A new look at the meaning of sanity:

It's easy to say that a man is mad if he insists he's Napoleon or if he runs amuck in the streets killing people. But there is little doubt in the minds of intelligent people (particularly those in our young reform movements) that a more subtle madness permeates our whole culture today. We see a society that permits the indiscriminate destruction of people and environments (through wars and pollution), a society that pours millions into mental health "research" while institutions fill to overflowing and suicides increase. We see government agencies that confiscate honey off health store shelves because of "mislabeling" while condoning the label"enriched bread" on a product containing mostly unpronounceable chemicals,whipped and baked into a foamy, plastic lump.Legally a person is considered insane if he doesn't know right from wrong;but this is hardly a guide we can use in our delicate daily judgments andchoices.Along with its other helpful offerings, the tone scale gives us a reliablescale for measuring sanity.The lower a person is fixed on the scale, the less sane he is. There is no sharp division between sanity and insanity. A person is more or less sane at any given minute. In fact, he may be rational in one area ofliving and nutty as a pecan pie in another.It's mostly the volume of a tone that provokes society to lock a person up. That is, when someone is caught in a low tone with the volume turned on full, he's generally considered insane. This means that one angry person may beat his wife with a baseball bat while another (at lower volume) destroys her with words. They're both insane; but society recognizes, only, the first one as dangerous.