"We need to talk about the past, so we can distinguish the trivial, overblown concerns that otherwise plague our thoughts from the experiences that are truly important. We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there. We must submit the strategies and tactics we formulate to the judgments of others, to ensure their efficiency and resilience. We need to listen to ourselves as we talk, as well, so that we may organize our otherwise inchoate bodily reactions, motivations, and emotions into something articulate and organized, and dispense with those concerns that are exaggerated and irrational.... An individual does not have to be that well put together if he or she can remain at least minimally acceptable in behavior to others.... We outsource the problem of sanity.... If you begin to deviate from the straight and narrow path—if you begin to act improperly—people will react to your errors before they become too great, and cajole, laugh, tap, and criticize you back into place. They will raise an eyebrow, or smile (or not), or pay attention (or not). If other people can tolerate having you around, in other words, they will constantly remind you not to misbehave, and just as constantly call on you to be at your best. All that is left for you to do is watch, listen, and respond appropriately to the cues.... [You need] to appreciate your immersion in the world of other people—friends, family members, and foes alike—despite the anxiety and frustration that social interactions so often produce."
From Jordan Peterson's new book, "Beyond Order/12 More Rules for Life" (p. 3).
Do you "outsource the problem of sanity"? When other people "raise an eyebrow, or smile (or not), or pay attention (or not)," when they "cajole, laugh, tap, and criticize you back into place," it isn't always only to cue you that you've erred. It is also to control you and to fool you into thinking that there are limits that just don't exist.
And why did he say "the problem of sanity"? He could have said — We outsource the process of understanding whether we are sane or We outsource the problem of detecting our own insanity. Isn't that what he meant? It would be funny to think that sanity is a problem.
ADDED: I looked up the "sanity" quotes at Goodreads, and I did this because I expected to find what I found — the kind of sanity-skeptical attitude that's been popular in America for as long as I can remember.
2 of the top 6 are from Edgar Allan Poe:
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
And:
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”
There's also Mark Twain: “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
Tim Burton:
“One person's craziness is another person's reality.”
"
J.K. Rowling: “Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.”
And George Santayana:
“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”
ALSO: Reading more deeply into the quotes, I find exactly the line I expected to see (attributed to Akira Kurosawa): "In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
Posts
48 comments:
It doesn't always work.
I don't think we can read recent writings without considering his recent health history: anxiety, treated by benzodiazepine, followed by abreactions to the drug, and drug dependence, then an induced coma to overcome the drug dependency. And somewhere in the middle of all this, I think his wife died.
The “problem of sanity” is the issue of how one determines sanity. In computer science the “halting problem” is not that a program halting is a problem, it is how one might determine halting.
"It is also to control you and to fool you into thinking that there are limits that just don't exist."
or:
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
And stuff it up the hole
In your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother
It is murder
One post questions another to keep things straight.
I am Laslo.
Sanity looks different from the outside.
I am Laslo.
"I don't think we can read recent writings without considering his recent health history: anxiety, treated by benzodiazepine, followed by abreactions to the drug, and drug dependence, then an induced coma to overcome the drug dependency. And somewhere in the middle of all this, I think his wife died."
The book begins with that information. And, no, his wife did not die. She just had a horrific health crisis and almost died.
The definition of sanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting the same results.
I am Laslo.
if you begin to act improperly—people will react to your errors before they become too great, and cajole, laugh, tap, and criticize you back into place.
If that doesn’t work they delete your posts and ban you from the forum.
Nevertheless, some persisted.
It's a constant source of uncertainty--how much of my wife's feedback is about me and how much is about her? It goes the other way too. How much of the behaviors that bother me are things she should stop doing and how much are things that I need to have a better perspective about? "Who's the crazy one" is usually an unanswerable question.
The quadrant of Hot/Sane is a lonely place.
I am Laslo.
anxiety, treated by benzodiazepine, followed by abreactions to the drug, and drug dependence, then an induced coma to overcome the drug dependency
In other words, he has extensive knowledge of the perils of outsourcing the problem of sanity.
I guess "sanity" is social. You can't know if you are "sane" or not without reference to an external social order or system.
Feel free to add relevant references to Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre to up your intellectual credit score.
I dunno. I usually try to think before I speak. I’m so old I remember when doing otherwise might get you punched in the nose.
"Lurker21 said...
Feel free to add relevant references to Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre to up your intellectual credit score."
Kierkegaard from The Crowd is Untruth:
“There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that "the crowd" received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.”
