We Are All Crazy

Opinion (Umberto Eco, Italian Semiotician, Essayist, Philosopher, Literary Critic, and Novelist):  “In the last few months we have become witness to a few events that are explained only as acts of madness: The German pilot that committed suicide, an entrepreneur from Milan who shot everyone who went through the courthouse, a pilot who opened fire in his home, police who instigated a slaughter; and all of them are portrayed as having been completely normal people before these events. What kind of madness took hold of them?…

“In every person there is a little bit of madness, sometimes this takes hold of him such that aggression appears in him constructively. People like these we generally call geniuses. As far as it seems even the decapitators of ISIS at particular times of their daily lives are good husbands and loving fathers. They have a fixed salary, free food, they get up at eight in the morning, the wife prepares sandwiches for them with an omelet, and then they go and shoot a few hundred children to death. The most brutal murderer, if we hear what his mother says about him, until yesterday he was a wonderful child, in the worst case, sometimes he was a little sad.

“If so, do we need to live in constant fear, from the apprehension that at every moment the wife or the husband, the son or the daughter, the neighbor or our best friend will suddenly take an axe and crush our skull or add arsenic to our drink? In a case like this we become paranoid, constantly living on the defensive. To survive, we must at least trust and have faith in someone. All that remains is to accept the fact that absolute faith doesn’t exist.”

My Comment: As a result of our insane behavior, we will reach the conclusion that only mutual Arvut (mutual guarantee) can hold a person to a good intention regarding everyone. Only the positive influence of the right environment on each one of us can make of each one of us a faithful member of society. Otherwise, everyone will gradually go insane and in relative isolation from each other (live separately, divorce, and so forth). This will not help us refrain from behaving in an uncontrolled manner.
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