Sanity is a Group Project
How can you tell whether you’re sane?
Does the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that defines disorders characterized by this or that collection of symptoms really have anything to say about sanity?
I have a crystal clear memory of my textbook from a college psychology class defining “sanity” as arbitrary and subjective. Essentially, “conformity with the norm” as defined by the old white men who write and edit the DSM.
For a long time, I’ve carried that and felt that “sanity” is whatever beliefs and behaviors allow you to peacefully cohabitate on this planet with the majority of people with the maximum possible ease. I’ve thought of it as whatever helps you frictionlessly “fit in.”
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
We’re in the middle of a human-driven mass extinction that is destroying wetlands, clearcutting forests, and paving the world.
Suicide now outranks all deaths with violent causes. Some bizarrely callous thinkers register that as a good thing. Evidence of a trend toward progress; the world is apparently safer.
But.
Is it any more rewarding, enlivening, satisfactory or fulfilling? Why do so many feel the need to leave it?
There is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, “What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?”
I wrote Listen to Fear, Find What Feels Good in response to this prompt by Eisenstein’s Mutiny of the Soul essay, and I won’t reiterate too many of its points here.
I will say, however, that there is an often overlooked both/and option when it comes to allowing depression to rule, to dampen, and to provoke inaction, and the internalized capitalism slash growth mindset urge toward unstoppable, never-ending progress.
Put another way, there is a both/and option when you are approaching Eastern Mysticism’s Radical Acceptance and Western Occultism’s Protestant Work-ethic.
I am intimately familiar with this dichotomy; it is the depression and mania of my clinical diagnosis, stripped of their unfortunate stigma.
We can enact our True Will on the world when it is appropriate while also backing off and listening to our bodies when the fear tells us it’s time to contract, to accept, and to cultivate meditative stillness.
We can stretch like yogis to the exact point of juicy discomfort which cultivates progress toward the idealized form while also respecting the limitations communicated by our embodied knowledge.
Why is the relentless pursuit of money, status and success considered more sane than listening to our bodies’ calls to unplug, rest and recharge?
Why is conformity with a sick norm considered sanity? Why is the adoption and worship of the narratives, assumptions and presuppositions of a nihilist, capitalist, scientific materialist society considered the “sane” option?
Why is that reality the one that we collectively promote and privilege?
Is it truer to classify rabbits according to their meat or according to their fur? It depends on what you want to do with them.
This argument, from The Wisdom of Insecurity, questions whether the only accurate way to construct a narrative about reality is to rely on the scientific worldview that everything is physics and particles: dead, purposeless, deterministic matter.
That narrative asserts that a human is a slow motion explosion that is tricking itself into believing that it is conscious. Fooling itself that it has free will.
That is a useful way to conceptualize the world if you want to build a bridge or airplane or space station. It’s fundamental to modern medicine, which isn’t perfect but is a huge improvement over doctors delivering babies still coated in blood from the morning’s autopsies. Knowing the physical laws of the universe is necessary to create silicon chips that power the device you’re currently holding.
Again, though, are they serving us spiritually?
The scientific materialist narrative denies any value in a spiritual belief system. To a hardcore redditor debatelord atheist, people who believe in a sky daddy are superstitious kooks.
But then, why are so many people despairing? Why are we destroying the planet? Why are we on the brink of another Civil War if not another World War?
What can the adoption of new and ancient stories about our reasons for existing promote instead?
Maybe we’re putting our shattered God back together through our own individual self-perfection.
Maybe we’re reincarnating to live virtuously and thereby burn off karma and escape Samsara.
Maybe the UAPs are checking up on their directed panspermia project and we’ve evolved to the precipice of joining the Galactic Federation.
Maybe Earth is simply a soul school, a spiritual pupal state that requires for its maturation a conscious experience of all the pain, pleasure, sorrow, joy, fear, hope and everything that makes us human.
Any of these myths can sound absolutely stupid. Superstitious. But pragmatically: if you were to hold them in mind, what would be the outcome? What kinds of behaviors would you be more likely to exhibit?
What would happen if they dethroned the current definition of “sane?”
Sanity is a Group Project
Remember that textbook from a decade and a half ago tells us “sanity” simply represents adherence to a group’s values and norms. We’ve evolved to be social creatures who rely on the love and support of our community. “Sanity” represents a state of mind, perception of events and collection of beliefs, the protection of which promises we’ll receive that love and support.
It’s a relative term that mostly represents conformity with the consensus reality of your tribe.
You can’t define an individual’s sanity without defining a group to which they belong and to which they are being compared.
The definitions of insanity diagnosed by the DSM are characterized by symptoms that prevent a person from fitting in with their peers, those normal folks who are functioning, productive, contributing members of society. What are they contributing to, though? Destroying the planet?
Maybe depression and fatigue are our souls’ mutiny against participation in systems that condone and cause this planeticide. Maybe I don’t want to be that kind of sane. Maybe I am drawn to other narratives and would prefer to fit in with other groups.
I wondered for a long time whether there were other people out there for whom the fitting-in that connotes “sanity” might involve compassion, awe, reverence, and purpose. I wondered whether I could find others who enjoyed entertaining narratives that were prosocial, pro-nature, pro-all-living-beings.
Enter Eisenstein’s Sanity Project.
Here’s what he had to say about it when announcing its launch on Substack:
How I stay sane is not through my own willpower. I am no different from the other idealists. What will keep me sane is a community that holds sanity for me and with me.
I’ve been enjoying the early days of the conversations that comprise Eisenstein’s Sanity Project. Predictably, there is a quality of connection and community among posters to that forum that is rarely matched by the un-paywalled internet. The Creekmason Discord is definitely a contender, though.
One of the platform’s few codes of conduct is delivered via an essay about approaching your communication with a remembrance of “reverence” fueling your diction and your perception of the intentions of your interlocutor.
What can a community that defines sanity as “reverence of the other” contribute to the conversation?
I’m excited to find out.
Frequently, in addresses to the Sanity Project’s forums, Eisenstein suggests that there’s an objective definition of sanity: to be connected to what’s true and real in the universe. To be connected to reality.
I don’t know if I agree. I think any group can and will define sanity however it collectively decides. All too often, what’s true and real is a matter of perspective. Many different stories can contain parts of the truth, none contains the whole complex phenomenology of reality. Which one you pick depends, pragmatically, on what you are trying to accomplish.
But, given the choice, I’d rather be the brand of sane that doesn’t encourage planetary destruction that necessitates depressive burnout. Deciding how to classify Alan Watts’ rabbits, the phenomena and people I encounter moment to moment, I think I’ll choose to approach them with reverence.
I’m glad to be in good company.
Geoff Gallinger writes poems, essays and fiction and has said a time or two that a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing from SF State qualifies them perfectly for being a pizza driver. That sounds like self-deprecation, but hours a day completely alone in a beater car with an audiobook and a notepad for company are actually a good approximation of a “room of one’s own.”
Being home isn’t too bad either; their daughter and wife will always be their primary audience.