A short note on madness
According to the philosopher Anarchronicon madness is social and cultural defined. Every society and every age has its own opinions about what is mentally illness, and what isn’t. In some countries discrimination is regarded as sick, in another the Pope thinks homosexuals are sick.
According to Anarchronicon the local opinion on mental disorder is not only dependent on coincidence and local customs, but mostly on the hierarchy and the methods of production in a country.
In a pre-Christian setting, as with the Celts at 300 AD, no one was believed to be mad.
People who suffered from delusions and couldn’t speak out one understandable
sentence, were not believed to be mad, but to be touched by the gods.
This is logical, so Anarchronicon claims: "This society was controlled by a caste of
druids, by priests who worshipped very chaotic gods and goddesses. Life to them was not
logically explainable, but erratic as the goddesses themselves were."
The druids and their faith were very predominantly present in society. The druids decided
where there was to be sowed, when it was the right time for harvesting the crops, who was
to become king; there was no life possible without the gods having their chaotic influence
on it.
In this magical world of the illogic there were no madmen, because many of the people we
now call insane, act as incomprehensible as the gods themselves did. So they were seen as
a vehicle of the gods.
In our current society, or rather our current spectacle, production and consumption is
not depending on a chaotic religion, but on technology. Technology in her turn is
depending on science. We only believe what can be empirically proven, and, with a bit of
effort, we’ll believe that what logical reason will tell us to. We live in a world of
reason, a simple world, where everything is explainable by cause and consequence. We
consider every discrepancy of that to be madness.
People who are not capable or willing to keep up with the tempo of the machine, or who
can’t reason rationally in our information oriented society of computers, are
mentally disturbed. This illness can vary from burned-out-syndrome up to completely
insane. In the Netherlands about 1 out of every 15 people is considered to be so.
Anarchronicon, one of the most striking and controversial philosophers of our times,
considers this as ludicrous.
In most cases it would not be the madman who is sick, but society that makes mad.
Anarchronicon logically concludes his argument with the words: (…) "the time has
come to question normality."