During summer holiday, I read a book called “The Fallen Angel ” (人間失格), which is written by Osamu Dazai. The book is talking about a man’s life story. He said: I had a shameful life. He cheated himself and other people, and did a lot of irretrievable mistakes. He judged himself as failure. However, after he disappeared, a woman said: He is gentle, attentive to detail, just like god’s child. Whole book is questioning the meaning of human lives like human and lives with human.
After I finished the book, I had a question: To what extent, is shared knowledge correct?
In this book, the man said he is a madman, a useless man. In society, most of time, when a person had some weird thoughts or acting strange, he or she will be recognized as a madman. If he or she doesn’t do anything or doesn’t have any energy to do something, this person will be recognized as a useless man. Sometimes, this person may be sent to bedlam as a psychopath. At the same time, people will try to avoid these people because no one knows what they will do. Everyone knows that psychopath is an incorrect existence or maybe harmful to society, so no one want to be recognized as psychopath and if they were recognized as this, they will try their best to deny it, but it will make situations worse.
In shared knowledge, everyone is trying to not to be a psychopath and if they think they are, they will hide it and don’t want others know. However, in the book, the man acknowledged that he is a madman, is a psychopath; he has mental disease. When a person acknowledged that he or she is a person not of the same clan, is this person still a psychopath? Can we just say yes and send him to bedlam? Most of times, personal knowledge is not correct for everyone, but shared knowledge tends to be correct, or at least most people know this knowledge. When one thinks he or she has mental problem, it doesn’t mean all people think so. Actually, from objective point, this person is acting abnormally and actually hurting someone metamorphic not obviously. Is he or she categorized to psychopath? For common sense, yes, but if most of people think this one is normal, then this one is categorized normal, even this person knows oneself is mentally sick.
So in daily life, most of times, if public say what is correct, then what is correct because human decides what is correct or not, also truthfulness. Human has the awareness of complex rationality. Most of times, people judge things based on ethics, and ethics are made by human, which is acknowledged by everyone. Human decides that the property of things, so it is only applied to human, not others.
So when we are trying to judge an event’s rationality is based on the ethics and logic, which are acknowledged by most of people. So are rational mean most people acknowledged it? Then what if the ethics are decided by a bunch of people who is called “psychopath” by us?