Endeavoring to not go crazy
I've had this thought for many years, but seeing yet another instance of someone randomly going crazy makes me think about it more frequently again. I'm not going to name names, but it just keeps happening...By going crazy, I don't mean literally going crazy, but something has gone really wrong in their heads, I think. Basically the pattern is you take someone and all of a sudden, often after some sort of long hiatus from any public activity, they start obsessively posting about political topics, spending what must be large fractions of their day on the junk. They'll make daily+ rants being angry about something, sharing rage bait, commenting about rage bait, they'll reply to all sorts of accounts trying to start fights or just own someone on a piece of rhetoric, they don't care that their reply is 1 of 5000 and probably won't be read or engaged with -- they don't seem to care that none of their actions have any real effect (let alone a positive effect) at all -- they post unfunny memes, and politics crap just becomes their number one obsession. Platform doesn't matter, the pattern repeats on twitter, facebook, linkedin...
Sometimes it's not politics crazy, sometimes it's conspiracy crazy. Ancient aliens, illuminati (though that gets into politics), moon landing or flat earthers... Other times it's health crazy, which can easily tie into medical conspiracies and politics too. Or shitcoins crazy. Or born-again Christian (or just converted-Catholic) style crazy. I'd prefer simple politics crazy to most of the other stuff but there is enough overlap it doesn't matter that much, it's all just crazy.
Now, I have some opinions that I'm sure people would call me crazy for having. e.g. I think absolute monarchy in the form of Frederich the Great or Caesar Augustus (or to a lesser extent with a lot of Orwellian hand-waving, but a more modern de-facto example, Lee Kuan Yew) is a superior form of government. I think Common Lisp is the best programming language. But while I'll sometimes drag myself into public or online arguments about such things, or do some unsolicited "evangelizing", this is not a sizable portion of my daily activity. It's at best a minor obsession, and most of the time not even that.
I don't really care if someone has what I think is a crazy belief, since I probably have some too. You think we humans never landed on the moon? Fine, whatever. I might even argue with you about it, once. Just don't make it part of your identity. I don't want to see you devolve into posting about it all the time. And if we hang out, we should talk about other things while doing fun activities. If you can keep your "crazy" thoughts mostly under control, then I don't think you're really crazy. That's the standard I endeavor to never break.
Posted on 2025-10-15 by Jach
Tags: philosophy, thought
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