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.
