Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that those who study madness may share some of the same tendencies as their subjects, and that ordinary people are increasingly defined by their extreme behaviors.
Jon Ronson's quote suggests that the researchers and professionals involved in studying mental health and madness may themselves exhibit obsessive traits, blurring the lines between the observer and the observed. It also reflects a societal trend where individuals are increasingly judged or defined by their most extreme behaviors, implying that everyone has their 'mad' moments, and that such traits are becoming a significant part of personal identity.
In practice
In a discussion on mental health, one might quote Ronson to emphasize the complexities of studying 'madness'.
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?
Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.
It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
Many psychopaths describe the traditional treatment programmes as finishing schools where they hone their skills. Where they find out that there are lots of techniques they had not thought about before.
We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
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