The Descent

The descent into madness cannot be understood by either those who are sinking into its fetid slime nor by those who watch from a distance, sure the subjective can witness the decline, the behaviours and the changes in the traveller, but they cannot understand the journey, in the same way we can imagine what it is like travel on a ship or indeed be the traveller on a ship and not fully comprehending the mechanics of how the ship has sailed oir even tracking its every move.

Therefore, only those that have walked in madness can reflect on themselves in a later rational rime can know the most vibrant snippets of the descent, and even then it must be asked if a rational mind can ever really know the madness and despair of the journey.

If madness is a journey then the logical questions are to where and from what, the from what is perhaps the key to the journey, sanity is perhaps the collective agreement by the mass of what it is to be sane, the social rules to be followed along with the delicate aspirations that one may work toward, however, these may shift dependant on many things, your social status your finances, your access to medication and education, the willingness to step outside the safety and comfort of conformity.

The destination for some then is the breaking of the role assigned, the breaching of laid down rules without the knowledge of good and bad, the abandonment of the norm escaping from the boundaries thrust upon us by concess, yet one may ask who's consensus, those that make the laws are rarely those that are affected most by them, historically we see that rules and social norms often benefit those that pursue the changing of them.

Perhaps then one may further request the understanding of mechanisms that are in place to enforce social norms, and how much we the sane have control over them, perhaps then to break the rules and push against the societal norms is not a descent into madness but a journey into the realisation that the majority are all just passengers unsure how the ship moves, waking up in a new place without the real knowledge of how we got there but holding onto the comfort blanket that is the knowledge that we are still safe and noit indeed mad.