In the Mind of Madness

The Problem:

You know a conversation is about to go downhill faster than than a fistful of shit when someone with an overbearing sense of their own importance pipes up with "If I were in charge..."

Recent conversations in this vein have yielded an interesting insight. If I were in charge, I'd get rid of all this Health and Safety nonsense. If I was in charge, I'd deport all the foreigners who are stealing our jobs. If I were in charge, I'd halt the moral decline. If I were in charge...

Through these insightful observations, I have come to the conclusion that what we are lacking most is not people who are in charge. Indeed, there are too many people in charge, and by just letting anyone be 'in charge', we run the risk of complete global meltdown because, generally speaking, people are idiots. The biggest problem is that the people who are currently 'in charge' are too agreeable. In that context, they're agreeable in the way that a Pod Person appears agreeable, until they start shrieking in an otherworldly voice and chasing you down endless streets before ramming you into an over sized courgette and stealing your body. The fact is, they are normal. What the world is lacking most is people who are, in no uncertain terms, affably insane.

"If I were in charge, I would make bananas illegal."

The Methodology:
 
Now, most of my day-to-day decisions, especially pertaining to morality and political alignment, are based loosely - and I mean loosely - on rational choice. Basically, I will have an idea. If there is no prevailing mental discourse against said idea, it will be implemented to catastrophic affect. I have found that this is the most satisfying and least confusing way of running my life, but it has left me with a difficult question.

Why, in a world obviously dreamt up in a madman's nightmare, is everyone insisting on acting in a justifiable and sane manner? This collective self-delusion is starting to wear at me, a little bit, especially given the above decision-making apparatus. Even the most disagreeable people can deploy certain arguments to support their stupid and bigoted opinions. Why does Bill Gates, a man who quite possibly defecates money, give to charity? Why does he not live in a giant, hovering pyramid? Why does a lottery winner insist that this will not change their life, and that they will maintain their working-class hero roots by returning to the daily grind at Tesco before retiring, exhausted, to a bed made of solid gold.

Returning to the problem, what we see is a sneering contempt for the needs of say, a bunch of pox ridden foreigners dying someplace somewhere else. But unless you've taken a vow of absolute soul-crushing poverty and dedicate your entire life to ridding global ills, we perpetuate the problem. The only answer, then, is that people obviously pretend to care. This is in direct conflict with our rampant narcissism, overbearing egos, human nature and general survival instinct, which dictate we always must strive to do our best by ourselves, and damn anyone else.

The Solution:

Insanity.

The obvious conclusion is that people, generally, while absconding from ethics, responsibility, and humanity, are taking themselves too seriously. In the high stakes game of 'how full of shit are you', the answer is 'depthlessly full'. I am depthlessly full of shit. The solution is affable insanity - a rejection of enforced social normality and a complete opt-out of any unspoken reponsibility or behaviour that entails. Allow me to explain.

Tomorrow I win the lottery. I can do many, many, things, but I've already decided to build a giant bronze statue to myself and pay two people  - dressed as a radish and a vacuum cleaner respectively - to loudly declare my greatness every half hour. The rationale behind this is 'because I can, and because no one else will'. No one else will built a giant statue of me and zealously scream my name to the uncaring sky. The burden of responsibly falls on me to fulfil this unspoken dream. People will call me insane.

Those same people will pass a beggar on the street and not throw any coins in his direction. They will lie to their friends and loved ones - even justifying it as a lie to forestall argument or spare them emotional distress. The very same people will elect a parliament of clowns based on nothing more than a half-arsed newspaper article and deep-seated ignorance. This will, invariably, have disastrous consequences for someone, somewhere else, but they will not care. In fact, they may even say that you have to be cruel in order to be kind, or make assumptions about other people's motivations for complaining, social circumstance, or adopt the patronising opinion that they know better.

In light of that, there seems to be no reasonable argument why anyone should act in a manner that is anything other than completely and utterly selfish, devoid of compassion and crazier than a sack of cats. What we need is more people who are willing to simply run with an idea purely on the basis that they can do it. If leaders we must have, let them be deliberately incomprehensible, unjustifiable, and wilfully misanthropic. Too many years have passed since we last managed to apply the suffix 'the Mad' to someones name.

Summarised: We already live a mad, nihilistic existence. Like many things, a failure to legalise it has only driven it deeper underground.

So I'll leave you with a list of my personal beliefs of 'if I were in charge'.

If I were in Charge

1. Leading a coalition of other months, February would annex January. Since nothing interesting ever happens in January and no one seems to like it, it seems only fair that January is outlawed, calenders are retroactively changed and the month itself is struck from the annals of history. It's 31 days can be divided between the remaining months, bringing them to about 33 and a half days each, give or take some time, which is irrelevant anyway. Whole days in excess are added to February, which as the new First Month of the Year, and constant underdog, deserves it.
2. Every lunar cycle would be named after a different variant of marmot. If not enough genus of marmot are available, it would fall to the world governments to genetically engineer new species to make up the shortfall.
3. The display of purple would be banned on every day apart from Thursday, in which anyone found not wearing an purple item of clothing would be dragged through Grimbsy by a donkey.
4. Endangered species would be hunted to extinction, so no one could be accused of only doing half a job. Emphasis would be placed on the most dangerous species first, to ensure our continued survival.
5. History would, where possible, be written five years in advance, to allow people adequate time to prepare for it, and if the desire takes them, participate in it.
6. An overhaul of the penal system would see prisoners rehabilitated by forcing them to partake of their crimes for an indefinite period of time and filmed for reality television. While many new, strange and interesting laws can be created in the interim, preliminary suggestions include: 
1. Making murderers kill a required number of squirrels every single day, chasing them to exhaustion and beating them with a mallet. 
2. Making convicted sex offenders repeatedly carry out inappropriate acts on unwilling goats. 
3. Making burglars and shoplifters participate in a daily game of Supermarket Sweep, whereby they must steal a predetermined value of goods within a set time limit.
4. Failure by any participant will result in them being sacrificed to flesh devouring ants.
7. Employing a Walrus to resolve all global non-emergencies that would otherwise require my attention.
8. Compulsory wearing of sunglasses. All the time.
9. Referring to anything before 1987 as 'The Bleak Years'.
10. Challenging nature's dominance by punishing the earth for natural disasters.