top of page
Writer's pictureourrawmaterial

Questions For Truth and Sanity

Sanity: reasonable and rational behavior; the quality of being sane

Sane: Proceeding from a sound mind: RATIONAL; mentally sound; healthy in body

Rational: having reason or understanding


How do we find any common agreement on who or what fits this criteria right now? (And, honestly, when was the last time we considered the meaning of ‘sound mind and body’?) Which of our general behaviors and thought patterns are considered rational and sane by the majority? These are very real questions before us as we slide into the fourth quarter of 2024 with our country at serious odds on a lot of important issues. Words like ‘unhinged’, ‘deranged’ and ‘dangerous’ are prevalent in our everyday conversations about the leaders of our country. Our connotation of sanity has been parsed by politics, and the concept of sanity itself is losing integrity.


Rational and reasonable have also become particularly relative as we watch people claim truths in what we clearly know to be false. You aren’t losing it – this is really happening all around us in nearly every direction. Right and wrong are being presented with an essentially black and white definition (excepting all of the history we’ve collectively ignored, of course), and public opinion is leading the charge. Start poking around in all of the gray areas, and we will find the very essence of truth to be in question. Context becomes necessary, and that doesn’t fit very well into the sound-bite driven, sensational approach that has become the style of our harbingers. Our media gets the bulk of the blame, but this has become a human habit all-around. Tuning out that which we don’t want to know or hear is common ‘protective’ practice, but also clearly exacerbates the divide.


The phrase Emotional Intelligence has been around long enough for each of us to have, at least peripherally, placed ourselves somewhere on the scale. Like most things, we are apt to view ourselves higher on the list simply because we have more awareness of ourselves than anyone else. Fact: Human beings spend a lot of time guessing about feelings, even our own. Our minds reach logical conclusions based on the things we have seen and known in the past, leaving little room for massive growth and change. Previous outcomes affect our current beliefs and tell the story of what is going to happen before it actually happens. This paves the way, energetically, for the ‘truth’ to follow. So what happens if we have made a wrong assumption from the jump? Every belief that follows could build on that false interpretation, leading us astray…


People who don’t see the world the way that we do will not share our thought processes either. Even those who believe the same things will have their own unique approach to the same conclusions. Conflicting value systems will place more importance on certain details for one person than another, and we are all drawn to different parts of any story. We already know this, but it is so easy to forget when we are deciding things for other people. How they feel, or how they will feel, is one of the biggest transgressors, because it seeks to keep them from having a spontaneous and genuine reaction in real time. (You know, to spare their feelings…)


Example: You and your 6th grade best friend are hoarding gum and only giving it to the people you really, really like that day. You lie to one girl and tell her you don’t have any more. Later, when she sees you giving gum to someone else, she knows you were lying to her. Now, whatever she would have felt because she didn’t get gum must be processed with the fact that we lied to her, compounding her emotions and her reaction. If we had been honest: “sorry, we are selfishly saving the gum for later”, she could have dealt with her feelings right then and moved on. Our attempt to save her from our ugly truth definitely made things worse. I used this example because (1)  it really happened, and (2) it shows how our attempt to cover the truth created added negativity where there didn’t need to be any. It’s a bad habit we have picked up somewhere along the way, and at this point, it is serving emotional ignorance – and we are all being forced to choke it down one way or another.


I’m not sure when we started trying to ‘protect’ people from the tool that is designed to indicate truth and reality – which is –how we feel about anything we see, hear, and think. What is it that makes us prone to tell those little white lies to spare another person’s access to real-time feelings? And why do we keep doing it even though we know it denies the truth and/or prolongs a person’s spontaneous reaction to it? How many sitcom plots are designed around this premise? It seems like the go-to lesson in most episodes. So why is it so hard to put into practice? These are rhetorical questions because I am curious…. I don’t really know the answers.


We blame so many things for the way our patriarchal society operates today, and they all root to the same basic ideas that have prevailed until we started carrying receipts:  control and power for the few, at the expense of many. It was easy to do when you could pay someone off who probably wouldn’t have been believed anyway (and they knew it, so taking the money was the only plausible recourse, it seemed). Our feelings, emotions and reactions have been sealed tightly under the wraps of payoffs, threats, and ‘my word against yours’ so often that we all began to accept this truth as reality – until the internet and cameras began capturing our actions and behaviors for others to witness. Artificial Intelligence is chomping on the heels of that truth, for sure, but it’s still helpful when we are discerning fact from fiction, minus opinion.


