We Are All Stark Raving Mad

I just back from a short drive and on the way back we listened to 'All Things Considered' where Jon Ronson, the author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry , was being interviewed. The main premise of the book, which sounds like it would be an interesting read, is that much of the world is run by psychopaths. I laughed, but as I listened to some of the things the classified as constituting madness and as telltale signs of madness, a few things stood out. Much of what he described are often described as 'having a power trip', 'being a ruthless leader', or a 'cuthroat competitor'. Mr. Ronson is not describing madness, he is describing sin.

Many people today cannot accept that 'normal' humans could be as bad as most humans evidently are. Forget Hitler or Stalin, how do we explain a basically good man taking pleasure in firing hard working employees when he knows that they need the job and will have little possibility of finding another job? How do we explain a basically good person talking about their belief in the predator instinct and the dominance of the strong? What about the kids who walk into schools and start shooting, or the career criminals who see nothing wrong with their way of life? If we do not believe in a God or a Devil, we are forced to accept these evils as part of the world and either deny the difference between good and evil, or we can normalize it by calling it madness. While there are definitely those who would chose the first option, appealing to evolutionary development and the survival of the fittest, there are many who cannot accept this solution. They feel on a basic level that certain things are just wrong, and when they see people take joy in these things, unwilling to admit to the existence of evil, they conclude that these people have a psychological problem.

The result is a society afflicted with varying degrees of kleptomania, narcissistic personality disorders, and a myriad of variations of madness. Everyone in a society is afflicted with madness to one degree or another, because all deviations from good behavior are results of madness.

If this is true society cannot function. If everyone is mad to one degree or another, who is to say what is madness and what is sanity. If you remove the basic standards that God put in place; right and wrong, good and evil, you remove the logical and rational basis for society to function. Evil exists, and calling it madness and normalizing it will do nothing to ease the pain or fix the damage that it creates.

It is true that there are psychological disorders that are real disorders and are neither results of a conscious desire to sin nor indicators of present or past sin and I have no wish to diminish the suffering that such diseases cause. There is however, a difference between someone who has a legitimate disorder and someone who is just plain evil.