Madness

What is sanity? Is sanity what everyone agrees is sane? What if the majority of people are insane? There are times I listen to people and I think that they cannot honestly believe the things they are saying. Commercials do that to me. I cannot believe those commercials that show all the meat there machine makes, and the people in the audience are so excited like they are going to cook turkey’s and roasts and ribs every night. Most people cannot afford that much meat, or if they can afford it they are at the time of life when their doctor is telling them not to eat it, or there has just been yet another mad cow discovered somewhere but will not be a threat to the public. 

      Is it sane to think that $600 is going to save people’s houses, the economy and the election for the Republicans and do the people really believe it is free money when it is coming from their taxes? Is it really necessary to have chemical imbalances and mental illness to have delusions? Do we really need demons to be paranoid and out of touch with reality? 

      In some cultures, buying a pair of red shoes when that amount of money could have built a school or vaccinated all the children in a third world nation is insane. Killing a person in order to have the status of owning a hair of a famous person is insane. Some people see a lot of insanity in the Western world and the vast majority of them think that they don’t want to copy the west. Our government call the insurgents in Iraq terrorists because they do not want the American military there, but from a Third World perspective, some people are afraid of the insanity that comes with materialism that is sometimes a core value in American society – a society that the American government think could  work in Iraq. 

      Reality is in the eyes of the beholder. Americans cannot comprehend that Iraqi’s would not want the American freedom. There are a lot of people, however, that see freedom as the threat. Freedom punishes criminals, but lack of freedom prevents crime. In the Middle East, they see American-style freedom as a threat to their family safety – but see their societies with its strict rules as freedom from fear. The reality is that they can choose what they want in their lives, and when their lives are not what they want, they have to construct an alternative. People who have suffered severe traumas create an alternative personality to take over from them, like split personality. Is Eliot doing this? Is his demon the tougher personality that is telling him things that help him cope with the reality he is afraid of? What if he is right? Not every conspiracy theory is just a theory of crazy people. Conspiracies happen, and Goebbels said the bigger the lie the easier it is for people to believe it. 

Most people find it hard to know what is real. We see this among people who are generally considered sane – such as the general public. People on both sides of the 9-11 White House versions of events think the other side is out of touch with reality. Democrats and Republicans think the other party is delusional. Independents think they are all whacky. Who is sane? Who is insane? Apparently whoever is in power gets to decide how events and terms are defined. That does not mean they are sane or not committing a conspiracy against the people. Kind of makes you feel a little paranoid, doesn’t it?

      Eliot defined insanity as a biochemical imbalance (Rushdie 134). His perception of insanity is not like that of his friends. Eliot is seeing things that are not there. Technically the hallucinations are due to a chemical imbalance in his brain, but hallucinations are either to drug induced or induced by a chemical imbalance in the brain which is a technical way of saying crazy. Rushdie lets us know this though conversations by conversations about his actions, and the three tea chests stuffed with Eliot’s papers: “In these chests of delirium I found hundreds of operatic, undirected obscenities and inchoate rants against the universe in general (Rushdie143). Eliot was by any definition crazy.