Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain. (Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness")
Since One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's been something of a cliche that the crazy people are sane and the sane crazy-- but I do think there's a truth there that, as cliche as it has become, could be better understood. Because what makes us supposedly sane is a filtering system that blocks out the real, because none of us can bear too much reality. I am quite content to live in a consensus reality in which I, for instance, don't see or hear dead people. But I have no problem believing that some people do. Whether they're sane crazy or not depends on how they handle it.
Sanity has always been in large measure measured by one's capacity to accept and work within the consensus reality of one's time and place. Wisdom among the sane is that Tom Sawyerly ability to understand how the consensus reality works, to accept it for what it is without much thinking about it, and to work it to one's advantage. Mental illness is measured by one's incapacity to work within the consensus reality. I'm not here to tell you that there is some virtue in mental illness, but simply to acknowledge that the more ordinary syndromes we call mental illness--compulsive disorders, obsessive thinking, severe levels of anxiety and depression--are a function of breakdowns in the filtering system the consensus reality establishes, the psyche's freaked-out response to the leak, and its struggle to patch it for fear of the flood that will drown it.
The "chain" in Dickinson's poem is not just the one the "sane" people constrain the "mad" with, because they are constrained by the same chain. The psyche enchains itself to the degree that it locks out what comes to it from outside the consensus reality prison. Freedom is not just defined by one's ability to navigate within the austere walls of the prison, but also to go outside those walls or to allow what is outside in. We are all of us to some degree within our own psyches both prisoner and jailer, and it's the jailer part of us that freaks out when it starts detecting unauthorized reality leaking in. Why some people have a greater or lesser capacity for freedom in this sense, to freely embrace extra-consensus reality, is a mystery beyond the scope of my ken, but it's clear that some do.
So the point here is that one's degree of sanity has less to do with the one's relationship to the consensus reality and more to do with, first, one's capacity for freedom, and, second, the scope of reality outside the consensus reality one is capable of taking in without losing that freedom. We're living in a time when the consensus reality is pretty rickety. It always is during a times of major cultural transition, and when it is, too much reality leaks in, and we all have a hard time dealing with it. But the difference between the sane and the mad is not determined by one's capability to patch the leaks, but by the capability to adapt and to work with what is leaking in.
And the obvious point here is that this drama that plays out in each of our psyches also plays out in the nation's collective psyche. What are Mexicans from the south and Islamic terrorists falling from the skies really about? What is the security state really about? What is this need to obliterate our enemies really about? I'm not saying there are no problems, but rather that we have the choice to deal with them with the mindset of the free or the mindset of the prisoner. Can't we see that the more we tighten security, the heavier the chains and the thicker the wall we're building around our own self-constructed prison?