Insanity

I read somewhere once that insanity, the kind where people do things like yell strange words in the middle of a park with their pants around their ankles, is actually pretty simple.

An otherwise healthy person develops (or convinces his brain he's developed) a positive response to the emotions he feels when he's suffering humiliation. So, for example, when most people fall on their butts while they're giving a presentation in front of a group of respectable citizens, they feel ashamed and sad because they know their audience's derisive thoughts.

A crazy person, on the other hand, falls on his butt and, seeing the haughty smirks, decides he likes seeing those smirks and carries on falling on his butt. It's sort of understandable and probably a little liberating to pursue this course.

This theory at least explains why people who are not crazy are made so uncomfortable by the presence of the insane; the insane are unbounded by the restraints that sane people still have to deal with. Their lives are unmistakably sad; we know that and they know that. The pain is real - they may often be hungry or lack shelter. They feel that another kind of human contact and fulfillment eludes them. But underneath those surface differences, the regular people are nervous and scared, because they are frightfully close to feeling the same inclinations toward self-destruction.

Also, it may very well be that a person's degree of insanity varies with his or her environment. I'm not talking childhood here, either. I mean on an instant-to-instant basis a person will feel more or less affinity to the humiliation impulse based on who or what happens to be around.

If that is true, everybody be careful.