We could redesign holiday resorts or re-engineer the way leaders are chosen. We might rethink how people get rewarded and whose face appears on magazines. Maybe we’d take a great deal of interest in architecture or reinvent the school system. We might ask, for instance what our concerns would be if we could be the absolute ruler of the world for a month. More broadly, we can use ‘mad’ thinking to develop our social and political perspectives. Of course, in reality there can’t be such guarantees but holding our fears aside for a certain amount of time helps us to identify our areas of real enthusiasm, longing and ambition that we would otherwise too soon push out of our minds. Or we might spend our evenings writing a novel – if we could be sure that it would get published and sell a respectable number of copies. Or we might opt to spend more time looking after our children – if we knew this wouldn’t prevent advancement in our working life.
Moments in life professional#
Liberated not to think always of our laughing critics, we might discover that we’d very much like to pursue a business venture – if we it knew it would be solidly profitable after a few years or perhaps we’d concentrate on sport – if we were guaranteed to reach a professional level. Similarly, around a career move we could ask ourselves, in a ‘mad’ spirit, what we’d do if we knew we couldn’t fail. Furthermore, it could turn out, on closer examination, that some of our desirable plans were not in fact entirely dependent on finances, it was simply that we had grown used to turning down every more ambitious idea on the grounds of money. Without the inhibiting need to think only within the parameters of sensible financial planning, ideas that we usually censor might start to come to the fore, some of which could be highly valuable. Maybe we’d suddenly see that a particular career deeply suited our nature, perhaps we’d concentrate far more on beauty or kindness, honesty or adventure, we might end up living in a completely different country or starting a new relationship. For instance, money is naturally almost always a major consideration but in a spirit of ‘mad’ enquiry, we can ask ourselves how we’d approach an issue if money weren’t a factor.
Our thinking lives are grievously harmed by a background imperative to appear at all times wholly normal and entirely sane: we should, to maximise our insights, learn to make friends with moments of ‘mad’ thinkingĪ central step in ‘mad’ thinking is to temporarily set aside the normal (but not always wise) restrictions on our imaginations.
The masterpieces of art, the business plans of certain corporations, the conversations of inspired lovers, the visions of political theorists, all have elements of protest against the settled status quo, and contain aspects that are eccentric, contrary to received opinion and impatient with day-to-day practicalities – and yet that have for all this hugely benefited our species. Many of the greatest thoughts humanity has ever produced possess – at some level – an unusual and, from some angles, insane dimension. But it’s one of the tragedies of our thinking lives that, amidst the detritus of dismissed thoughts, there are invariably a great many that could have been of high value, if only we had dared to examine them further, if only we hadn’t been so scared of their less conventional and more speculative dimensions, if only we hadn’t been so resistant to an occasional burst of ‘mad’ thinking. Some of them evidently are: too mean, flawed, absurd or petty to deserve further exploration. We banish a great many thoughts from our minds on the grounds that they are, as we put it, ‘mad’.
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