What my parents taught me was invaluable, which is how to diagnose mental illness by what is NOT there. We assume lunatics will act like lunatics. We picture people walking around talking to themselves, or going on stabbing sprees, or making endless doodles on the wall, or cutting themselves incessantly. We expect them to talk about voices in their head, or to see things that aren’t there.
But insanity has a curve. There are grades of insanity. And it is quite possible to under the thrall of very primal, very basic emotions, and to act quite genteelly, as George Bernard Shaw does in saying “Sir or Madam, please be kind enough to justify your existence.” Do we not speak of “Shavian wit”? Shaw was a functional psychopath. He believed strongly in mass murder. He supported Hitler. And his plays are still performed often to this day. His legacy has seen no reckoning.
What Shaw was missing was empathy, and its fulfillment, Love. He was missing the most important emotion possible in a human being. Seeking it, without being able to name or even imagine it, he came upon Cultural Sadeism as an ersatz moral compass. He came upon something which does not exist, “Society”, and came to see in it all possible good, all possible moral development of precisely the sort he was incapable of.
I look at my parents and what I see are automatons, with as little true freedom as insects. That is of course a gross exaggeration, but somewhere within them is a complex, or set of complexes, of unprocessed traumatic emotions, things they simply cannot integrate into their consciousness, which drive them, and which, to the point, prevent them from the exercise of true empathy, from truly being able to connect with an outside world.
And I see important and substantial similarities between the world I grew up in, in which everyone was expected to pretend they were happy even when they were miserable, and that which the psychopaths working to build a global socialist order want. Perhaps that is another reason I chose my parents, to be able to see this connection.
Until you can truly and fully relax, you are much less than fully human. Until you can take pleasure simply in existence, you are less than fully human. You are insane.
In important respects, this in my view is what the Buddha actually meant by “suffering”. You can’t know how trapped you are until you become free. You can’t know what other emotions and sensations are possible until you feel them.