So I recently went to a psychiatrist. After being in and out of several different mental hospitals, I figured it couldn’t hurt. The thing that most people don’t understand is that what makes people crazy is the people who are convinced there is a “crazy” to be. After about four days of someone telling you “you don’t seem normal”, there’s a few different possible results -
A. You cut off contact with that person for being a close-minded social behavior nazi
B. You realize that you should probably get some sleep and take care of yourself a little bit more
C. You can always flip the table and say “Nah, you are being really weird, but I am doing fine.”
The fact that something as apparently important as “sanity” can be so lightly tossed around and/or skewed/rotated/scaled tells me that it’s more-so about maintaining a personal satisfaction than anything else. I’ve watched human behavior in my life, and one constant I see again and again is the ability to elevate one’s social standings and/or self-perception based on a person-to-person comparison of someone else (option C above) . It’s set up in the following manner.
Person A is a complete asshole, but apparently everyone likes him/her
Person B has always been more of a follower but has extreme envy of Person A, and chooses to emulate them.
Person C could give less of a shit about Person A or B, or for that matter D and pretty much just focuses on personal freedom & expression.
Person B notices that Person C doesn’t give a shit about conforming to a social norm, and so attempts a crude reconstruction of what they conceptualize Person A would do in this situation – critique.
Person A notices Person B criticizing person C for no apparent reason.
Person A is an asshole to Person B for infringing on personal perceptions/thoughts.
Person C learns person A isn’t the real asshole, but Person B is.
It always seems to be the same setup. The *followers* always seem to head in the wrong direction, and unfortunately followers tend to follow other followers until you have a room full of idiots following someone who’s following nothing more than someone they want to be.
What is really going on is that their personal sense of self is being ass-raped by envy. Sure Person A may be better looking, have a higher IQ, and get all the hot women, and maybe you are stuck in a wheelchair from a car wreck, lost your penis, you’re ugly, and you hate the world (yes, this exists). Even so, the concept of one person being *better* than someone else is nothing more than a concept manufactured by others. The beauty of self is that you get to make a decision to believe other people’s thoughts or not.
A wonderful example of this in action is the concept of what is considered “attractive” in a woman.
In the 1800′s overweight women were considered beautiful simply because if they were overweight it meant they had enough money to afford food, and so everyone wanted to marry/be with overweight women. My guess is even that this became the sexual overtones as well. It’s a subscription to the perceptions of others that forms the ideals of a “norm”. While I personally think this concept limits possibilities, and do my best to keep my own views, it definitely helps to know that a person is only as correct as they believe in their own mind.
