Serial killers and pedophiles are not insane?
They are but so is society. Thus, how can an insane society determine if something is more or less insane than itself?
How would you describe a sane society?
A sane society would be where people only eat meat once every three days or once a week. A sane society would not be ran by religious nutjobs who blow up anyone who does not obey their religion. A sane society would not look to the Pope as the prime leader of rational thought and inspiration. A sane society would not war for oil, a sane society would not violate the Constitution and have unjust policies and laws. A sane society would not cut down the forest to expand their infrastructure and make cheap money. A sane society would not cuckold men. A sane society would have sex therapist provided to angsty teens and sexually frustrated individuals. A sane society would primarily focus on improving the conditions of schools and male students, rather than focusing on feminism and banning guns to stop school shootings. A sane society would not spread the lie that the two genders are just as capable at everything as the other. A sane society would have a DNA machine, so that stupid people, or people who don’t like their bodies or ugly people, could be comfortable with their bodies, and conversely, so that the world is not populated full of selfish idiots that contribute to animal suffering or unselfish ugly people, who don’t contribute to animal suffering but are hated and ostracized by the selfish idiots. A sane society would have free speech, not fascist feminist laws where scientists and students lose their careers over making slightly politically incorrect jokes. A sane society would not have a blocking tool called Facebook where friends sadistically block communications with each other over the slightest provocation, when they hear something they don’t agree with, promoting strife and ignorance and restriction of freedom of speech.
That is only scratching the surface.
What is sanity? What is insanity? Like with all questions of this kind, we need to know what we are talking about before we can have any fruitful discussion.
Personally, I find very little value in these words. I’m more interested in the way these words have been/are used by the powerful, the institutions of mental health, society in general, and so on. How they actually function in regards to people’s well being or lack thereof. Not whether there is actually any legitimacy behind the words themselves.
If anyone had my life, exactly as I did, they’d be insane. Insanity is real.
I’ve had experiences and beliefs and views and behavior and all sorts of things that people may very well describe as insane, and I have also considered myself insane before. But that doesn’t make it so.
The problem with this word “sanity” is that people must be adjusted to “reality” in order to be considered “sane”. Here we are on a philosophy forum where many of us admit, by the virtue of asking the question “what is reality” (or other forms of that question) that we DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT REALITY IS! How can we say we are sane or insane if we can’t even agree on what reality is?
I don’t doubt that you are “crazy”, as I am, in the sense of societal standards. But our society could very well be a madhouse that has no justifiable right to define what sanity or insanity are.
Products of the society they come from.
Nonexistent.
They’re used by institutions and authorities in society on individuals they can’t control therefore by default under authority anybody that can’t be controlled or doesn’t go along with the officially endorsed social conformity is insane.
Nobody can adequately define what normalcy is which makes the words sanity and insanity all the more damning.
I am saner in the sense that I know when I am insane, and other people don’t. Difference is, other people think they are sane, when they are clearly insane.
What if sanity just means having a well-functioning brain, and isn’t so noble or poetic as all this jazz?
Well functioning brain? Define.
I’m not a brain-scientist, so I’ll have to define through example. Take myself as the example. If I’m near somebody holding a hypodermic needle, I break out into a cold sweat, my heart races, and I can’t think about anything but getting away. It must be my brain doing it- what else would it be? I don’t like it, I don’t consider myself to have a ‘different perspective on life’, because my perspective is that needles are totally fine- but I have this reaction to them anyway. So, a well-functioning brain would be at least a brain that doesn’t do that. Now obviously, that doesn’t mean all well-functioning brains are the same, and all sane people must be alike. It just means there are a host of things we can point to as obviously not well-functioning, and insanity can be attributed to those.
Well, what’s the standard for a well functioning brain? What of that of an autistic brain with neurological disorders? Are they insane? What of a high functioning individual with a phobia of needles?
You haven’t even begun diagnosing the behaviors of this supposed insanity either.
Of course I haven’t, I’m not a psychologist. Why are you even asking anybody on this website if that’s the kind of detail you want?
What I am saying, though, is that there are clear irregularities in human behavior that are unwanted, damaging to a person’s life, and caused by the brain. An absence of those would be sanity, and a presence of those would be mental illness. Is there some subjectivity there? Sure. But just because there are corner cases (A a phobia of sharks unreasonable, or a survival mechanism?) doesn’t mean we have to doubt the obvious examples.
Well, in order to discuss what insanity is and isn’t it would be helpful to know what sanity is.
Yes, autism can certainly be damning on the individuals that have it. It’s a neurological illness of the mind much as liver disease is an illness of a stomach.
The problem lies where psychiatry fabricates mental illnesses for individuals that don’t socially conform that are physically healthy in every other regard.
Yeah, that happens too. And not just in psychology, it happens in real medicine as well- A 70 year old man not having the libido of a 19 year old is apparently now a ‘medical condition’ requiring treatment.
But in answer to your first point, I don’t think you’re ever going to get a definition of sanity beyond ‘an absence of crazy’. I don’t know what else it would possibly be beyond an observation that a person seems to be free from mental problems.
That is really a huge problem. Mental illnesses are fabriacted in an industrial complex of mentally ill brains.