Most of us, from time to time, act irrationally. We let our wishfulness or our emotions override our better judgment. That's why people gamble, why they indulge in all sorts of endeavors that involve risk. Maybe it's not exactly rational to ride a motorcycle, because you know if you ride for long enough you'll eventually have a situation where you'll have to lay that bike down. Maybe for you the pleasure you derive from riding motorcycles (or smoking cigarettes) is worth the pain you expect to experience some day.
Risk is a necessary part of a well-lived life, and while it might be argued that smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles are crazy, in a free society adults are allowed to risk their health and treasure to pursue happiness. No one can tell you not to sky dive or open a restaurant. Most of us are probably too concerned with our personal safety most of the time.
But a little crazy goes a long way. People can and do get hurt. Over time our brains mature, we learn to moderate our appetites and control our impulses. Usually the feedback is good. We find it easier to sleep with a good credit rating. We find a kind of balance. Most of us. Not all.
"Smooth running crazy" is a term I thought had wider currency; it's a useful description of a fairly common condition.
So it surprised me when I Googled the phrase and found only eight results. Two of the first three citations were in pieces I'd written, while the fourth result was a link to a blog post by a friend of mine. So while you would probably deduce the phrase's meaning from the context in which it's used, let me attempt a working definition.
When you say a person is smooth running crazy, what you are saying is that the crazy isn't immediately apparent. The crazy is submerged and largely silent, which is not to say latent. Smooth running crazy has split the blanket with reality, but it doesn't feel compelled to dress in feathers or eat rocks. Smooth running crazy is like the high-functioning alcoholic or heroin addict--the roots of their problem are likely deep and gnarled but from day to day, minute to minute, they can mostly keep it together. They might be able to fix your car or deliver a scorching guitar solo, but they're essentially unwell.
You only begin to take the full measure of their derangement after spending a lot of time with them (or encountering them in full flower on the Internet). One day you wake up and realize the spontaneous, fun-loving person you've been dating for the past six months is in fact a dangerous narcissist who believes the moon is a hologram and that Hitler died in Argentina in 1986. Or that the quiet guy you've worked alongside for six years believes the president is a Muslim who was born in Kenya and Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely have their political enemies assassinated.
Smooth running crazy is something that they can live with, and so you probably have to as well. You just make allowances. Maybe you handle it like you handle a racist relative who says inappropriate things at Thanksgiving. You don't exactly confront her each and every time, but you make it clear that you don't share her sentiments. You just kind of roll your eyes and later pull the kids aside to explain that while we all love Aunt Viola, her comments are her own and don't reflect the opinions of any decent American.
You handle her the way Paul Ryan tries to handle Donald Trump.
People are allowed to be smooth running crazy so long as they don't hurt anyone. Maybe they can't even help it; maybe their chemically induced fantasies are just too strong. And maybe they've been taught that feelings and gut instinct--faith-- is a surer determinant of truth than facts and reason. It seems that a lot of us really believe their personal, reflexive assessments of a given situation are actually better without being confused by facts.
Over the past few weeks I've had a number of conversations, online and via email, with people who've assured me they neither trust nor care about what scientists, historians, lawyers, economists or any other credentialed experts think about the issues of the day. To be clear, these people weren't expressing a reasonable skepticism about the sources of information or the agendas of these experts; they simply didn't want to consider any "facts" at all. They knew how they wanted to feel about a given issue--how they needed to feel about it--and that was the way they were going to feel about it.
Because that's what matters to them, not how things are but how they seem. What's most important to these folks is preserving their particular vision of the world; if that means believing the overwhelming majority of the world's thinking class is engaged in some vast conspiracy, that's what they believe.
This isn't a partisan issue; I've seen it across the political spectrum. I've seen it in areas of our lives that have little or nothing to do with politics. People believe all sorts of things that are demonstrably untrue, and some of us live our lives in ways that make no sense. They've crawled into a bunker with their files and paperbacks; anything from outside their hermetic environment is inherently contaminated and corrupt.
Some people call it cognitive dissonance, some willful ignorance. I suppose those are both handy descriptors, but what it is is smooth running crazy.
And that's about 30 percent of us.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 08/09/2016