We Need More Hypersane People

     OK, I'm going to posit an opinion that many would find revolutionary, even though some have already come to similar conclusions- The Joker is hypersane.
     Yes, that's an actual clinical term in psychiatric circles.
     Of all the major Batman super villains, the Joker and Riddler are considered to be the two most insane ones simply because of their outlandish behavior and mode of dress. But the Joker strikes me as having the richest and most profound psychopathology for the simple reason that, the face paint and deliberately garish garb notwithstanding, is the ultimate pragmatist. After all, all four gifted actors who had played the Joker on the silver screen won an Academy Award, with two of them having won it for playing the Joker.
     The Joker states his case to Harvey Dent in that all-important hospital scene in The Dark Knight in which he tells Gotham's former District Attorney that he is a man without a plan. He confesses that with a handful of bullets and a few gallons of gasoline, he'd succeeded in reducing Gotham City into a writhing nest of anarchy and chaos. "I'm like a dog chasing a car. I wouldn't know what to do with it if I caught it!"
     The Joker can confidently stake this claim because, in order to wring chaos from the most tightly-controlling grip of law and order, one had to recognize chaos. And how can one recognize chaos and its dubious virtues unless one is hypersane?
     There are several hypersane people among us in human society. Often, they are to the untrained eye indistinguishable from the insane because we cannot separate the bizarre behavior of one or the other. However, one can make a case that the stoic Diogenes, he of the lamp looking for an honest man, cavorted with dogs much more readily than humans and masturbated in Corinth's marketplace, was a hypersane man.
     Because often in these displays of unsocial, antisocial or asocial behavior we see the underlying motives behind such performance art. or we would if we but ask. The ancient Greeks, an inquisitive people if ever there was one, would ask Diogenes about his behavior that, even to this day, would land him in jail if not earn him an involuntary commitment in a psychiatric hospital. Regarding the masturbation in the market, Diogenes answered it was easier than alleviating hunger by rubbing one's stomach.
     Diogenes was among the first of the Stoics and ascetics who eschewed all worldly possessions in favor of a simplified lifestyle devoted to unraveling the mysteries of human existence. And his experience and example had been emulated by countless people in the several thousands of years since his passing. In fact, so many affluent people who had suddenly experienced an epiphany and renounced all their worldly goods to go off and find themselves had become a cliche by the late 20th century. As poet and novelist James Dickey wrote in the screenplay for Deliverance, "Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you find anything."
     The early 18th century had its own Diogenes, of sorts. His name was Benjamin Lay, the "Quaker Comet", whose lifestyle by anyone's rubric would be considered bizarre. Lay was a hunchbacked dwarf who was a pacifist, an avowed vegetarian and quite possibly the world's first revolutionary abolitionist. He'd once angered his fellow Quakers for condemning them for owning slaves and was known to abruptly get up and leave a dinner if he discovered his hosts owned slaves. He lived in a cave in Abington, Pennsylvania.
     Lay's fellow Pennsylvanian, Benjamin Franklin, a foe of slavery himself, had feared for the man's sanity. But while Lay was deformed in body (he stood but four feet tall with a hump on his back and had spindly legs), Lay would eventually win the debate about slavery, an industry that was so commonplace even in the north that to even question it was to put your reputation at risk.
     Hindsight being 20/20, we can all agree now that Lay was absolutely correct in that slavery was a great evil and that it would burden the United States to the point that the Confederacy fought a bitter four year-long war to preserve the right to own African Americans. Lay was one of those whose hypersanity was often confused with more pedantic insanity. If they could speak a common tongue, he and Diogenes would have had conversations worthy of being recorded by loving posterity.
     But the hypersane do not see things the way so-called sane people do. They take in everything, and, if not agreeing with it, see the good with the bad and possessing the intellectual fortitude to fly in the face of whatever zeitgeist define their age to make their views known time and again.
     The vastly more quotidian mere sane see the world in compartmentalized terms, or view their world narrowly. A merely sane person would not necessarily be moved to tears at seeing a dead bird on the ground or a particularly vivid rainbow after a rainstorm. And a sane person does not necessarily see the beauty or tragedy in the world like the hypersane. Often, these are the people who need to be led by political, religious or cultural leaders and do not observe what is in the world. Our thinking tends to be more rigid, more conforming to the diktats of our day and age. Many of us fall into political rigidity, sometimes even falling into acts of fascism and outright cruelty because this is what we've been led to believe must be, not as a logical consequence of what is. And among those who are merely sane, if they default to humanity, it is usually just a baseline of it.
     This, I think, gives us the beginning of an explanation for what explains the enduring appeal of Donald Trump, a man who was "elected" by a minority of the people (just 25% of the electorate, if that). The more he bungles the response to the coronavirus pandemic, the higher Trump's approval rating goes. This is not because his supporters are insane, although it's easy to dismiss them as such, but because they cannot or will not envision a world in which he's not their leader, protecting them from liberals, Democrats and all sorts of brown people. They see at the podium Trump had ignored for the first three years of his alleged presidency a tall, well-dressed man with bizarre skin tone and a double-woven combover and just think Trump's alternate universe is what should be. Or in the Republican sentiment of another dwarf, Alexander Pope, "whatever is, is right."
     On the eve of WWI in 1913, Carl Jung ended his brief but intense relationship with Freud and embarked on a psychological spelunking that would last the entirety of the Great War. It was what Jung himself had called a, "confrontation with the unconscious." In it, he held inner dialogues with Philemon and Salome. To Jung, they were fully-realized characters as many of the seemingly autonomous characters in the imagination of a novelist and for over five years he'd had illuminating conversations with these long-dead historical figures.
     At the end of it all, he'd found what he'd called the primary material for a lifetime of work- The psychoanalysis of human dreams.
     So the next time you see someone acting outside of societal norms, don't default to the lazy and easy armchair evaluation that they're off their rocker. In reality, if you but ask, you may discover they see more of the world the way it really is in all its ugliness and pulchritude than the vast majority of us and may perhaps impart wisdom and insight that may, in time, become the zeitgeist against which they presently rebel.