Score
I think he's right. You have to figure out how to separate the helpful cues from the worthless cues, but even identity is formed (only?) in dialog.
(Nod to Charles Taylor.)
Actually, though I think Peterson is talking about process, not conclusions. In the process of formulating our conclusions we need to listen to others. we need to have some sense of where we stand in relation to others. He isn't supporting cancel culture but rather saying everybody has to listen as well as talk. That's what cancel culture coming out of Twitter doesn't do - it proudly doesn't listen.
I've never paid any attention to this Peterson guy or understand why the fascination with him. But from reading that excerpt, I see that I haven't missed anything.
Insanity is inherited. You get it from your kids.
Madness is like most things: the dose makes the poison. A certain amount can be simply stimulating but more than that becomes destructive.
I know some people like him, but Peterson has the kind of flabby, not getting to the point anytime soon writing style that puts me in tl;dr mode within a couple of sentences.
I gather he's popular as a self help guru because he's willing to cut to the chase and offer practical suggestions people can take to make their lives better. But he sure doesn't write that way.
"We outsource the problem of sanity" is a nice point, and a good turn of phrase. It should be the topic sentence in that selection, and the whole thing should be about a third as long.
I abandoned my sanity a long time ago for a more balanced worldview.
I think “wild swan” at 10:35 is on to something. Sanity and insanity is a one-word tag that gets applied at a given moment to a given subset of observations of an ongoing process (or multiple parallel processes) in an individual. The *process* is the thing, and processes are cybernetic, that is, they have (or need) feedback loops in remain stable, coherent, productive over time. We all get thousands of potentially “crazy” half-thoughts and impulses every day. Most vanish before even we log them in. Some become whimsy or dark imaginings. Some even fewer become subvocalized and a handful may get voiced as a joke or a what-if. The attritive process is both internal socialization and sometimes, when voiced, externally socialized.
I don’t find Peterson’s remark either super-insightful or wrong.
---ALSO: Reading more deeply into the quotes, I find exactly the line I expected to see (attributed to Akira Kurosawa): "In a mad world, only the mad are sane." [AA]
Very '60s. RD Laing probably said the same thing.
What forces bring people to question sanity itself? Or to attempt to promote insanity?
Peak-of-cycle phenomena.
Kai Akker: great reference to Laing. When Marcuse was getting on in years, he was interviewed by a young admirer, who asked something like: you say people are foolishly going along with momentary and superficial "fun"; they should seek deep satisfaction of a kind that is denied them by the present system. Ronnie Laing is suggesting that some of the people in the asylums are actually the sane ones. Marcuse said something like: no, I can't agree that we should defer to the nuts because they are nuts.
Don't get mad, get Glad.
That said, lunatic privilege. I want my baby, baby, baby-back ribs. Get in my belly!
"He's not like ordinary men. He acts differently and he thinks differently."
Oh dear. Was Helen Lewis setting JBP back on the path to sanity with her facetious bullying? I wouldn't ordinarily subject myself to academic bafflegab, but let's drill down on this excerpt (assuming Prof. Althouse did him the courtesy of posting all relevant content).
Talking about past, present and future? Why yes, JBP, any rational system of planning needs to know all of those things. Where he tends to go off the rails is the idea of "submitting" his strategies to the judgment of others. Real genius is usually not comprehensible to people who share neither the genius nor the shared beliefs that make exchange possible. Apparently, JBP is surprised by this, assuming the careful flattery offered before his disastrous Sunday Times interview was genuine. "I do not think that it is mere thin-skinned sensitivity on my part to believe that I would have fared no worse had I discussed my affairs with an avowed enemy," JBP remarks in obvious bewilderment at his treatment. Literally any honest commenter here with more life experience than a goldfish could have told him yes, that's how the modern lugenpresse works, Jordy! So the idea that you need to "watch, listen, and respond appropriately to the cues" strikes me less as great wisdom and more of what an neurologically atypical man might say. Does he sound like he's "appreciating" all this immersion into mildly hostile questioning? No way, in fact he's in full-on Hamlet mode as he agonizes whether he should take interviews from the elite media (as his desire for fame demands), or stick to the friendlier waters of Joe Rogan. I certainly wouldn't be stupid enough to accept a "friendly" offer from the elite media, so why would I ever accept lifestyle advice for someone who would be surprised by the results of such an offer?
