The Democratic Basis of Reality

I am crazy and nothing I write should be taken seriously. I took it seriously and now I'm nuts.

Crazy means disagreeing with those around you about things they hold sacred. Agreements build reality. That is a chair, that is a table, they are solid and you can sit on one and put your dinner on the other. Oak makes a good solid reality, yes it does.

But then, scientists said the chair and table were made of tiny particles with great spaces between them and were not solid, they just seemed that way to the ignorant. So scientists were crazy, but the sane were a bit unsure, since they did so poorly in high school science classes.

But then the scientists began a campaign to convert the recalcitrant. And they did. Once the reality changed (reality being a sort of democracy where people vote on what is real and the majority are sane and the minority are crazy) people continued to sit on chairs and put dinners on tables, but now they looked at furniture differently because they suspected that if they looked closely enough, they could see tiny planets and stars in the wooden table top. And even though there were huge empty spaces between those tiny particles, they somehow could still hold up the meatloaf. And a few neurotics may have wondered why the spaces in the glass of lemonaide didn't sink into the spaces in the table, but they were worried about looking stupid and so didn't ask.

History is full of crazy people. Those who thought the Earth rotated around the sun, that life began in pools of mud hit by lightning, that God was dead, that chewing tobacco was a good treatment for hookworms, that area 51 holds an alien spaceship, and that electricity through the brain was helpful in bringing crazy people back into agreement with their neighbors.

Some of those ideas caught on, won elections and those who agreed became sane. Others, not wanting to be crazy, signed on even though they had doubts. Only the holdouts who refused to subscribe to this new religion, this new reality, became insane. Like the guys who still have "Bush/Cheney" bumper stickers on their travel trailers. You can see the milder cases in England which is a sort of museum for odd people. Or here in the U.S. you will find them in backwards areas, chewing tobacco to keep away the hookworms, taking Prozac for constipation and wearing copper bracelets to ward off arthritis. The real stalwarts are strapped to tables in psychiatric hospitals with voltage going through the brain because aunt June is still alive to them and giving good advice on the stock market. When the electricity is turned off they have amnesia and thus become sane: "Aunt June? Huh?" Some of them forget their own names and can start a new life -- just like being born. But I get ahead of myself.