"... a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze... If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
From "Orthodoxy" by G. K. Chesterton.
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5 comments:
Michelle writes:
"I am glad that, having stumbled upon Chesterton's Orthodoxy, you're continuing with it. There's no writer that I myself have found more valuable. And here, as usual, he's caught up the truth and put it into an aphorism."
I love the writing style!
H writes:
"I come at Chesterton from the direction of detective fiction (Father Brown -- definitely not the TV series, but the short stories). I appreciate this discussion hint."
Assistant Village Idiot writes:
I have always loved this quote. He writes something similar in The Everlasting Man. Having spent my career working with acute psychiatric emergencies I can attest that he is quite accurate about this. However, it is not inclusive, but applies mostly to those near the Schizoaffective diagnosis. Paranoid schizophrenics and Bipolars can display this. Depressives and those with anxiety disorders are less likely to be this way. There are also people with Borderline Personality Disorder who display this characteristic in a different way, along the axis of resentment and misreading emotional content rather than intellectual data.
From the same chapter: I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument
I have taken to saying in the past year that the solution to everything is to read more CS Lewis. However, if one prefers Chesterton I will not say him nay.
ken-in-texas writes:
"In Thailand I tried to learn conversational Thai. I don't remember the
word for insane in Thai but I remember that it literally translated as
"Thinks too much.""
Lloyd writes:
I appreciate the comments from Assistant Village Idiot. Try to help people find some mental fresh air, where they are less confined. I don't have his or her experience with psychiatric emergencies, but I have given this some thought. Surely there are common types of mental disorder that don't lead to emergencies, but friends and family all know something is going on. OCD is one term that is used. I have had the experience that the affected person doesn't really want to explain why they are doing simple things in circuitous ways--they know it will sound funny, or something--but sometimes they decide to share. They do in a way think too much, and then do too much--they keep busy with pointless work. As Chesterton says, there are logical connections between one statement and the next, but the growth gets weirder as it goes along.
The novelist Kingsley Amis deals with this in several novels. He claims that lay people can tell the difference between "mad" (as the Brits say) and sane, but a communication with an expert can fill in a lot of details. He claims that when Shakespeare sets out to depict mental disorder, he gets a lot of details right. One thought is that the complex rationalizations are not inspiring or even funny. Amis thinks the whole idea that mental illness is likely to go with brilliance or writing a great novel is greatly overblown. The thought patterns tend to be repetitive, monotonous, not creative or exploring new ways to use words. A mental world that is much too small. Probably any disease can give us the feeling "there but for the grace of God," but mental illness can get under our skin with the idea that reason is letting a person down, or making things worse. Jokes about professors and pundits on TV, to say nothing of internet crazies, are welcome. Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" is a great source.
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