The Quantity Theory Of Sanity: Is There Enough Sanity To Go Around?

Via Notes From Disgracedland’s Bjarne Knausgaard

What if there is a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? (Will Self)

If you think about it, sanity is a rather delicate and improbable mental configuration. It is an unstable (more precisely, metastable) state of the human psyche. It requires an extraordinary amount of fine-tuning to remain sane. An incredible number of things has to work out in a coordinated way for a person not to flip out at some point in his life. And if one experiences a severe shock during his life, chances are he or she will go insane and never come back.

Sanity is a one-way street. There has never been a case of an insane person suddenly becoming normal, spontaneously or as a result of a shock or trauma, or that one is born insane and then suddenly, when he/she enters puberty, becomes normal. You see! It is like entropy: systems evolve from less to more probable configurations. So sooner or later everything turns into shit (2^nd law of thermodynamics): As we age, our sanity becomes questioned and at some point, if we live long enough, we start losing it. There ain’t no way around it.

Hallucinogenic drugs themselves do not carry any particular magic cocktail of chemicals that causes a state of controlled madness. No, that madness is always in us — there is a constant, albeit dormant, carnival in our heads; it is hibernating thanks to various inhibitors, which control that process. Hallucinogens merely deactivate the inhibitors and set the madness free. A similar effect can be observed without drugs when one is subjected to stress (e.g. hunger, sleep depravation, torture, or a marathon run), shock or some other factor that disturbs the existing order of things (e.g. fasting and a drop in blood sugar — this is how ascetics are getting their visions).

We are biologically wired through evolution to see the world the way “normal” people do. This maximizes our chances of survival. But, we were not meant to live this long and to endure these levels of persistent stress, or to be surrounded with so many people. So, the sanity dimple at the top of the hill is almost full and the shocks are continuous and even though they might not necessarily be always powerful, they are capable of causing persistent overflow.

Setting madness free: Social change as a mental disease

Superfluid information flows have transformed madness from idiosyncratic to systemic. Traditionally, elites and rulers (and people of influence, in general) used to define cultural parameters, set the trends and boundaries. But, their extreme idiosyncrasies remained always their own.

With the evolution of media and compression of timescales, their idiosyncrasies, no matter how odd and socially unpalatable, got a chance to catch up with the rest of the population. In particular, the democratic process has been gradually transformed into a referendum on the idiosyncrasies of the candidates. The madness is no longer individual, but collective and systemic. In a society where an increasing number of people feel like outsiders or outcasts, idiosyncrasies acquire special appeal and great mobilizing power. They cut through the mix and humanize politicians. Individual instabilities become destabilizing on a collective level and are used as leverage to erode the democratic process. The system becomes a center of production of social vulnerability.

The Dual Risk Model distinguishes between types of response to environment. Resilience plays a large part in distinguishing between “normal” and vulnerable individuals. In a positive social environment all is good: When there is growth, there is enough for everyone. But when there is no growth, everything is a zero-sum game — there is not enough for everyone. This brings out the worst in people and this is when social change begins.

The pinnacle of human evolution, the ultimate manifestation of civility, is the human ability to engage in a dialogue, to listen to and respond to the others. The structuralist deconstruction of mental illness consists of an unwinding of the evolutionary process. For them, mental illness is evolution in reverse. During mental illness, unwinding starts from the top by shutting down the ability to engage in a dialogue – the cacophony caused by the “voices” takes over; one is in constant dissensus with oneself, which incapacitates the ability to listen and respond. The regressive unwind proceeds step by step by shutting down other social and biological skills. Different mental diseases differ by the terminal points at which the unwind stops. This is why social changes, which follow closely the pattern of a mental disease, look like madness and the social degradation that accompanies them is defined by the level of destruction of democratic institutions and devastation of traditional forms of civility.

Emotional shocks can also cause disorder. With extreme psychoses like schizophrenia, one is often born with a tendency towards them, but it is only when certain traumatic life events happen that the actual symptoms are triggered (this is the nature-nurture argument). With other factors combined, psychoses can develop faster or not at all in certain individuals. But you have to have both: a tendency towards it + the stressful life factors. These stress thresholds are very relative. They are both biologically and culturally conditioned — people in the pre-Homerian period had a considerably lower threshold of stress than modern man. In fact, the distinction between madness and “normalcy” is more quantitative than qualitative. Everyone has a different breaking point, but practically everyone has it. So, it is only a matter of generating an appropriate level of stress to reach an individual or collective breaking point and everyone will go crazy.

Individuals with higher intelligence, money, supportive families, and a generally positive environment can deal with personal problems better and will, therefore, come out with a better outcome in the end. But when (in the words of an anonymous depression sufferer) we sink to our lowest depths — when everything seems dark and the light is nowhere to be seen — that is when we are the most receptive to change. And we are ready to accept any change, even the one that would hurt us in the long run, as long as it is a change.

At this point, the system operates with a sanity deficit — there isn’t enough sanity for everyone. The madness is set free. Everybody is crazy and everybody has a gun. The greatest show on earth can begin.

Enjoy the fireworks. Happy 4^th.

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