[Thoughts] We are all crazy.

I recently discovered the channel "School of Live" on YouTube. I am still undecided about it: some videos seem ridiculous, some others are interesting.

 

Here is a video which stroke a chord with me. 
 





Its label, "How to Defuse an Argument", is not the thing which stroke me.  What stroke a chord is the message at 3:04 within the video: "We are all crazy. No one is sane.", along with the idea that there are two cognitive mistakes which can be associated with this message, only one of which is explored in the video.

The aspect which is described in the video is that everybody should remember moments whem they, too, were not 100% rational, from "a bit crazy" to "ravening mad", and try to remember how they wished to me treated at that time, and try to treat others the same when they have their own moment of craziness: "We are all crazy".

But it seems to me that there is another aspect, at least as important: if you feel crazy, don't assume that you are the only one. "We are all crazy" (at least from time to time). When I was young I was joking about being crazy to other people all the time. I felt or wanted to be different from others, and I felt that this was a kind of craziness, a form of madness. I was jokingly explaining that the first step toward being a mad genius was to accept one's own madness. Much much later on, after a shrink suggested in some way that I was indeed crazy, I got afraid of being crazy for a few years, trying to find a "normal" way. (Turns out that a few years later various other shrinks corrected the diagnostic. I might still feel "crazy", but at least I do not seem to be in the clinical sense.)

All along (both when I was proud of being crazy AND when I was ashamed of being crazy), I assumed that it was only me (and a few others), and that the rest of the world was "normal", aka "not crazy". And when I could not understand people's behavior, many times I assumed that I was missing information, or in a more general way that the fault resided in me if I could not see the logic in other's action. But little by little, I think that I realized that a lot of the action of other people, of other societies, do NOT make sense. "We are all crazy".

Of course, the cognitive trap is not so much in the definition of "craziness" as it is in the signification of the verb "be". In Spanish and Portuguese, the verb "be" has two translation: "estar" for the impermanent and "ser" for the permanent. The sentence "We are all crazy" is using the impermanent signification, to mean that we all have moments of craziness, let it be for tiredness, stress, hormones,... In the end, we are all capable of craziness.