“It's crazy.”
“That's insane.”
“It was totally mental.”
“She's a complete nutter.”
These are just a few throwaway comments that sprinkle our daily conversations and create our shared understanding of reality. This language is sanist. It reinforces the idea that there is a boundary between the mad and the sane (I would argue against this.) It privileges the rational, the controlled, and it mocks the irrational. Like any unconscious bias, sanism permeates our thoughts so insidiously that it exists invisibly. Once you tune into it you find it everywhere.
I'm thinking about this because I recently spent time with my loved ones, who do cherish me and have no wish to offend or hurt me. Yet sanist language cropped up with everyone, and kept me in my place. It offended, and it hurt.
It happens at home, it happens at work, it happens out in public. Hell, I use sanist language myself – regularly, with a knee-jerk cringe of self-awareness. It's not personal (not always) - but it is an expression of power. It maintains the illusion that we can contain madness, and distance ourselves from the disturbing complexity of our own uncontrollable minds.
Sanist language does the same work as racist, sexist and ableist language. It establishes and reinforces a moral dynamic: sane equals good and mad equals bad. Us versus them. The mad are painted at best as fools, and at worst as dangerous threats.
No doubt there are theorists who could explore this more comprehensively: how language is used as a tool of violence, of domination. Sanist language is part of this phenomenon. How tacitly do we assume that sanity is the benchmark, and madness the incursion? How much power, authority, relevance, legitimacy and respect do we accord with sanity? How much disdain and disrespect do we accord with madness?
Many people might at this point throw up their hands in exasperation. More language policing, more liberal wokeness. What next?!
Yes, it's tiresome, I agree. It is difficult work, whenever we attempt to shift the paradigms that govern us. It requires effort, and awareness, and attention to both the big ideas and the small daily habits. But it does make a difference. Norms and attitudes and understandings all change, and mature. We evolve.
And evolution is what I mean when I say that I would argue against a boundary between sanity and madness. Here's my crackpot idea (notice what I did there?): we all have the potential for madness because we are all a part of the divine, and madness is a divine state. Or a step closer to the divine. Or something like that. It's like the saying: “blessed are the cracked for they let in the light.”
I recently came across an interview between the actor Ethan Hawke and the talk show host Stephen Colbert. “What do you think happens when we die?” posed Colbert. Hawke paused to consider, then responded: “Um.... I don't think we die. I don't think that we have an understanding of the divine concept of time. I don't think we're any more capable of understanding a clock than a dog is, and I think something much bigger is going on than we're aware of in our day to day routines. So I don't think I have the intelligence or the DNA makeup to answer that question.”
Along the same lines, I too think something much bigger is going on than we're aware of – and I believe that when our minds wander into the state we call madness, we are perceiving a glimpse of that something bigger. I don't think we master it, by any means. We just taste its flavour. We experience the divine. We touch the next stage of our evolution.
No wonder madness frightens us. And no wonder we try so hard to dismiss it and contain it with our sanist language.