Call me crazy, but then what?

So we as a society see someone do something crazy, right? Crazy here meaning demonstrably irrational — something we can’t imagine ourselves doing, be it climbing a water tower, whispering madly to oneself about gophers, wearing clashing plaids or mass murder.

“Well, that’s insane,” we say to ourselves. “Totally senseless.” We call it “crazy,” and that’s descriptive. It describes how alien the action is to us.

Then we look at the particular perpetrator of this act, and as with the act, we attempt to understand them — not so much a conscious thing, but more of an automatic reaction where our brain sees something new and instinctively tries to wrap itself around it like white blood cells digesting a bacterial infection.

Failing to understand this person, we call him or her crazy. This is also descriptive — we’re noting that this particular person is in the habit of doing things we find to be eccentric, unnerving or horrifying in a conventional, logical or moral sense.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Having bracketed off the actor and actions as “loony,” our brain can simply stop trying to understand them. And then suddenly, “crazy” becomes more than descriptive. Now it’s an explanation.

Now the “crazy” of the person is the reason and the origin of the “crazy” actions that we’ve been failing to comprehend. What’d they do? Oh my God, that’s insane. Why’d they do it? Oh my God, it’s because they’re insane — case closed, that’s all there is to it.

This is misleading for a number of reasons. Also dangerous.

Up until now we’ve been using the word only to diagnose people and actions in terms of our particular view of the world. But this “crazy” can be easily conflated with the “crazy” that implies a professional medical diagnosis, which brings with it a greater sense of legitimacy.

But we might as well confuse the anecdotal and the medical crazies for now, because they’re both a part of the same big fallacy.

We’re assuming this irrational person is a closed system — a little line segment of insanity unto itself that shares absolutely no points with any other ray, line or quadrilateral of earthly existence or humanity.

We can’t even be parallel to the crazy line, because that would imply some sort of common trajectory, which is ridiculous because they’re crazy and I don’t know why.

And equipping ourselves with fancy medical terminology that attempts to do more than describe the crazy only perpetuates this problem. Oh, they have a disease — chemicals in their brain made them do it.

But chemicals in our brain are responsible for everything we do. Every time I get angry you could simply ignore any of the possible causes of my anger and blame the chemicals in my brain — and you’d be right!

But you’d be missing something. And it’d probably just make me angrier.