Living Life: Mad or Unique?

Have you ever wondered why mad people think everybody is mad but them? Could it be true? I mean have you ever met someone who behaved truly like a crazy sort of fellow and was frowned upon by everybody yet they seemed to have the same sort of perverse view of everybody else? I have come to find that there is a very thin line between madness and genius, extraordinary and bizarre, excellence and craziness. One of my favourite writers, David Foster Wallace, was an acclaimed genius by many standards, yet he committed suicide due to depression. Ten years ago, if Barrack Obama told you he wanted to be president of anything less than the USA you would have called him, right, - Mad! Nobody wants to be mad, because it is human nature to try to include you into the group, what my high school classmates used to call ‘the band wagon effect.’ The problem is the bandwagon is too ordinary because everyone is trying to be average. It takes some stick to try justifying being crazy, to dream and cast your net of ideas, ambitions, beliefs wider than the bandwagon allows. If you are satisfied in sitting in the centre of the bandwagon, you tend to criticize anything outside the fold. You think anything above or below average is not correct. So consider being mad, at least sometimes. Crazy people rule the world, make scientific innovations, become sports icons, and achieve great things. Ordinary people don’t do any of these. Madness helps to guide one to think outside the box. I laughed myself to tears when I heard that the first car had no horn, so someone had to run ahead to warn people that a car was approaching in order to avoid accidents. It sounds so silly, but that is where the nice comfortable automobile we all fancy came from, thinking out of the box. Galileo was accused of heresy by the church because he said the earth moved around the sun, even after improving and using a telescope to make his point. For example, some people claim to reach a kind of nirvana where creative intensity increases when they are high on something. When a drug encourages the production of ideas and thoughts that would otherwise not reside in the realm of consciousness and yet it harms the physical body, is the irony of a thinker. According to How Stuff Works, Geniuses like Albert Einstein are also known for their creativity and productivity and sometimes for their quirky behaviour. It goes on to say that some researchers believe that creative people have less latent inhibition than other people - the unconscious ability to ignore unimportant stimuli. Researchers theorize that creative people either receive more stimuli from the world around them or ignore less of it. This may also explain why creative people seem to be more prone to mental illness. People who are both unable to filter stimuli and emotionally unstable are more prone to psychosis - any severe mental disorder in which contact with reality is lost or highly distorted (in my simple English, this means madness.) So don’t sneer at the mad fellow when you meet them by the roadside next time, because they might just be the genius you never were! I wish you a creative Sunday! kelviod@yahoo.com