ironically through the imposition of the Television Licence Fee upon every household, we are in the privileged position of paying for our abuse. Our academics and intellectuals are vilified, our educated youth are pushed to emigrate and our best universities close their arts and Philosophy departments and plummet in the International rankings.
The few who remain awake, who have not as yet succumbed to the doctrine of the markets that virus of idiocy that is sweeping through our species with the virulence of a pandemic; can find a place to hide and speak only within the infinite anonymity of the web and the Internet and on occasion through books and film or the Arts. In reality their continued existence is a threat to us all, to our consumptive philosophy. For as long as the capacity for independent thinking remains alive we may not have recourse to a plea of insanity, if ever we are called to account for the great mess we have made and continue to make of this world with each cent and each plastic bottle. We can tolerate the truth in small doses, like Chili on a Pizza, we want our philosophy in snippets on a Sunday, or in Pulp and comedy from a Zizek or a Chomsky.
Man's stupidity is a more realistic diagnosis than that of his insanity, yet it is one that we remain too stupid to recognise. Indeed that is the irony of stupidity in that it immediately deprives one of the ability to recognise it's presence, thus making it the most advanced and most dangerous of all of our pathologies.
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