‘The distinction between insanity and genius is the ability to connect your madness to others. Quote by Chris Mosely, 1994.
I developed this quotation in 1994, and my business partner at that time believed it was good and submitted it on an offer website which has long since vanished back in the digital nothingness from which it came – as did he it appears, but that’s an entirely different story better left for another blog. The quotation has jumped up again and now and I thought it was about time that I discussed it a little more So exactly what do I mean by this record?
Have you ever watched the record channel where they ask the query ‘Hitler Madman or Evil Genius? I’ve always desired to look for a easy method to recognize for all between insanity and genius and once and investigate this further. It’s actually not as easy as you could watch mad men online think. How can we tell if someone is just common fashioned mad, or an unrecognized genius? That’s qualified to make such judgments? Is it actually possible? My quotation merely states that genius is the ability to connect ‘Madness’ to others – all kinds of conventional chaos. In a way this identifies a new kind of Madness, as opposed to the conventional everyday chaos we understand and all know. It’s like an infection, you’re infecting others along with your madness, and the more people you infect, the more genius like attributes you assume. You infect them through conversation.
So, my quotation generally says that if a person’s Madness isn’t communicated effectively/successfully to culture at large, it is likely that society will consider them angry, in the conventional sense. Insanity in the conventional sense is general it depends on what the most people consider to be typical behavior – ‘it is the tyranny of the masses ‘, quote by Alexis de Tocqueville. There’s no absolute frame of reference in which you may call somebody normal and another individual mad. That creates a fascinating set of results for me. I reside in a world in which many great thoughts are smashed in to dust consumed and because they aren’t properly communicated by the important handling mob.
To me Madness/Genius is a group of radical ideas or methods related to an individual. The thoughts need to be a departure from what’s the currently considered view of reality. In this, the danger lies. These new ideas upset the status quo, they bring down countries, they redistribute prosperity and resources, they eliminate shortage or develop new shortage, they make people behave in odd and unpredictable ways, they change people’s position and how they even see themselves, and they could cause great harm… and so we normally don’t like to accept them easily. They seemingly come with an advanced of risk and disruption.
Let us say you’ve a revolutionary thought, a life-altering strategy and you have the confidence and certainty to start telling people about this. At this point you could possibly be regarded as a madman or perhaps a genius – in the conventional sense. The court is still out on you. You have to connect your madness/genius to others. Individuals have to understand what you’re saying they have to be convinced that your notion is plausible in some way. Possibly even plausible. That does not mean your notion is actually correct the so-called ‘fact’ would rely on some absolute construction of right-and-wrong, which does not occur as far as I am conscious.
We’re not discussing the truth here (or the precise character of reality itself) but instead the human mental connection with understanding (agreeing with something). It’s that moment when a person finally kicks there arms up in to the air, nearly in surrender and proclaims they finally understand something. I really believe that the brain in total exhaustion, having looked at the problem from as many different angles as is virtually possible (or having been required to do so), eventually produces substances, which give you a experience of ‘understanding. That’s it for me personally. It enables the human animal to make products, useful abstractions that may be applied to make forecasts, useful forecasts used to keep alive or flourish. Once you have this chemical response, it becomes very hard to change that person’s view from that moment onwards.
In the end how effectively you communicate your concepts and create these chemical reactions in other people’s brains will influence whether or not you’re considered crazy in the conventional sense. Develop the ability to connect your radical ideas and methods successfully and you’re well on your own method to becoming a genius. Come up with radical life transforming concepts, but connect them poorly and you’re probably be tortured, put in jail or killed!
The interesting thing about conversation is that it comes in many different forms. It may be both verbal and non-verbal. It may be gestures, everything you use, how you walk, whom you keep company with, the tribe and designs you’re associated with. It may be delivered by people apart from you in return for a few kind of consideration, or via various forms of coercion. Consider how this affects culture and just what a doctor or a judge or a cop conveys when they use their respective uniforms. Transmission may be scary, non-violent, provocative, chaotic, wondrous, funny, sad and unpleasant. It may create any mental state you want if done successfully. It could involve both psychological and physical features.
History and human knowledge is littered with types of how to communicate correctly and successfully. You can do it through works, demonstrations and lovely words of art or literature. You can do it with compassion and love increasing everyone’s connection with life and raising humanity up. Unfortunately you can even do it by utilizing violence, oppression and hate. It is possible to drive humanity to the depths of suffering and despair. In a relativistic universe, whose judgments are we to follow. As a whole humanity did not occur into existence with a pre-defined set of goals. There’s no pre-built way of measuring success for the human race as a whole, we’ve had to build it for ourselves. In that way we’re unable of judging we are removed by what up, and we are pulled by what down and herein lies yet another major problem for all of us all.
A Historic example that comes to mind is The Spanish Inquisition. The ‘Insane’ were tortured and burned alive. The inquisitors were considered to have the keys to all information, basic and a comprehension of reality itself. These were the absolute arbitrators of right and wrong truth and falsehood. From the contemporary perspective we can clearly see that’s mad in the traditional sense, nevertheless the more important point here is, can we see how we’re doing exactly the ditto today. When we make reference to the ‘contemporary perspective’ what we are actually referring to is the collective contract of the most people living today (or the people we care about – individuals with influence and power – people who thought knowledgeable) and are respected. Nothing has fundamentally changed with regards to the way the human animal works because the days of the inquisition. What has changed is our collective style of the universe, it is probably expected, more realistic and ‘beneficial. Recognize I am deliberately not saying, more accurate – no nearer to the’ fact’ essentially. No nearer to meeting the human races collective objective – whatever that eventually ends up being.
The debate continues. So, go forth and reveal the madness in enjoyable, positive and an way (or don’t it is your decision), but tread carefully. Your chaos may end up changing humanity forever. History is littered with the corpses of people we consider geniuses today, however in their own time were considered insane madmen. These were tortured, ostracized, vilified and some other ‘ized’,'ied’ or ‘ured’ you could imagine. People became legends, immortalized in human history the stuff of legend.
One of the most famous people put to death for their major ideas (or perhaps because they irritated too many people is the Greek thinker Socrates. I’ve a consent note of Socrates on my desk at work in the kind of a small marble bust. It’s staring at me right now as I create this, peering through at me from the digital nothingness it seems as if he’s grinning at me through the cool rock somehow imbuing the in-organic white rock with his life force.
Owner of this paper: Reinhold T. Schraner