Eccentricity vs. Insanity

 The adjective "crazy" is thrown about routinely in a variety of contexts.  If someone, for instance, really loves something (food, music, etc.) or someone (their significant other), they are often said to "be crazy about" whatever the something or someone is - in a more negative context, it refers to an abnormal obsession with something as well. In another context, "crazy" is also synonymous with extreme, and can be used both in a good or bad context - similar to other normally negative adjectives such as "sick" or "bad."  As an integral part of American syntax and slang, we are used to these applications of certain words, and there is nothing wrong with it - sometimes, it may be the perfect word to address whatever the context is in all honesty.  However, there is a more proper context the adjective "crazy" is used in, and generally it is used to describe some sort of mental instability or insanity, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc. A person with those disorders is not the same as having a mental disability such as Down's Syndrome, as those disabilities are not normally associated with insanity because they are developmental disorders which are not the fault of the individual who has them.  In all fairness though, clinical insanity is often not the fault of the person diagnosed with it either, but unlike Down's Syndrome, clinical insanity is psychological rather than genetic or developmental.  A clinically insane person may actually be extremely intelligent and highly capable of normal functions, but at the same time there is something that isn't firing right in their mind and it causes issues - usually, proper therapy and even medical treatment can control it, so much like someone who is developmentally disabled, a clinically insane person can function in society with the right care.  It is also important that decline in cognitive ability with age that occurs in some individuals - such as Alzheimer's and dementia - is not the same as clinical insanity either. What constitutes clinical insanity needs to have proper diagnosis as well as basic knowledge of what constitutes it, and therefore it is judicious to exercise care at labeling someone "crazy" or insane in that context.  I may be sounding politically incorrect by using terminology such as "clinical insanity," but in all contexts there is not a proper word (maybe psychological disorder, but even that is broad in definition) which really codifies the description other than that.  However, at the same time, if that terminology is to be bandied about, it should be done so with equal discretion.  That leads me to a second term which often gets confused with insanity, and that is the term "eccentric."

Eccentricity is defined as having unconventional views or behaviors that often are not looked on as "normal" by others and seen as strange, and many of us have peculiarities unique to our personalities which could be described as eccentric.  I am a case in point, as I am a self-identifying eccentric, and I am not ashamed of that in any way.  As a matter of fact, eccentricity should be seen as a gift rather than an abnormality, and if properly respected and appreciated, eccentric individuals may actually enrich the lives of others.  An eccentric person does not have either developmental issues or clinical insanity, but due to much misunderstanding about said person, others may look at them as "crazy" or even worse.  It was often true that in earlier days many validly eccentric people were misdiagnosed with mental disorders and locked away in institutions.  This is particularly true with the rise of eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when very racist individuals tried to essentially "church up" discrimination as they saw it as a way of purifying the "race."  In this case, actual individuals with eccentricities were lumped in with the clinically insane and the developmentally disabled, and it led particularly in Britain to the codification of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which labeled "feeblemindedness" as a contagion that needed to be contained and segregated from the rest of society (Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics {New York: Oxford University Press, 2010}, 117-118).  The legislation of such measures in Britain also provided an impetus for the Nazi regime to enact the "Law for the Protection of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" in 1933, which mandated both compulsory sterilization and euthanasia for "inferior" individuals who had any type of disorder - swept up in that mess were a number of people who just had eccentric traits and not mental or psychological issues whatsoever.  The Nazis were not alone though in this, as in the rest of Europe and in the US, similar laws were in place that were just as egregious as those of the Nazis, and generated from the same sources - namely, the eugenics movement.  Any "undesirable" population was at the mercy of such heinous law, including in the US many Blacks, poor Appalachians, and immigrant families. Much of this nonsense could be traced back to Darwin, Galton, and Ernst Haeckel, all of whom actually espoused what was called a polygenic view of human origins - essentially, this idea said that different "races" of man were in reality different species, and therefore any identifiable abnormalities in a group could be attributed to intermarriage between people of different races, and thus racial integrity would be an objective of more radical voices - such as the Nazis - that would come later.  For their part, the Nazis assimilated this idea from the work of German Volkisch occultists such as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, who in his 1902 screed Theozoology even went as far as to incorporate Biblical language and redefine traditional understandings of terms such as "sodomy" on these racial terms - Liebenfels for instance redefined "sodomy" as sexual relations between two different races, and he even basically affirmed homosexual activity, saying it was OK as long as the two individuals were the same species (these early racists equated "race" and "species" as being one and the same based on the polygenic view of origins advanced by Haeckel in particular).  It was this type of thinking which oftentimes targeted people with just eccentric traits as being "abnormal," and it would be an important subject to research to study how eccentrics were killed and what the stats were concerning that, not only in Nazi Germany but in the whole West.  Some of the more targeted behaviors I have read about which were seen as "feeblemindedness" included such unique traits as being left-handed or having preferences for a weird food combination.  In reality, the perpetrators of these atrocities were more than likely more clinically insane than the people they targeted, as to engage in such behaviors would display an underlying issue of lack of empathy or an unnatural obsession with either the perpetrator's own imperfections or their insecurities about their own unique traits.  This was certainly true of Hitler, and I would argue equally true of both Stalin and Mao as well.  So, what does this mean?  Let us unpack that by going back to a basic philosophical lesson I often refer back to from my Master's degree coursework a few years back.

