Styles Of Madness

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Lately I have had to calculate a lot of risk.

The math goes something like this:

Is the exhilaration that X brings me worth potentially splattering, drowning or exploding in mid-air?

If so, exactly how big is the risk of dying compared to the thrill I’ll get from said moment of living. Personally, I prefer the ratio to be 1:1,000,000, whereas Tree considers 1:5 a bargain.

On a day to day basis, most people don’t have to think about their fear of dying on a conscious level, but being married to Tree, I get to consider it quite often. Just the other day I was standing on the edge of a cliff wondering...

Why do I have to go first?

Yet, in reality, our death anxiety is always present. We just keep it repressed because if we didn’t, we’d be existentialists—depressive twentieth-century philosophers who wore black turtlenecks, smoked cigarettes, and wrote really long books and confounding plays on the meaninglessness of life.

In one such Pulitzer-prize winning book, appropriately called The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker explains how man is torn between his symbolic, self-conscious awareness and his flesh and bones, brute nature:  The same creature that names himself, imagines, explores and speculates his own everlasting heroism is, in the end, nothing more than worm food.

This conscious awareness of our imminent death can be a bit maddening.

“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” –Blaise Pascal

In other words, we go through crazy measures to repress our death anxiety, because if we didn’t, we’d go a different kind of crazy.

Ernest Becker calls Pascal’s necessary styles of madness ‘vital lies;’ we create these social constructs to give meaning and heroic status to our earthly life, as well as hope of an afterlife. For example, Capitalism and Christianity are two widely held vital lies in the United States. The bigger our bank accounts, the higher and more important is our social status, and if we believe in Jesus, we trump the worm food problem with a soul that goes to heaven.

This is all fine and dandy, unless of course you happen to be a hellbound Jew, Muslim- or god forbid, homeless person, the least valued member in our society.

The problem with vital lies is that they tend to be mutually exclusive, and we’re willing to fight to the death to prove that our own vital lie is the real truth—hence the billions of people that have died in the name of god and country.

But what does any of this have to do with Tree and me? We're not religious, nor are we particularly concerned about climbing any social ladders. So what do we do to give meaning to our life in the face of imminent death? What is our vital lie?

What is our style of madness?

Apparently, we run off cliffs.

In looking at our life and the choices we make, it seems Tree and I think that maybe we can cheat death by squeezing in as much life as possible. This has become even truer for me since I’ve been with Tree, who thinks life itself is an extreme sport. And as for our hero complex, well….

It’s bird, it’s a plane, it’s SUPER NOMAD!

What is your style of madness? We want to know. Post it in a comment below...