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.
But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
Interpretations, criticisms, diagnoses, and judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our unmet needs.
I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.
People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
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