Dr. John F. Crosby, who is the Philosophy Chair at my alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, notes in his book The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996) on pages 14-23 that there are four things that individual human persons co-experience in regard to morally relevant acts, and they are as follows:

1. Persons are ends in themselves and not mere means

2. Persons are wholes of their own and never mere parts

3. Persons are incommunicably their own and never mere specimens

4. Persona est sui iuris et non alterius iuris (each person belongs to themselves and not to any other)

These four affirmations as I would call them substantiate something very integral to our being as individuals.  In Scripture, God proclaimed that mankind was created in his image, and to be honest there has been some misunderstanding of that over the years.  It does not mean God created us as clones of himself - we are not "little gods" as popular televangelists such as Paul Crouch and Kenneth Copeland would have you to believe.  On the contrary, I heard it better explained once by a Methodist minister at a campmeeting I went to in Florida years ago, and to be honest, his perspective was perhaps one of the most revolutionary insights I had ever heard, and I understand this mystery even better as a result.  Of course, God did reflect some things in us that he possesses, such as the penchant for creativity, but being created in God's image also has a whole other dimension that is based on foreknowledge - God created every human person unique in the image he envisioned for them.  In other words, all of our distinctive traits (incommunicability) are created in God's image.  When you start thinking of it that way, it will actually be transformative.  You may wonder why you have that interesting and harmless quirk and no one else does, and now you can appreciate it because God designed that just for you.  You are made a unique creation in God's image, in other words - not a clone of God, but his vision of you as he made you.  There is something fundamentally liberating about that, and this leads to a couple of other observations I wanted to make, with the first being a clarification.

In this present day and age, the LGBT movement has gotten lots of attention and it seems as if it has moved into a new phase with the push for "transgender rights." This nonsense of "personal pronouns" and unequally engineered surgeries and placement of biological men in women's sports where the former has an advantage has caused a lot of controversy.  Given the facts I noted above about being created in God's image, transgenderism is a denial of God's creation.  As a matter of fact. transgenderism has its roots in Darwinian biology rather than divine revelation, and its origins can be traced back to a German sexologist named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs, who was a practicing homosexual himself, came up with the evolutionary view of "the third sex," and this proposed that homosexuals were "evolving" into a third sex due to their inclinations. For the most part, up to this point homosexuality was seen as a psychological disorder (rightly) and it was not considered normal behavior in society.  Over a century after Ulrichs though, we now have "personal pronouns" making their way into our vocabulary based on the same rationale.  Promoting transgenderism as "normal" is an ultimate slap in the face to the Creator - the idea of "a man trapped in a woman's body" is a fundamental denial of what God said when he created mankind (and everything else) in Genesis - over and over again, God said "it is good" when he looked at what he created and the way he created it. Essentially, transgenderism can be seen as a theological heresy that denies God as Creator, as well as his perfection - it suggests that God made a mistake when he made someone a man who "should" be a woman.  While many proponents of the transgender lifestyle are functionally atheist anyway, they have already denied God and instead embraced the evolutionary justification for the activity they engage in based on the faulty "science" of Ulrichs and others.  At its roots, someone trapped in these types of lifestyles are in a bondage, and instead of persecuting them as individuals, we should always treat them with compassion as what they ultimately have is a psychological disorder that merits compassionate treatment and not either indulgence or segregation (both of which are toxic fruits of the eugenics movement).  This also means that by definition, neither a homosexual or a transgender can be classified as merely "eccentric," as that is not what eccentricity really is. I know this is weird for this type of discussion, but given this is a hot-button issue, it needed to be addressed as it relates to eccentricity, and it is what eccentricity is not. 

