4 ms·

Terms like "nut" or "crazy" are antiquated. They don't have very precise meanings. Is anyone truly crazy in the sense they are out of their wits all the time?

• kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Thank you for your comment. My words were very imprecise. I'll try to break down what I'm seeing. I'll start with my perspective as a (painted) dog on the internet. :) I have a fair amount of personal experience with insanity and with religion and with art. (Not all at the same time.) I'm by no means an expert in psychology, but I have spend a lifetime studying people. I'd like to think I have a pretty good eye for understanding the motivations for most people in various cultural settings. I have no academic credentials. For the most part, I'm speculating with more or less the same amount of expertise as everyone else here. We all have our pet topics we like to think we know more about than average. So, what I do see? (I'll stick to one aspect so I'm not writing a novel here.) I see is a man who is outside baseline behavior in several ways, the most prominent being his religious zealotry. Reading the lines as written, there are all the parts of a "normal" "obsessive" person. But! When I try to piece those together, something doesn't match up. Specifically his mission and goal doesn't quite make sense from a religious or artistic perspective. It's tilted a few degrees in a way I don't quite follow. To use a writing analogy, it feels like I'm beta reading a story and the author made an incorrect assumption somewhere. It's not in the words themselves, but the choice of the words the incorrect assumption causes. Once I realized that, I reread the article looking for what could be missing from the picture. His childhood is the biggest red flag for me. The zealotry described seems excessive to the point it's controlling him. This detail points to the missing piece. (Ignoring that this is a classic sign of early mental illness or poor childhood which causes one.) It's not the obsession, but the shape of the obsession. It doesn't feel "normal". It feels like there's a lack of grounding to reality happening at a deep level. This is the clearest explanation from what I'm seeing. This wasn't the first conclusion I came to. I was genuinely curious about the story and was hoping to find something interesting about human nature I haven't seen before or adding a perspective like who Steve Jobs was. (He was a fucking asshole, but I do like my phone.) I didn't get that feeling here. I hope I'm missing something, but I have the sinking feeling I'm correct.
  • starkd 4y ago
    I suspect you probably are as well. Extended isolation can do that to a person. It's like he needed a mission, but was too deeply frustrated in himself. So, he assigned himself an objective. The refusal to give up was the only thing that defined him.