Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo
"Both mental disorder and hyper-sanity place us outside society,
making us seem 'mad' to the mainstream.
Both attract scorn and derision, but whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling,
hyper-sanity is liberating and empowering.
Ultimately, standing out is the price we pay for being outstanding."
by Neel Burton
"Games, games. Here's some games.. Games, they vegitize you. If you play the games, you're voluntarily taking a tranquilizer.... Wackos everywhere, a plague of madness.
In fact, very few, very few of us here are actually mentally ill. I'm not saying you're not mentally ill, for all I know, you're crazy as a loon.
But that's not why you're here. That's not why you're here. That's not why you're here! You're here because of the system.
There's the television. It's all right there — all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray... Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we for then? We're consumers. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally ill!"
~ Brad Pitt (Jeffrey Goines)
12 Monkeys (1995)
"The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’.
Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply:
‘I am just looking for a human being’
– thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential."
"This self-knowledge, which I call super- or hyper-sanity, opens up a whole new world before us, rich in beauty, subtlety, and connection, and frees us not only to make the best out of it, but also to give it back the best of ourselves, and, in so doing, to fulfil our potential as human beings."
Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane:
they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities,
and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception.
As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things,
and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people.
In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive.
It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range,
as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives,
locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity.
Unable to take leave of their selves,
they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility,
rarely contemplate the bigger picture –
and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves,
of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity
to defend against another, as life – mysterious,
magical life – slips through their fingers.
Neel Burton is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He is a fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford, and his most recent book is Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking (2019).
This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education.
Thinking is about much more than logical reasoning, and Hypersanity broadens out to examine concepts such as intelligence, knowledge, and truth, and alternative forms of cognition that our culture tends to overlook and underplay, including intuition, emotion, and imagination.
