Perspectives on Sanity

Sanity
n.
1. normal or sound powers of mind


Origin: Latin sanitas 'health'.


Some time ago I wrote about Lunacy. Two opposite perspectives and how both are equally valid. Not having resolved the debate completely whether Cat Stevens was right, or Pink Floyd was, the musings about lunacy continued. This somewhere led to thinking about the exact opposite - sanity.


Talking about sanity - who's sane, who's not and the likes of that - would be grossly incomplete without a discussion on the classic 1975 Oscar-sweeper, 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest', by Milos Forman.


The movie is about a convict, Randall McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) who is looking for a cushy life in a mental institution and therefore feigns mental illness (successfully). While there, he finds a lot of affection and compassion for his fellow inmates that comes naturally to him and he soon becomes the life of the institution. As a part of them, he actually ends up doing them a lot of good because he gives them all a taste of life. An imaginary baseball game with the TV switched off, gambling with cigarettes, smuggling girls in for a private party for one of the young kids, and so many more scenes of the movie beautifully bring out the transformation that he brings about in their life.


However, doing all of this means breaking a whole bunch of strict rules imposed by a martinet, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). She is the one who is supposed to keep all the mental patients in the hospital in order and everything about her is cold and forbidding.


Things ultimately come to a head between McMurphy and Ratched as the tension between them keeps growing. Both have strong wills and opposite motives. McMurphy wants to rebel and do good for his fellow inmates. While Ratched wants to show everyone that she's the real boss in the place.


The movie ends tragically but poignantly. And it also leaves us wondering - who really was crazy in that cuckoo's nest? Was it the bunch of mental deviants who were quite harmless and just trying to find their way around in the world? Or was it Nurse Ratched who in all ways was 'sane' to the world, but had an insane, almost maniacal desire for controlling helpless people for an end which can only be understood as ego-gratification.


It is probably as impossible to say who's sane and who isn't, just as much as to say who's crazy and who's not. But it looks like there is some resolution to the whole sanity-lunacy thing that comes out of this movie. Ultimately both sanity and lunacy lie not in the person but in the action. Somewhat like what Aristotle said about the virtuous man - it lies in his actions.


I would like to believe that McMurphy, a convict and an odd-ball in the society, was really the sanest of the lot. And Nurse Ratched, a healthcare-giver and a respectable nurse, was actually the most insane.


I'm glad that I have been able to sort this thing out in my head. It had been bothering me for some time now.