You know that quip about how whatever you think normal now was thought crazy once? And vice versa. Planes. Marriage. Democracy. Consent. Vegans. And pretty much all the guys after whom religions were fashioned.
Our divisions were fastened in Good and Evil. When philosophers entered the arena, they tried really hard to drive us insane but we loved our bovine sanity. So, briefly, our divisions were down to sanity and insanity until all the philosophers gave up.
Now, we have moved from the playground of the good and bad to normal and crazy. And now, we are in a place where we can’t tell the difference. Because how do you tell between nuance and well, more (sic) nuance? We are in a rubberized playground of sensitivity and desensitization. Of feeling nothing, eventually.
The 20th century, inspired as it was by wars and productivity, knew the only way to keep the momentum going was to take a probabilistic approach to progress. Pump the planet with enough humans and at least a few will be crazy enough to build reusable rockets, giant touch screens, and cylindrical devices that talk. The 21st century. Inspired by your dick.
When the answer to saving the planet is Mars, to politics: religion, to religion: politics, to love: Tinder, to loneliness: marriage, to success: meditation—it’s not crazy to wake up every day and ask: WTF is happening? And why is there charcoal in my toothpaste?
The one thing religion did well was draw a universal line between good and evil. Forget for a moment that a few people used that line to snort fundamentalism, start wars, slow progress, spread hate, sell shit, and stop people from having sex. It didn’t work. But despite that, the line helped us hang on to our conscience and, inevitably, our survival. Now, everyone’s walking around with a sharpie, to draw a line of their own, to cross out everyone else’s.
The power of the line.
Total extinction, our raison d’etre.
When truth is a spectrum, we can all invent our own. What freedom—this sovereign state of individuality. This faux self. You are a cage in search of a bird. You’ve constantly got to be feeling something about everything and tell everyone about it: Never have been so confident about what we know and never have we needed more validation. Our existential paradox.
Can a thousand monkeys pounding the keys of a thousand typewriters for several years produce Shakespeare prose? No, but we got Twitter. Also, fuck Shakespeare. Can you tell what’s normal, and what’s crazy about this paragraph?
The line moving away from normal and crazy means people don’t disagree with what you said. They disagree with who you are. It’s how they accept themselves. And that’s becoming normal now. Which is crazy.
All status quo is normalized craziness. And there will always be people who never catch on. You both look crazy to one another. You, because the majority is on your side and the other because he is alone. What unites you both is that you both need one another to validate your identities. We are all deluded by a common belief that the other is deluded.
All of us have a little bit of crazy in us. A little bit of God’s debris. The inner search is an attempt to find that part. And when we can’t, we invent the craziness. Much like the spectral truth. And that shit’s scary: If you can’t find God, play God. Draw your own line.
The external divisions are a function of the split inside ourselves. Social media hasn’t really divided us. It only commoditized our schizophrenia. Everyone’s drawn their own line now. When really, to find is to find out there is no line. There’s never been one. Isn’t that Crazy?
Meditations 