The second issue I wish to bring up regards how many of us are treated by even our own families.  When I was a kid, I had a variety of things which could be labeled eccentricities.  For one thing, from an early age I developed an aversion to pickles or anything vinegary.  Now, there are many people who don't like pickles, and from the outset this is not anything unusual - there are other foods I don't particularly care for either, but I don't have the hatred of them like I do for pickles.  I guess under normal circumstances disliking pickles would have just been a matter of personal choice, but what turned this into an eccentricity for me was the fact my family often acted like a bunch of cruel jackasses when it came to that.  I guess when I was really young I expressed dislike at a pickle upon first encountering one, and my ignorant uncles and aunts picked up on it and used that as a sort of amusement against me.  To this day, many of them still treat this like a joke.  But, for me, it caused an initial dislike of a particular food to become an intense hatred.  I still despise pickles so much today that if one even touches a plate of food I am served, I will not even touch the plate - the damned pickle ruins the whole meal for me.  I also cannot stand to smell that stuff - this extends to any other vinegary food such as mayo, mustard, ketchup, salad dressings, barbecue sauce, and even Asian cuisine items such as kimchi and teriyaki sauce.  The slightest hint of odor of anything like that will make me physically ill.  That is both an eccentricity on my part but also it constitutes a conditioned response.  On this, I want to say something to those of you with a family member who displays eccentric traits. Don't make fun of them, tease them, or generally not take them seriously - it will do damage to them.  If you have that little niece, nephew, or cousin who maybe doesn't like pickles, please respect them and say "OK, cool - different strokes for different folks."  Believe me, your relative will appreciate that.  And, if you see someone else trying to antagonize them, step in and stop it - and, if need be, slap the offending individual upside their head for acting stupid and cruel.  In all honesty, to this day there are some of my cousins I would like to plant my foot in their backsides for what they did, and a few deceased uncles and aunts could use a kick in their keisters if they were still alive.  Maybe if you appreciated your eccentric relative instead of belittling and dehumanizing them, you might have a greater appreciation for life yourself as you could learn something. OK, rant over.

Shifting gears a bit, even the Church has a class of eccentric saints who have gained much devotion over the centuries.  While most of them are part of the Eastern Christian tradition, there are some in the Western Church as well.  In patristic theology, they are known as "holy fools" or "fools for Christ," as well as the Russian/Slavonic word Yurodivi.  A couple of these individuals are of note in Bishop Varlaam Novakshonoff, God's Fools: The Lives of the Holy "Fools for Christ" (Dewdney, BC: Synaxis Press, 1973).  One of these particular saints was Saint Terence the Wonderworker, a Russian mystic who died in 1886.  Terence only wore one shoe on one foot, and as Bishop Varlaam notes in pages 60-61 of his book, this saint was so eccentric that he chastised wicked people by breaking windows of their houses and throwing dirt on the "Karens" of his day (I like this guy already!).  Although he was taunted and disrespected by neighbors, he dealt with it by crying "to evil, to evil!" and chastising his oppressors.  He endured a lot of persecution for his actions, but there are many more like him in the hagiographies of both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  "Holy Fools" are still a source of discussion in many theological circles, as two things can be true at once - first, their uniqueness was a creation of God, but God allowed the oddest things about them to be their greatest vocation.  This again proves that God gives us certain traits and abilities for a reason, and although they may be eccentricities and not fully respected or appreciated, God uses these things.  I mean, in Numbers God used a jackass to speak to Balaam!  So, what would limit him from using our own personality quirks?

I am a person of many eccentricities myself - I hate pickles with a passion, I engage in self-directed speech (I talk to myself), I possess a trait called synesthesia (which means I can "hear" colors in songs), and I like chili powder on my buttered toast.  I have many others too, and some of them I have dealt with in separate discussions here, but I view myself as the quintessential eccentric, and I love that about myself.  My eccentric traits have been misunderstood and I have been misrepresented and misunderstood, but I also am happy with the person I am.  And, you should be also.  Don't worry about what people say about the music you like, or a certain way you like to eat food, or anything else unique to you - you are not forcing them to conform to you, so they should afford you the same courtesy.  Any rate, I wanted to share that today, and hope you enjoyed reading.  See you next time.