I was reading today about pet hoarding -- keeping an unspeakable house full of pretty happy bunnies, with the freezer for a cemetary. It's a syndrome. I think of Zell Kravinsky, plotting to give away more and more money and organs. There's a level of sacrifice we can make sense of; when people go beyond that, we want to know who they are, to try to figure out whether they are noble or nuts.
Here's the complicated part: I read once on a university bathroom wall this bit of insight, "Just because they're out to get you, that doesn't mean you're not paranoid." The corollary to that is: "Just because your sacrifices make sense, that doesn't mean you're not crazy to make them."
Suppose one was faced with the following choice: do x amount of good, and stay sane, or 100x amount of good, and go crazy. How would one choose?
My friends from the early 70's would tell me that "crazy" is just a label that society puts on those whose conceptions are radical and challenging. It's a term of abuse with no moral content. But I am inclined to disagree: I think one has good moral reason not to go crazy, and that crazy is a pretty definite place one can go. But I don't know my way around this territory very well.
Posted by shea0017 at August 10, 2004 3:19 PM