Reading Lovecraft "Wrong" - Insanity

[throwsFireball]

This is something that's been bugging me for awhile now.

I've always noticed that in Lovecraft stuff when a character gets exposed too much to the mythos they're considered to have been "driven insane" by the reality of it.

Wouldn't it make more sense that they'd not been driven insane, but lost the insanities that we permit ourselves in order to survive? Insanity is, by definition, a divergence from reality and sticking to delusions instead of cold truth. These characters have had themselves exposed to the cold truth and found all their insane protections stripped away.

It's just a minor point, but it's a niggling one. I don't think Lovecraft intended it, but it definitely seems that way.

[tomcat51]

They are driven insane from the perspective of those who don't know the true nature of reality. The one sane man surrounded by the insane would appear to be the odd one out. 

[throwsFireball]

They are driven insane from the perspective of those who don't know the true nature of reality. The one sane man surrounded by the insane would appear to be the odd one out. 

Of course, it's just a pet peeve that it's mechanically described as the opposite in games. :p

[tomcat51]

There's an RPG called Kult where the more insane you become the closer you get to the truth about the universe.

[Connectamabob]

In the actual stories I think the kind of insanity varies. Sometimes it's like what you describe: the character is saying/doing stuff that seems insane to others, but is actually the truth. Sometimes it's that combined with a nervous breakdown or extreme PTSD sort of thing, where their experiences break them emotionally so hard that they can't function. And the former all by itself could itself cause the latter, if the truth were incompatible enough with one's emotional needs/priorities.

So you get a guy with extreme emotional instability, combined with saying/doing things that seem delusional (but aren't). It'd be easy to see how those things in combo might look like some kind of psychosis or schizophrenia from the outside. Especially the further back you go in time. I mean, even in the modern day psychology as a science is still in it's infancy, and the state of it in the early 20th was in many ways equal parts Monty Python and Wes Craven.

Terry Pratchett had a concept something like this. "Knurd": a state of hyper-awareness on the opposite side of sobriety from drunkenness. Most people who experience it have breakdowns and are haunted by it for life. This being Discworld, there are a few major characters who have some degree of it naturally as a sort of superpower.

[FramFramson]

Exactly. The idea is that the human organism is primitive and not able to comprehend the true form of the universe (which is true anyway!), so that our simple animal brain breaks down when overwhelmed by the naked universe. This results in a malfunctioning brain, i.e. "insanity".

[Eccentric Cowboy]

That's actually a pretty fascinating point you bring up Fireball. I never thought about it that way.
For a lot of the characters the insanity element comes from having the rug of reality yanked out from under them, realizing that all the rules and laws of man, nature and reality itself are false. Most average minds would be fragmented as a defense mechanism to cope with that sort of knowledge, while stronger minds would be consumed with depression and nihilism.

This is actually pretty strongly explored in Rick and Morty. Rick has seen it all and done it all, and yet for all his accomplishments he is extremely depressed. He's seen all that reality has to offer and all he has left is his sense of ineffectual inevitability.