Random Acts of Madness.

"In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

A man who prefers to be dead rather than Red is normal. A man who says he has lost his soul is mad. A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. A man who says that Negroes are an inferior race may be widely respected. A man who says his whiteness is a form of cancer is certifiable...

... our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities... many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."

R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, Preface to the Pelican Edition.

 

On 16th March it was reported in the press that a man in Telford had committed suicide by jumping from the top of a multi-storey car park. Apparently a number of members of the public gathered at the foot of the car park in order to witness this tragic spectacle. In itself, one might venture, a somewhat ghoulish thing to do. But this was not enough for some, who actually urged the man, before he plunged to his death, to "get on with it". Others were reported to have said, "go on, jump", while some raised the level of tawdriness by shouting, "how far can you bounce?", and filming what happened on their mobile phones. Whether or not these people actually hastened the man's death is, I suppose, uncertain, but he did eventually, despite the efforts of specialist negotiators, take his own life.

One wonders about the state of mind you would have to be in to take such drastic action, but even more than that, one is left agog at the level of desensitised cruelty of the crowd that gathered to watch it all. If one can, then, speculate as to the condition of the man's mental health, one can also be left pondering the mind set of the supposedly sane onlookers.

Indeed, this got me thinking about R. D. Laing's comments which are quoted above, which seem to point to a sort of relativity of madness. For who is more harmful or threatening; a man who decides to kill himself, or a baying crowd which urges him to do it?

Such random acts of madness committed by those regarded as "sane" or "normal" only reinforce this notion. Indeed, one only has to turn on the TV and watch the news to find some truly bizarre behaviour. Recently it was reported that a Conservative politician had negotiated with the extreme right-wing English Defence League in order for them to march through his constituency. His idea had apparently been that he would ultimately stop the arranged march in order to garner votes for himself. The politician in question was of Asian descent and had a military background. In his defence he said that he had tried to employ military tactics to try to bring disparate elements of his community closer together. Just how you do that by doing what he actually did reflects, to me at least, a somewhat deranged view of how such issues should be tackled. And then there's all those members of UKIP, seemingly queueing up to make outrageously bigoted statements. Perhaps some of the sheen is at last wearing off that particular political party as they are revealed more and more for what they truly are, but this hasn't stopped a significant number of our populace from supporting them, an act of collective madness if ever there was one.
Perhaps it is as Laing says, that we are all too successful in acquiring false selves to adapt to false realities. This seems close to Marx's notion of false consciousness, as how could one otherwise explain our economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent lack of any meaningful comeuppance for those who actually caused it, while the welfare state, the public sector and the NHS are all attacked and perilously close to being dismantled. All this coming under the banner of "austerity", which has been accompanied by a hefty amount of propaganda to mislead, misdirect and misrepresent. A "false reality" indeed.
So what of, as Laing calls them, our "true potentialities"? I believe, and I think what Laing may have been hinting at, is that far from taking us away from reality, mental ill health can sometimes, if we recover from it, bring us closer to it. It can lead us towards a truth far removed from that simply imposed by our own society. Mental illness can be, as well as a sometimes tortuous experience, a sort of journey through oneself whereby one becomes more compassionate, more humane, not less. As such it can be a counterpoint to our 'normal' 'adjusted' state, a reminder that many of us, with our false selves and false realities, are both repressed and oppressed. To all those with experience of mental illness, I can then heartily say that you should never think too badly of yourself. After all, when, as Laing puts it, normality, sanity and freedom become a "betrayal of our true potentialities", you could never be as mad as the world you inhabit.