"He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart." - C.S. Lewis

A democracy does not want great men, it wants all men to think they are great.

Relative Insanity?

People tend to use the word “insane” casually, to describe all people and things that are not pleasing to them or are simply of a very different kind from them. Is this all that insanity then is? Just when any one human is too far away from another for him/her to be considered as “normal”? Could it just mean that there is no such thing as real “insanity” that everybody that is “sane” can agree on? My view on this issue is along the lines of what I would like to call “relative insanity”. This means that each individual has a different view of what it means for someone else to be insane.

Every human being has a mental image of what an ideal person is. I say this with the impression that everybody wants to accept people that are closer to them in both beliefs and characteristics. I came to this belief by observation, both internal and external. I observed that in me, the ideal person of whom I speak is present. I also noticed that this ideal person is closer in characteristics to me than anyone else. Although this observation was useful it was not strong enough grounds for the conclusion I made earlier. I however also observe that most people tend to be closest friends with people that are similar to them. I feel that this is due to similarities between these friends and the ideal person.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned something I called relative insanity. I now plan to explain my view on this with the theory of the ideal person. I think that insanity is relative on two different levels. Firstly, since everybody has their view of an ideal person, it also follows that they have a view of an insane person. Insanity for each person, is a *sidetrack from our ideal person. Most people in a community have major similarities in their ideals; a person who is then regarded as “insane” by a community is anyone whose ideals differ greatly from the majority. The other way in which insanity is relative is in that a person ideal at different times in their lives change. An excellent example of this is Osama bin laden, not only because he was viewed as insane by a large number of people and viewed as ideal by extremists, but because I feel that a young bin laden who worked as a CIA agent would have viewed his later self as mad.

The question then is, is insanity then solely a matter of impression? Is it just a subjective view an individual holds? Or is there a more objective ideal that goes beyond any one individual’s views? This is an essay for another day.

Battle Scars - Lupe Fiasco & Guy Sebastian

When a song seems to have been written just for you because it expresses your feelings in a way you can't.

"We are all haunted by the idea that we are wasting our lives away"
-Unknown

Hi :)

This is going to be my first shot at blogging, so it is very exciting for me. I have wanted to do this for a while, so all it took was a little encouragement from Jenai yesterday and here I am. It's funny how people who were strangers not too far back begin to mean so much. Their words and opinions become so important.