Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Normality is overrated (very interesting reading)
More than anything else human beings want their lives to be significant. The unbearable truth is that the lives of most people who ever lived are insignificant; those of many people who live today threaten to become so. ("I feel so insignificant," said the ant with Woody Allen's voice in Antz. "That's a breakthrough," said the ant psychiatrist. "You are insignificant.") Paranoia inverts this horrifying sense of insignificance. To the paranoid, everything is significant. Powerful forces conspire against him. He imagines himself to be a figure of great importance. Threaten his protective illusion and he may try to kill you. What he cannot bear is the notion that he truly is insignificant.
More than anything else human beings want their lives to be significant. The unbearable truth is that the lives of most people who ever lived are insignificant; those of many people who live today threaten to become so. ("I feel so insignificant," said the ant with Woody Allen's voice in Antz. "That's a breakthrough," said the ant psychiatrist. "You are insignificant.") Paranoia inverts this horrifying sense of insignificance. To the paranoid, everything is significant. Powerful forces conspire against him. He imagines himself to be a figure of great importance. Threaten his protective illusion and he may try to kill you. What he cannot bear is the notion that he truly is insignificant.
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