We need something more, perhaps something transcendent and unconfined by reason to grant some necessary meaning to our lives. That need seems to be something quite fundamentally human, whether or not we are considered mad.
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Either we need to come to terms with a possibility that we are all in some ways a little bit mad, which is a cliche, or we need to consider a much more inclusive, less discriminating attitude towards experiences we do not share or understand.
It is not simply to be unafraid of otherness - it is to seek out and attach value to otherness and in this way to extend ourselves and assert our humanity.
Perhaps especially in this divided and fractured country we need urgently to extend and complicate our lives by engaging with otherness, rather than retreating into familiar territories that can no longer be consoling: the precarious and absurd identities of race and nationality and normality or sanity.
We live in a world increasingly preoccupied with information or data. We attach value to the accumulation of more and more information. We believe that this will grant us greater control over the circumstances of our lives, or enable us to reach beyond ourselves.
It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.