Sorry if I seemed so.
There was something about your first couple of posts to me that seemed insulting and a little arrogant. If I misunderstood, forgive me.
If memory serves, you and I have had many pleasant exchanges in the past and frankly I was a little surprised by the tone here.
Actually, everyone is crazy.
If that is our starting point, it seems to me that crazy must have a rather broad meaning.
Let's define crazy as an inability or refusal to define and adapt to reality.
If the problem is inability to define and adapt then there is no hope for those people. They are forever crazy according to this definition. If the problem is refusal to define and adapt then they must heartily disagree with this "reality" you describe. That brings into question the truth of the reality. Is it or isn't it true? It may be, as you later suggest, that they cannot easily define this reality because of other difficulties (fear) and if they can't define it how are they supposed to adapt to it?
At sunrise on the Serengeti Plain, reality for the wildebeest is that he must run faster than the lioness...or he is dinner. And the lioness must run faster than the wildebeest or she cannot feed her cubs or herself.
Can the wildebeest and the lioness both be the fastest? Isn't it a situational thing? Sometimes one wins, other times the other wins. That is not just a flippant comment. It applies to this discussion.
In the wild, if you are alive...you are sane.
To me, that is instinct and conditioning. Does it really have anything to do with sanity as we are discussing? Couldn't an insane lioness still catch and kill a wildebeest and vice versa, could a crazy wildebeest still successfully flee from a lion? I suppose that would depend on the type of insanity they had. Isn't there more than one type?
But human beings are able to exist at quite some distance from reality and, the more society and families coddle their members, the more such members are able to extend that distance.
Here, there needs to be a definition of reality in order to proceed. It is my opinion that we all have our own realities in that our contact with the external is through our senses and processed by our own individual brains. There is no reality with out me, to me. the same is true of all others. Socially each society has their own particular mores and standards to which all are expected to conform for the benefit of social cohesion.
To use your example, mature male lions have prides of from ten to fifteen females who provide food, companionship and sex for him. In turn he provides protection for them. That is their instinctive standards, not something they sat around and discussed and then agreed on. It is their particular way of propagating their species.
Now hyenas have their own set of standards. They steal from the hunters and travel in packs as protection and to facilitate their stealing.
That is the reality for both but their standards are so different if you chose one's reality you would have to consider the other insane. Yet, they are each operating within their particular position in nature.
Human insanity, quite incorrectly, has been historically defined by society and families as that distance from reality at which members become difficult to handle or inconvenient. That of course is a fallacy.
Although I am not sure I agree with that and I know I haven't heard it described as such, the central point seems to be that people who stray so far from the accepted norms of a society they become problematic are often labelled insane. You disagree and I say maybe they are and maybe they aren't. Some may just be rebels.
Because humans cannot define reality (and, for the most part, refuse to try) and because reality, even if it could be defined, is a rapidly moving target, it is difficult to calculate the distance between a person and his reality.
Suddenly, we seem to be saying the same thing.
But knowing humans as we all do, we can be safe in presuming that such distance is, on average, significant...and that humanity is collectively and individually quite insane.
I disagree with that and it definitely does not logically follow from your previous statements. In fact, is is contrary to your previous paragraph.
That is why I have difficulty following you and I end up thinking it is just useless blather, that you are over-thinking it. I'm sure you have some deeper meaning but we are not in sync in communicating it.