Seven Steps to Insanity

1. The first step to insanity is to confuse the subjective with the objective. This is necessary. You can’t go insane without this, but it’s much easier to do than you might think. All you have to do is think of value judgments, inferences, and other cognitions of yours as measurable when they’re not, and vice-versa; lose track of, and any interest in, what another capable mind might conclude when looking at the same thing. Simply put, you insist on debating things that aren’t really debatable, and settle on the realization that anyone who thinks differently than you do must be a flaming idiot or must have something wrong with them. Stop believing in perspective. Things are the way you think they are…unless you don’t like whatever that is, and then there must be “shades of gray” involved.

2. The second step is closely intertwined with the first step; it usually follows it, but this isn’t always the case because this might actually be a precursor. The second step is to start feeling your way around challenges rather than thinking your way through them. This makes perfect sense to many people — the purpose to life is to be happy, right? So the only way to check any decision you make, is to evaluate whether it makes you happy. Start finding ways to deviate from the path through the First Triad; reach opinions and inferences without considering the facts that are supposed to justify them. Pronouncing Things To Do as correct or incorrect without internally understanding what consequence looms if the wrong course of action is chosen, or what reward is supposed to be forthcoming if the right one is chosen. Just make all your decisions, about what you know and what you do, by feeling, feeling, feeling. Easy as falling off the proverbial log.

3. The third step has to do with financial and social issues on a personal level, and how to think of yourself, and those around you, when suffering is going on. This is a big step, and it’s actually divided into three parts:

3a. Place more importance on the prospect that an individual’s problems be solved, than that the individual owning the problems be the solver of them;

3b. Place more importance on the prospect that a group of people get together to try to solve the individual’s problem, than that the problem be solved. At this point, you have this sequence of importance: collaboration; solution; accountability. Solution of the probem is subordinate to working together as a group — so the group-work appears to be a prerequisite to helping someone, but it really isn’t because it has ancillary importance that goes beyond solving the problem. We work together and fail to solve the problem — that’s good. We solve the problem without working together — that’s not as good. And, accountability for creating the problem in the first place, is less important than anything else.

3c. Nurture an acrimonous attitude toward the idea that somewhere, there might be an individual solving his own problems. It isn’t supposed to happen.

4. By the time you’ve completed the third step, you have rounded a sharp corner and are very far gone. Now what you need to do, is browbeat everyone else into getting to that point as well. Associate with other people who are as insane as you are, or moreso. Start looking at people as being more worthy, depending on their willingness to participate in groups to solve problems. Your model should be the insect, and all other eusocial animals. You have grasped that the world is divided into two kinds of people and you resolve to strengthen your favoritism of one kind of person over the other. Stop evaluating ideas based on their content. Repudiate the notion that anyone from your school of thought can come up with a bad idea, or that someone from the other school of thought can come up with a good one. Team, team, team. Your team is so perfect. That other team is so wrong. Someone comes up with a new idea? Your first order of concern is to figure which team he’s on.

5. You’re almost there now; at this point, what you need to do is change the way you look at personal wealth. Check your bank account balance. Compare it to what you would like it to be. This is proof that the world is cheating you. It has nothing to do with your earning potential, your savings plans, your ability to judge character and trust the right people — and it certainly has nothing to do with your spending habits. Everything you materially want that you don’t have, is evidence that someone somewhere hasn’t paid in what they should have.

6. Start encouraging dysfunctionality and co-dependence in people around you. Trust people more and treat them more cordially, when they’re poor and/or have problems. How it feels to people to have these problems, is all-important to you. How to solve the problems has become trivial (3b). How to prevent the problems from happening in the first place, is even more trivial than that.

7. Impose a series of litmus tests on strangers to determine if they’re worthy of fundamental respect and human rights, while accusing others of doing exactly that.

There you go. You’re wombat rabies bollywonkers crazy. Your alienation of truth and common sense will now leave an imprint on every single decision you make, large and small, and it is now logically impossible for you to do much of anything to make the world a better place; others will have to take care of that for you.

And the best part? You’re in great company now. This is your time. In the first part of the twenty-first century, this is the most fashionable way to go around living life.