It’s like I’ve always said. Sanity is a hard standard. Foremost, to be sane, you have to be sane all the time. Like being good. You have to be good all the time. But to be bad you only have to be bad some of the time (Homer Simpson). And to be insane, you only have to be insane some of the time. In fact, to do insanity very well, it’s useful to be insane only some of the time. But sanity, like moral goodness, like holding in gas, is a constant pressure.

Sanity is also stringently subjective. A 15th Century witch was likely only a feminist. Almost everybody outside of Noah’s immediately family thought he was looney. And the belief that the earth was not the centre of the universe was blasphemous, dangerous, and wickedly insane. And there’s cultural insanity too. Putting tap water into plastic bottles and selling it for a lot of money does far more damage to the world’s environment than the good it might do to drink it.

To summarize: Sanity, subjective, and constant work.

And Rationality. One of my favorite quotations ever is from Little Man Tate, I believe. I may have modified and fermented it a little over the years but it goes something like this:

A rational man adapts to the world around him. An irrational man expects the world to adapt to him. The only progress ever made is made by irrational men.

I’m sure Little Man Tate got it from somewhere but I don’t know where. I love that. It’s such an unassailable syllogism. And it makes perfect sense. Same thing as insanity, irrationality is very attractive.

The beginning of Peter Pan, the Disney classic: “He was a practical man.” And the voiceover makes the word sound detestable. “Practical.”

Rationality and Practicality, the dishwater-dull twin brothers of bills, mortgages, work, and proletariats. The governors of the borgeoise and the status quo.

Insanity and Irrationality, the champions of art, poetry invention, discovery, exploration, Santa Claus.

I’m not suggesting that we uproot and do away with the sane, the rational, and the practical. But let’s not discredit the usefuless of the irrational and the insane.

SS