I don't watch much TV since West Wing went off the air. But, I love the lead character in House, played by Hugh Laurie. I mean, aside from the fact that he's got more character flaws than a $10 diamond -- he's completely, brilliantly, insane.
That's right, I think brilliant insanity can be a good thing.
William James once wrote that the insane can actually reveal to us some ignored truths about reality, because they don't feel obligated to respect our group-hallucinations. In other words, I like House because his character shows us how silly many of our supposedly "normal" perspectives are.
To wit, in an episode that aired (rerun?) last week, Dr. House taught a class of newbie residents (the "normal" people), using a difficult but real-life case from his past. When the students were given insufficient information and asked to choose between two mutually-exclusive treatments, one of which (but they don't know which) would certainly kill the patient, roughly half chose the treatment which turned out to have saved the patient. House then commented that the other half of the students just killed the patient, at which point one of them objected "but we can't be blamed", on the grounds that there was really no way to know for sure which treatment would work.
To which Dr. House replies with this gem:
I am sure this goes against everything you've been taught, but right and wrong do exist. Just because you don't know what the right answer is -- even if there's no way you could know what the right answer is -- doesn't make your answer right or even OK. It's much simpler than that: it's just plain wrong.
Nobody wants to be wrong. But, nobody's perfect. We need to get past this obsession with not being wrong. It's debilitating. Don't be paralyzed by the possibility of being wrong. Be informed; use your head and your heart... and make a decision when needed. Then, when you are wrong ... own it; learn from it; and move on. Great security, comfort, and confidence derive from honest self-appraisal.
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