Crazy People

Recently I mentioned to an acquaintance that I thought a certain other person was mentally ill. These two people don't know one another. Also, the person who in my opinion is mentally ill shows clear signs of mental illness. He's not dangerous in any way, except possibly to himself. He seems to hear voices that other people don't hear. He has some twitches. Many of the things he says don't make any sense, at least to me. He doesn't complete a sentence, ever. He doesn't seem to be able to connect two things together in terms of cause and effect. My honest opinion is that this man has some sort of medical problem.

Many people would call him "crazy."

My acquaintance replied to my opinion about this other man's mental illness by saying that, "if somebody doesn't conform to what most people consider normal, they're crazy."

Now I would like to tease apart a few ideas, and try to make some sense out of how we use the word "crazy." I will make some suggestions about how we might think about things differently. I hope that as a consequence of changing our way of thinking, we might be able to change our way of acting and speaking.

Often the word "crazy" is used very loosely.

I know a man who is very liberal in his political thinking. Often he refers to people who disagree with him, even just a little bit, as "crazy." If someone thinks that the death penalty is justifiable at least in some cases, this man would refer to that person as "crazy, just crazy."

I know some conservative people who would say that the liberal man is just as "crazy" as he says they are.

Very often I've heard people who have certain views about religion refer to people who think or believe differently as "crazy."

Now, I think that using the word "crazy" this way is very often an excuse for avoiding something which can be very difficult. I'll get to that in a moment. First, let me ask a few questions and say a few other things.

Some people think that the moon landings of the late 1960s were faked. Are these people crazy?

Other people think that the earth is flat, rather than spherical. Are they crazy?

Still other people think that in the distant past human beings were visited by extraterrestrials, who helped them build the pyramids and do lots of other cool things which they couldn't have done on their own. Are people who think this way crazy as well?

The following is a list of ideas (separated by commas) which are all said by various people in various places to be "crazy": The existence of God, the non-existence of God, war is sometimes justifiable, war is never justifiable, eating animal flesh is wrong, thinking that eating animal flesh is acceptable is wrong, extraterrestrials might exist, extraterrestrials don't or can't exist, free markets are good, free markets are bad, it's better to have one skin color rather than another, people of all skin colors are equal, it's better to be one nationality that another, it's not better to be one nationality than another, wearing clothes usually worn by people of the opposite sex is acceptable, or that it's not acceptable, and so on, and on, and on.

It should be clear that if holding as true even one of the ideas listed above is enough to make a person classifiable as crazy, then every single person on Earth is crazy.

Above I said that we often use the word "crazy" as an excuse to avoid something difficult. Here's why.

Now, when we label a person as "crazy," that means we can easily and rightly avoid speaking to that person, because that person is no more rational than the man I mentioned in my first paragraph. We can wash our hands of both the person and the person's ideas, and leave everything to the medical professionals.

If, on the other hand, we say that we think a person is simply wrong or mistaken, then we might have to do something. We might have to say why we think the person's ideas are wrong. We might have to say why we think are own ideas are right.

The difficult thing I mentioned above is called "rational discourse."

In order to engage in rational discourse we have to have reasons for saying what we say. Sometimes we must present evidence in some form or another that another person is wrong about something. We might have to face another human being and actually discuss something, think about something, and even consider that we ourselves might be wrong about something, rather than go home every night perfectly content with our own ideas.

I would like to suggest that we try more often to do the difficult thing rather than the easy thing, and that we avoid calling someone "crazy" unless that person actually has a mental illness in the medical sense of the term.

Hans Bricker