There was a psychological study once when a bunch of inmates in a mental home were asked to pretend to be normal, to act in a way that they thought normal people acted. Surprisingly, this cured most of them, and they were soon able to be released.

Inversely, sometimes I get the feeling that the world is populated by insane people pretending to be sane; they're cunning enough to have learned all the tricks of sanity and not be picked out and recognized as crazy, but under the seeming order is a fairly big degree of chaos.

I think that if this is true, this used to be true of me too during my teenage years, but isn't anymore. Because I remember what I was like to be 12 or 14, and I remember that a lot of what I did and said and thought was pretty purposeless and irrational, although I was always able to give rationalizations and paint it as semi-sane.

And now that I actually do feel sane, it's harder to convince people that I am, and I act much more stereotypically crazy, because I can no longer rationalize or explain why I do things, and just kind of treat it as unknown and mysterious.

But returning to the original point, I kind of strongly suspect that most people are as crazy as I used to be. For instance, creating a rationalization for what you do or believe or say, and believing in that rationalization, instead of just recognizing that you don't know why you do things, is pretty crazy. And that's just one example of how most people are pretending to know what they're doing and pretending to be in control of what they do even though they don't and aren't. I can recognize it because I used to do it myself.

Not that I'm defending mental institutions, I think everyone in them should be released immediately. Except for those who got out of going to jail because of the 'insanity defense', they can stay.