Wait...What if We’re All Crazy?

Charles Manson is a scary guy. Yes, some of that fear factor has to do with his swastika tattoo and his violent psychopathology and his involvement in a series of murders and his belief in the prophetic elements of Beatles' songs.

But even if all of that is forgotten, he's still a pretty scary guy. And that's because he's clearly crazy. I mean he is so obviously completely and absolutely insane. And, because of his insanity, he holds onto some really batshit crazy ideas. And, here's where everyone gasps in fear, he thinks he's right.

He thinks that he and his prediction of a coming race war as informed by the prophecy Helter Skelter, is was and will be right. Admittedly, delusions of grandeur and a belief in one's own infallibility come with some forms of mental illness, particularly the schizophrenic something or other that Manson's jumbled, word salad-y pontifications indicate that he has.

But still, he's right, at least in his mind, at least in his world (which is the only one that he has, just as our minds and our worlds are the only ones that we have).

He is spending the rest of his life in a prison cell, and he still stands up and talks as if he is one hundred percent, completely correct. He gets on camera for an interview and argues that he is the sanest person in the room, the sanest person in the world. This is minutes before making a series of spastic faces into the camera lens.

Charles Manson, according to all the evidence Charles Manson has at his disposal, believes he is sane. He believes he isn't crazy. He believes he is right. Presumably, he ignores the fact that he is in prison, that he has been diagnosed with a mental illness and that, whenever his name pops up in the news, he becomes the butt of a slew of late-nit TV jokes. That giant arrow pointing to his insanity might as well not exist for Charles Manson.

He even had followers. Maybe the one sure way of calibrating our sanity, self-comparison, backfired. He went around to people and told them of his plan and a bunch probably laughed in his face but others followed. I doubt his egomaniacism allowed him to fully consider the possibility that he was nuts, but even if it had, he could still have come to the conclusion that, well, people are hanging around me, people think I'm right, so I can't be that crazy, can I?

But he was.

I don’t want to bring this to the place where university intro to philosophy classes go, when one student half sarcastically asks something about how we can be sure that we’re not living in the dreamscape of a dying goddess or something like that. At least, I don’t want to go there for too long, because that sort of question really concerns me. I can’t even know if the reality I understand to be my reality is the real reality. I can’t know if it’s some obscure derivative of the real reality, because the real reality could just be the dreams a child projects onto a shaken snow globe. I could be delusional, the whole world could be sane or I could be sane and the whole world could be delusional. There’s no way to know for sure.

But that’s a convoluted, pretentious point to make after all this talk.

The better point to make appears when we put away the philosophical telescope and bring out the philosophical microscope. We all have biases; we all have our moments of ignorance or feelings of prejudice. And, of course, we are usually convinced that these things we hold in our minds or our hearts are 100 percent, totally and completely true.

And there’s no chance that we can be wrong, we tell ourselves.

I wish I could have a conversation with some group of loony-tunes like the Westboro Baptists Haters Association because they are so convinced they are right, they are so certain of themselves. The problem with their certainty, with a certain kind of certainty, is that its self-fulfilling. It’s foundation is laced with illusions and bullying and feckless a priori arguments. There’s a lot of “Because I [or God or the Beatles] said so” in their and other’s arguments. These types of people don’t have reasoned arguments, they don’t have facts or data. But they’re self-assured all the same.

I wish I could go up to them with a massive poster of Charles Manson and remind them where ill-informed certainty, false self-assuredness can lead.