IN-SANE

NOW there’s an interesting, amazingly paradoxical word (I nearly wrote “world,” thank you, Dr. Freud for that Freudian slip). To say someone is “in-sane” would logically be the opposite of saying he or she is “insane.” But what is sanity, and who’s to say what it actually means. The online Oxford Languages dictionary defines sanity as “the ability to think and behave in a normal and rational manner,” the key words being “normal” and “rational.” Think for a moment about our “normal,” contemporary world of movies, historical novels, advertisements, bias, spinning, Santa Claus and “fake” news. And, if sanity means “rational,” then, in my humble opinion, it’s little more than a crap shoot these days.

The ancient Greeks, whose “philosophy” (literally, “love of wisdom”) has proven to be the foundation of “Western” thought, held that humans were susceptible to believing any of the appeals: logos, pathos and ethos — to which I would add keiros and numos — respectively logic and reasoning; passion; morality; popularity and legality. While all are said to appeal to humans seeking wisdom, only the first, logos (logic and reasoning) is said to have “truth value,” if one knows how to make a truth value determination. In short, and in newspeak, an idea must be free of logical fallacies and, at the same time, true in terms of factual arguments. Still feeling quite sane?

That being said, it is equally important to distinguish whether something “true” is such at the level of data, information, knowledge and/or wisdom. Data are qualitative or quantitative attributes. Information is data that has meaning (e.g. the datum “100” has little meaning until it becomes “100 degrees Centigrade”). Knowledge is present when one can take something true in one area and apply it elsewhere (e.g. the ability to apply “how to converse in one’s own language” to other languages or perhaps to debating a United Nation’s proposal). Wisdom, on the other hand, is all about knowing when and how to present a new idea without hurting others. Got it? Now you can say with authority that you’re firmly in-sane. At least, that’s my opinion.

If you enjoyed this romp into, through and beyond sanity, consider reading my latest book, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor. An Amazon genre bestseller, it’s available now in printed, digital and/or audiobook form. Try it. You might like it. And you might find that being in-sanity isn’t so bad after all…

The Edge of Madness

THE EDGE OF MADNESS has been purchased by K. Simmons Productions for manga, animation and cinematic treatment.

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