Читать книгу One Night in Copan: Chronicles of Madness Foretold Tales of Mystery, Fantasy and Horror - W. E. Gutman - Страница 8

PROLOGUE

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies,

but not the madness of people.

Isaac Newton

There exist ill-defined forms of mental illness, so subtle, so skillfully concealed and so utterly undetectable that they elude even those trained to recognize the myriad faces behind which they hide. Is he demented who pretends to be sane? Is he who fakes madness -- mad? Is conformist behavior proof of sanity? Is a clown “crazy?” Would his buffoonery be sanctioned outside the circus tent? He’s only play-acting, you say? What about motorists who willfully exceed the speed limit: are they clear-headed? Are citizens who, time after time rush to the polls and vote into office inept or corrupt politicians under the ludicrous pretext that they’re taking part in the “democratic process” -- in full possession of their faculties? Or are they imbeciles who deserve the scoundrels they helped elect?

Is the soldier who fires at an enemy he can’t see behaving rationally or, to dilute the horror (or ease his conscience), is he pretending to be shooting blanks every time he squeezes the trigger? If not, if he finds moral justification in sanctioned murder -- or derives some secret thrill from it -- is he demented, evil or just a hopeless moron?

Are boxers who bash each-others’ brains out -- for money -- out of their minds? Would their fights-to-the-finish seem less brutish if they didn’t appear to enjoy themselves so much? Aren’t the fans who salivate at the prospect of blood, of a bone-crushing knockout, equally deranged?

Are the uninvited evangelists who compel “primitive” peoples to cover their breasts and genitals “for the love of God,” who force-feed guileless children alien concepts and rob cultures of their identity, sane or dangerous psychopaths further unhinged by religious zeal?

Listen to the maniacal soul-robbers who harangue their congregations. Look at the transfixed masses of ‘born-again’ who sway and swing and rock, their arms outstretched toward heaven as they pray for the cleansing firestorms of apocalypse. Are they out of their minds or the unwitting victims of mass-hysteria?

What about the “prophets”? Were they merely confused talking heads or cunning terrorists; clueless prognosticators or schemers blinded by their own fury; soothsayers and mystic diviners who spoke in riddles and esoteric babble or crafty politicians bent on sowing fear in the hearts of the masses? Were their intentions noble or did they suffer from acute megalomania, monomania, egomania and thanatomania -- a consuming preoccupation with death? Wouldn’t they all have been diagnosed as certifiably insane -- or called charlatans -- had modern psychiatry not spinelessly declined to see them as superstitious crackpots pickled in gooey mysticism and predisposed to treat all inexplicable natural phenomena as the manifestation of some unknowable, invisible spirit?

Aren’t the dream merchants, the demagogue-pedagogues and the healers, the petty bureaucrats, the would-be public servants and the corporate kingpins who deconstruct reality and peddle cheap imitations of Utopia -- insufferable psychopaths?

If men were put away for their natural tendencies (or for the habits and fixations they pick up along the way) prisons and mental hospitals would be bursting at the seams. Madness is somehow less reprehensible when it festers in high places; when ruthless entrepreneurs are eulogized for their “initiative” and their cunning; when my-country-right-or-wrong “patriots” brush aside lies, rationalize injustice, defend sleaze and political chicanery; when fanatical evangelism is hyped as “God’s work;” when fraudulent and unwinnable wars that only enrich bankers and cannon merchants are waged far from home in the name of “national security;” and when freedom of thought is condemned as heresy and all moral codes are rescinded to protect the interests of the moneyed elite.

Pray tell, who are the mad, and who are the meek who inherit the wind? A slight detour to the brink might help tell them apart. There’s more to madness than meets the eye. Let me count the ways.