TRANSCRIPT
What is the difference between crazy and not crazy? To me, crazy is being out of touch with reality, and being sane is being in touch with reality. Now, in our society, there’s all sorts of talk about what insanity is, what mental illness is, what reality is. And the mental health field defines all these terms, and they give diagnoses to people when they become more and more and more crazy, more mentally ill.
But I actually don’t hold those to be necessarily true at all, because I think a lot of times certain behavior in society that’s considered very healthy can actually really fundamentally be crazy. And there can be behavior in society that is considered crazy that actually is very, very healthy.
So what does it mean for a person to be out of touch with reality? To me, what that means is to be unconscious. And what does that mean? To be unconscious means you’re split off. You’re not aware of what’s really going on. And part of being out of touch with reality, part of being unconscious, means using psychological defenses to deal with the world, to interpret reality. For instance, one of them is denial. So to be in denial, to me, is fundamentally to be crazy. It means there’s something going on out in the world, some pattern of behavior, some action that happened, some personality characteristic in somebody else, some personality characteristic in one’s own self that a person is not able to see, will not accept as true, but it actually is there. And that is denial.
Dissociation is another one. Being emotionally split off from the reality of an event, perhaps being split off from a whole part of one’s personality, perhaps splitting off so far that you can’t even remember what happened. People being totally disassociated from their childhood, it’s not remembering anything. It’s like it’s all in there. The memories are there, but a person is not connected to the reality or to part of the reality of what is actually going on. Stuff that if they were not dissociated, they would know it, they would feel it, they would remember it, they would be in touch with it, they would be able to talk about it. But they’re not. And that, to me, is crazy—to be dissociated.
Now, I want to make the caveat that with any defense mechanism—denial, dissociation, repression, projection—basically projection being seen unresolved unconscious split off parts of ourselves in somebody else. Well, all these defenses are ways of not seeing reality. So the caveat is that we all have them. The caveat is I think we’re all a bit crazy. We all have certain defenses. We’re all, to some degree, unconscious. I haven’t met anybody that’s fully resolved, fully resolved all their traumas, that has no unconscious left.
When you consider we’re all a bit that way, well, when it comes to the big societal level, people have overlapping areas of unconsciousness. People are out of touch with the reality in the same way. And you can get a whole family, you can get a whole village, a whole town, a whole country even, that pretty much all accepts a certain falsity about reality in the same way. And so you could call that a common delusion, a mass delusion. There’s lots of them out there.
You know, there’s that saying that’s so interesting culturally, and I’ve experienced this also, that sometimes people from other cultures, even very, very different cultures, don’t even speak our language, could come to our country and see things about our country that is like crazy to them and out of touch with reality. They can see the flaws in our culture sometimes better than we can because they don’t necessarily have those same flaws. They have a perspective on what we’re doing, and they can see the mass delusions.
But by the same token, we might be able to go to their culture and step inside theirs and just say, “Oh my God, they are insane!” Some of the stuff that—and stuff that they call tradition or they can call their religion, they can call it their reality. This is the way the world is. And we can look at it and say, “That’s not true. That’s not reality. That’s crazy!” Even. But that’s part of cultural politeness, is that we can accept other people, and there’s no all realities, and everybody has their own reality.
Now, personally, I don’t believe that. I believe internally people can believe that they have their own reality, but to me, I believe there is one reality. There aren’t multiple realities. So the problem is in society, if you have a behavior that’s much healthier than a commonly accepted delusion of society, you’re gonna probably be called crazy.
For instance, someone who’s going through a massive grief process and is really working through a lot of their traumas and talking about horrible, painful things that they’ve gone through and crying a lot, they’re thawing out the masks that held the lives of who they were in place, held their persona in place, held their false self in place—the person that they had to be to survive in their family. When people start really grieving a lot of their childhood traumas, this mask starts coming down, and sometimes a lot of emotions come out that have been repressed for a long time—emotions that are commonly repressed throughout society.
Well, sometimes when these things come out and people start, let’s say, talking about family secrets, this goes against the grain of society. This is not considered healthy behavior. This is not what people do in our reality. Well, society can call those people crazy. Sometimes even if they go to mental health practitioners, they can get diagnostic labels for their healthy healing behavior. “Oh, you’re crying too much. You’re grieving.” The therapist might not relate to this at all. The psychiatrist might be very scared of it because he or she is not doing it him or herself. So they will pathologize it in another person. “Oh my God, you have a major depressive disorder. Oh my God, you’re having mood swings. You’re bipolar. You need to take an anti-psychotic.” It happens all the time.
And the problem is that it’s very hard to go against the norms of society. It’s very hard to go against the delusions of society because if you go against the delusions of society, you’re going to be called crazy.
So basically, from a conventional perspective of society, there are two different groups of people that get labeled crazy. There are the people who are more delusional, more out of touch with reality than the rest of conventional society. So in a way, they’re more sick, more disturbed, have stronger defense mechanisms than society. Those people are like, okay, so if we consider society is pretty crazy, the people who are on the extreme end of crazy will get called crazy. They’re gonna get labeled mentally ill. They’re gonna get all these different diagnoses. “You’re this, you’re that. You have major depression. You’re psychotic,” or whatever. “You have a personality disorder. You’re schizophrenic,” whatever.
And then there are people at the other pole who are actually much healthier than society and have much fewer defenses, are able to see reality much more for what it is. And those people are a real threat to society. People don’t like them. Society gets very scared of them. “Oh my God!” Because those people, just with their natural way of being, are going to pressure society to change. And society doesn’t necessarily want to change. It’s very painful for society. It’s very painful for individuals to start looking at themselves more realistically, to heal their defense mechanisms, to face societal trauma, to face individual trauma.
So what do they do? They pathologize healthy people, and they say, “You’re crazy. You’re schizophrenic or bipolar. You’re depressed. You have a personality disorder. There’s something wrong with you.” And the question is, what category is a person? Where do they really fall? Are they crazy, or actually are they healthier than society’s craziness?
Well, I think sometimes people can fall into both categories. I’ve seen people who are in mental hospitals who then themselves say, “I’ve lost my mind. I’m, you know, psychotic right now. I’m super paranoid.” But yet they can say things that I’m like, “Wait a second, this person is actually much, much healthier than, you know, regular society.” And I’ve also seen people who are much, much healthier than society, and because of this, they feel totally alienated. They feel lonely. They feel isolated. They have no peers, and they can develop different defenses just to function in society, to be able to deal with the ugliness of society. And sometimes these psychological defenses maybe aren’t exactly…
The healthiest and so maybe they can be in part here. So I think the bottom line is we’re all a bit crazy. It’s just a question of figuring out, is our craziness fundamentally crazy, or is it because we’re getting society’s insanity put on us? And for me, that’s been a lot of my healing process—to figure out who I really am.
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