And that's without going into the fact that he apparently can't remember anything of his three-month trip to Russia, which is less like a rehab confession and more like botched MKULTRA programming. Honestly, his fans are more grotesque than his enemies on left or right at this point. You have to be genuinely desperate for leadership, if not spiritually sick, to insist that someone so severely afflicted resume a course in public life- at the precise moment when the intellectual forces arrayed against him are at their most powerful. All this, of course, after a substantial number of his former conservative fans are dismayed and disgusted by his increasingly erratic "advice," like asking Kavanaugh to be confirmed before he immediately resigns (what?!). But it's not going to matter if Peterson's fan base is seven thousand or seventy million: the existence of the negative criticism is what helped drive him to extremes of chemical dependency and rehab. It's only going to get worse for him.
Likewise
https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/18150674
How others react to us is one useful datum that can inform our self-judgment.
As a young college student, my brother was in 3 car accidents in one year, none of them adjudged to be his fault. But that confluence of events definitely suggested that he should look to his own driving. I think he did; I don't think he's been in an accident since then.
And here's a potential problem with therapy, as illustrated in Hitchhikers' Guide To the Galaxy: if your therapist never provides feedback as to how your thoughts and actions look from the outside, only uncritically affirms that your thoughts and actions are normal for you, then... well, obviously you could just as easily talk to the mirror. I think Peterson is not only saying that it's appropriate for us to check ourselves against societal norms (not necessarily to change ourselves, but to gather data that might lead to our reexamination of our choices), but also that we have a responsibility to others to react to them honestly, so that they can check themselves. IOW, "I'm OK, you're OK" (and its cousin, "don't microaggress against me") is destructive crap that might let you feel good in the moment but will ultimately harm both the actor and the reactor.
Sanity isn't normal.
Sadly, the system is indulging an awful lot of insanity, beginning with the schools. They excuse all sorts of insane behavior like cutting because "trauma" and so kids have to do even nuttier things to get attention.
There's a whole class of crazy coming up.
wild chicken @ 12:55 PM: "...There's a whole class of crazy coming up." Sad to contemplate. Is the mania for tattoos in any way related? A kind of self-punishing self-adornment to acquire attention?
Sorry for u, Mark. I’m absolutely fascinated by Peterson b/c he takes the time to help us out. His lectures from University are online! All my life I’ve believed there is Absolute Truth, somewhere- and then the individual version. Not relativism, exactly. Which is what this world loves and is moving through to something more sinister. He’s educated, experienced and willing to explain.
Most of all- he listens.
I believe his health issues stemmed from trying to wean himself of benzodiazepines. The physical reaction of his body to w/drawal created severe physical pain- I can’t imagine. He was prescribed this medication by his dr- to my knowledge never abused the drugs- but the w/drawal proved his undoing. Along w/a reaction to seafood... he explains it all in an interview w/his daughter. He’s not more than he is- but, he is certainly not less.
Reading more deeply into the quotes, I find exactly the line I expected to see (attributed to Akira Kurosawa): "In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
狂ったこの世で気が狂うなら、気は確かだ
Amusingly, as I just discovered when googling for the exact quote, a lot of Japanese seem to attribute this to Shakespeare, rather than Kurosawa, probably on the basis that Ran borrows the plot of King Lear.
Don't know what is so hard to understand about that phrasing. He simply means "the problem of maintaining sanity"
I’ll add one thought more- I’ve seen what “journalists” do to the folks they dislike. They smear, they lie. Peterson recently did an interview with someone from the NYTs and she twisted everything around. His daughter audiotapes the interview and put it online for compare/contrast. The amount of dishonesty in anything these days is sickening. Those having the stomach for it win.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
"Sanity was tenuous and life was burning by." Jamie Harrison
The tell-tale hearts beat ever louder.
Now, for something completely different.
insane Jussie lies,cries, uses n word on ABC interview
"In The Sane Society psychologist Erich Fromm proposed that not just individuals, but entire societies "may be lacking in sanity."
So, outsource that. If you can.
BTW, I'm somewhat surprised that the owner of this blog didn't point out that "sanity" is more a legal term than one used in psychiatry or psychology.
As a person who spent forty years working in acute psychiatric emergencies, I can't tell you how much I want people to just drop this idea of flexible or reversed sanities. Find another word. Find another way to put it. Frame your statements carefully. Anything. Just stop creating more excuses for the mentally ill not to get treatment.
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -
straight and narrow
<screams> STRAIT and narrow! STRAIT!
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