All Kinds of Crazy - Part I

I'll start right off & say it right now:
I'm crazy.

That's right, a bonafide lulu.

I have problems.

Okay, so maybe I don't really consider myself crazy. But someone else probably would.

The thing is, we all judge 'craziness' according to a very idiosyncratic, skewed, biased, personal lens.

Because of our weird personality biases, and the lens on the world we developed because of the family we grew up in (or without), and the coloring influence of our experience navigating through life, the way I see it is that what we really have are our own personal, unique patches of "crazy blindness."

We're immune to "seeing" certain types of "crazy," with our particular immunities depending on our experiences.

If we see enough of it, and it becomes commonplace to us...if we're habituated to it, it no longer really looks like 'crazy.' It becomes backdrop. Landscape. The normalcy.
Only other things will stand out, held up against that landscape.

Example:
My father may beat me, but no one in our family wears purple hair.
I go to your house. Your mother notices bruises on my arm, and asks me some
annoying questions about how I got so many bruises. I lie, without thinking
about it, because I'm used to that. However, I can't stop staring at your little
brother, who is wearing the loudest purple dye in his hair that I've ever seen.
He walks in the door with it; your mother doesn't even blink. I gape. After a
while of my staring, you ask me what is up with the weird staring. I ask
incredulously, "What the hell has your brother done to his hair?! Did he just
come home like that?? Did your mother not notice, or
something? Do you guys just, like, take that in stride, or something-??"

So- you get the picture. What is not even a "Thing" viewed through one person's Crazy/NotCrazy filter, may be completely out there in someone else's view.

And all behaviors which could, by anyone, be labeled 'crazy' at one given time or circumstance or the other, are 'crazy' mostly by matter of degree.

So, not only do we all have blindness for certain types of crazy and 'sight' for other types of crazy, our blindness or sightedness may be a 'threshold' matter.

Like, let's say in the example above, your family beats you a little, but there's a line drawn at breaking skin, drawing blood, and breaking bones. But let's say that my family just doesn't give a damn...they go all the way. I've been at your house with the remnants of cuts, scars, and healing broken ribs, etc. on me. So while your mother doesn't think it's nuts just simply that a parent hits a child, she does think it's nuts what my parents do to me.

Both sets of parents are hitting and/or beating children; it is merely a matter of degree being used to mark off the line of which set of behaviors is considered crazy. [And it depends on who you're asking, in that scenario.]


Which kinds of crazy that get restricted and punished/intervened with, is a matter of majority vote, more or less, in a society.*
[*Well, in more democratic social structures, anyway.]
If 80% or more [that's a somewhat arbitrary 'highish' percentage -I just grabbed-] of the population of a society say some behavior is beyond tolerance and should be intervened with/stopped, then it's gained Officialdom. Laws and 'best practices' then tend to get made, regarding whatever-it-is.


...to be continued