Definition of Insanity

Dear Ben and Albert,

when people define insanity (mostly in political discussions) they attribute their favorite definition to either one of you, presumably to evoke some higher authority on the subject. This definition, hardly contested by anyone, reads:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”

I personally doubt that either of you is the author of this rather dumb definition. Because it assumes several unlikely events:

1) Sameness of things. In a dynamic universe, no same things can exist. Everything is different and changing all the time. Nothing remains as it was. There just are no same things. This makes our universe principally complex and uncertain.

2) Linear causality: Doing the same thing is plainly impossible as well. Not only does the context of an action change, but so does the actor and thus the action itself. We can at most declare similarities and assume that similar things under similar conditions will produce similar results. But these are essentially speculations. We just cannot know.

To quote Heraclites: "You cannot step into the same river twice." But as Heinz von Foerster once remarked, you cannot even step into the same river once, because there is no same river. In a universe in flux, prediction is always speculation. Although we individually rely heavily (like all species) on such speculations by assuming that events of the past will happen again in the future, this is never certain. Prediction, whether by oracle or clearvoyence of computer models remains speculation.

So my definition of insanity would go like this:

"Insanity is to first believe that we can do the same things again (and again), and second to expect the same outcome."

Yours,

AdLib

Dear Reader,

Blogging is one of the new freedoms of the internet: the freedom to independently publish your own opinions. Of course you and I have countless opinions on countless subjects, so why bother? I decided to publish a blog related to the one issue that is becoming more and more important in our lives: freedom.

In order to make it more focussed I decided to write this blog in the form of letters, adressed to a particular person (which I do not personally know, in most cases). I will take up issues from the news or from my daily experience, and hope to be able to add a new and different, often critical and even contrarian angle to it. Seeing things and events from different perspectives to me is an important value in itself. When everyone thinks the same, no one thinks at all (or at best, only one does). This marks the end of freedom, because freedom is based on the recognition that we are all different and unique, and thus have each different and unique experiences, perspectives, histories and viewpoints. Even as a group, we act best when each can use his or her individual intelligence as independently as possible, because our personal experience and knowledge is unique and cannot be generalized or mapped into a computer model...

I consider freedom an endangered species, ironically because nearly everything that is done politically and individually today is done in the very name of freedom. Many of our self styled "freedom fighters" at the same time attack liberal ideas as the most dangerous modern evil. In such a time of semantic confusion, freedom is in danger of getting crushed between good intentions and the quest for political power to realize them. My blog is just one individual's resistance against this trend. It is meant to provoke and inspire. What we need is a global con-spiracy of freedom!