Disclaimer: This post may be a little weird and oddly philosophical…
In class today, we discussed that if everyone is mad then madness itself may not exist. Someone once wrote that all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Can we say that all mad people are mad in their own way? Therefore their perspective is always unique and will portray a different reality than what we know or are comfortable with. What defines being sane or mad? We all have unique perspectives on our individual realities. Where’s the line? Yoon gives us an account of a “mad” person’s perspective and we say she is unreliable. We dive into her reality as how she sees it and it’s uncomfortable… but does it make it unreliable? Unreliable to the truth? Don’t we all see truth and reality different? Is truth a socially agreed upon depiction of a story? Please comment or add on.
I guess it depends on if you believe in universal truth. If there’s no universal truth, then our differences and the way we all perceive things uniquely do effectively make us all “mad” because everyone cannot fundamentally agree on anything. But if there is universal truth, then there is some level of adherence to it that you could label “sanity” and everything beyond it is “madness.” Does that make sense?