Remember how hard those same powerful groups ‘fought’ for our(their) privacy, and our(their) right to keep whatever skeletons we(they) were hiding securely in our(their) closets? We received it with fear, and it made perfect sense that we should be afraid of someone else invading our personal information and agendas. In fear, we forget that those with influence have probably had access to privileged information all along. Only when the balance of power shifted away from protecting the elite, did the battle cry sound out with urgency. It is only those with the reins of control whose secrets can expose all of the nasty deals, big and small, that have allowed them to assume this type of power in the first place. I’m hoping that the reign of cover-ups is dying out as people find their voice and speak truth to consequence and effect.


We have all studied dictators. We were made aware of how unchecked power becomes a liability to the person who naturally begins to see themselves as separate and superior in their new environment. When everyone is paying attention to what YOU have to say, it creates a lot of different emotions all at once. That produces fears, which can lead to paranoia and delusions of grandeur if the fear persists. With power comes the organically conflicting fear that someone could take it away. The next step: deny the fear and convince the people around you that you have none - that you have somehow transcended what mere mortals contend with every day. This dynamic has our society approaching emotional ignorance: the denial of what we feel in favor of something we want more, or instead, or despite…. It gets tricky when we are trying to define what is or isn’t intelligent, ignorant, sane or rational.


We can be emotionally intelligent and emotionally ignorant at the same time. In fact, it’s probably true for all 8 billion of us, most days. The amount of things we don’t know build mountains of energy that stand in the way of seeing any real truth beyond our own. We cling to our rights and our boundaries as if that will keep others from crashing right over them, and our feelings about that have been bleeding all over our world – without proper care and attention to the cause and effect of the perceived hierarchy in our human classifications, and the way we view ourselves in relation to others.


This is not a breezy topic for most of us to open up to, but our vulnerability and willingness to look at our entire evolution make it easy to breathe while we pull the curtains back to see what’s really what, sans defenses. Picking the built-in barriers apart is challenging, but it is also interesting and rewarding. Watching how we formed, objectively, can be really fun as we  untangle all of the ways truth has been thwarted in favor of protecting someone from having a feeling that they, by all rights, ought to be allowed to have.


Before we knew, unequivocally, what Sean Combs was up to (insert any similar story, he’s just current), it wasn’t hard to make an excuse for the ugly rumors. Who among us hasn’t been taught to watch out for the opportunists who are looking for their 15 Minutes – and using powerful people to get it? Really? Does that seem as probable now, knowing that payoffs and protections played a part all along? Would we have grooved along to whatever he produced if we had been given the opportunity to see his backstage behavior 10-20 years earlier? I like to think not, but again, I can only know what’s true for me.


There was a time where we collectively decided to protect people from the truth about life and the world we live in. From performers to politicians to corporate cover-ups, choices have been made to keep the general public in the dark. It has been claimed that this served some greater purpose by keeping our fears from getting out of control and spilling over into something harmful. January 6th proved that this method doesn’t serve the truth (well, if you believe it happened, anyway). For the most extreme among us, the definition of truth itself sits undefined, in a general sense. Connotation has superseded our previous agreement and all bets are off.


Which brings me full circle on the question of sanity. I’ll start with my own, because I know my own mind better than any other. The amount of time I spend there makes me something of an expert in myself. As we all become aware of how our mental state holds balance, it seems we are finding more and more reasons to point that measure back on ourselves. Taking personal responsibility for things we have said and done is one of the best ways to regain our sense of power from within. The ability to represent ourselves as the person we are to a world that may or may not appreciate that version of us, is one of the best gifts we can give ourselves, because it speaks to our own sanity. I believe that if we consider our own actions and how they will affect outcomes, and speak truth anyway, we set ourselves up for a societal shift in defining the concepts of sanity and truth.


Kommentare


#OURRAWMATERIAL

bottom of page