We are the psycho-ceramics;
the cracked pots of mankind.
"You use this tabloid-sounding term far too often as a lazy, rhetorical dismissal of people you don't sympathise with and whose views you frequently fail to understand. And, ultimately, isn't everyone's pot a bit damaged in some manner?"
To be fair, he might have a point; maybe I do use this term too often and maybe we do all have idiosyncrasies and mental health issues to deal with.
However, I borrowed the word crackpot from an Adam Ant song rather than the popular press, and I like to think it functions within my text as a specific critical and clinical term to refer to individuals who have an abnormal understanding of what constitutes factual evidence and thus enter into anomalous and sometimes sinister relationships with reality and what is generally accepted as the truth (e.g. the earth is a spherical object that orbits the sun).
Such individuals - often known as cranks as well as crackpots - are invariably people of faith; that is to say, they hold firm and fixed beliefs rather than ideas that are open to interrogation, thus rendering rational discourse impossible. Once they make their minds up on any given subject they cannot be persuaded otherwise. Thus the crazy often resemble broken records as well as cracked pots; endlessly repeating the same thing over and over, forever stuck in a groove.
In 1992, American mathematical physicist John Baez came up with an amusing checklist, known as the Crackpot Index, that was designed to help identify cranky individuals and the way their minds (mal)function and I would encourage readers to check it out by clicking here.
Baez, like others who are interested in this condition, demonstrates that all crackpots share certain traits, characteristics, and obsessions. Perhaps the key feature is overestimating their own knowledge and ability, whilst underestimating (or dismissing entirely) that of leading experts.
Prone to paranoia as well as megalomania, crackpots also invariably subscribe to conspiracy theories and claim that their unorthodox views and revolutionary discoveries are being suppressed by mainstream science, big business, the government - or sometimes all three under the control of alien overlords. Or the Jews.
And so, whilst I'm grateful to my friend for taking time to write, I think he should allow me my continued usage of the term crackpot and, further, I would suggest he investigates the work of Josiah S. Carberry, the leading authority in the field of psychoceramics.
For whilst I agree that it's pleasant and proper to be foolish once in a while, insanity marks a loss of conscious integrity and the point at which creativity terminates. And so, whilst a work of art or theory can reveal the presence of unreason, there are, technically, no mad scientists or mad poets.
Note: the image above is of Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (dir. Miloš Forman, 1975); a film based on a novel of the same title by Ken Kesey (1962). The paraphrased line is from Pt. III, Ch. 2.
