Plenty of arguably quite insane people give every indication of being "reasonable." On the other hand, plenty of ostensibly reasonable people might be certifiably insane — if anything can be called "insane" these days. In our "go along to get along" culture, where questions of "good" and "bad" as they relate to the genuine welfare of the human person, his existence, and his fate, are just so many relative opinions. Thus nobody can say (has the courage to say?) what "insane" means anymore.
To say that a person might be clinically insane (according to standards of maybe 20 or 30 years ago) is just too "judgmental" these days, and not to be tolerated by "right-thinking" people who have been trained to admire the "diversity" of human expression (of whatever form it takes) above all other civilizational values.... Which essentially obliterates any distinction between "sane" and "insane." Rather, we must deal with the phenomenon of "different strokes for different folks." How this attitude could fit into a system of individual liberty under equal laws, with equal justice, I just can't figure....
I confess I'm in a tad of a bleak mood lately. If you're an American conservative, I shouldn't have to explain the reasons why.
A good part of the recent gloom is attributable to my current project of catching up with certain great German literary artists of the last century: Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fé), Robert Musil (The Man without Qualities), and Heimito von Doderer (The Demons). I've finished the Canetti, am about 400 pages (of a 1400+-page work) into the Musil; and von Doderer is "next on deck."
It was Eric Voëgelin who pointed me to these great authors (Canetti was Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1982). Voëgelin — who barely managed to escape with his life from Nazi Germany in 1937 — complained bitterly about the failure of the "German academy" — by which I expect he meant the the great German universities in general, and their academic philosophy departments in particular — to see "what was coming" vis-a-vis the entire Hitler phenomenon, and to raise a warning.
He chastises the German professoriat for not warning the German people about what was coming; rather it turned out in that in many cases the great names in the universities were either co-opted by the Hitler phenomenon, or became enablers and co-dependents of it.
But according to Voëgelin, not so these great German novelists. They sniffed out all this stuff, figured out its likely denouement in terms of mass human suffering, and traced it to its sources in a culture that was degenerating and disintegrating before their very eyes.
All the characters I've encountered so far — the utterly tragic Peter Wien (Canetti), and Musil's fascinating Ulrich (haven't dipped into von Doderer yet) — are men captured in an age of profound cultural disintegration/revolution, men who (just in order to live a "rational" life in an insane world) ended up constructing "second realities." Wien's second reality ended up literally killing him (via suicide). I don't know what will happen to Ulrich. But oh my, I can't wait to find out....
Then it will be on to The Demons....
Based on how far as I've gotten into The Man without Qualities by now, I'd have to say Musil is an even more penetrating analyst of the human psyche than Dostoyevsky.... And man, for me that's saying a lot.
You want to understand your own cultural age??? And what is likely to happen from HERE, in our own time — if history predicts future? If so, read these novels!!!!
Of course, they're all out of print now. But you can find them on the aftermarket.