[This is a speech on the quote “Not doubt, CERTAINTY is what drives one insane” Nietzsche]
The world is a strange place. I don’t quite understand it; every time I think I do a new layer of reality appears. Out of nowhere. Or maybe it isn’t nowhere, maybe it was there, the entire time, under my feet. I just didn’t see it. It’s like shoveling snow, again and again until you run out of energy, out of faith to see the ground one day. Truth is a very thick snow.
To really see the world, you need to keep searching, knowing you’ll never quite get there but you grow closer and closer every time you try. See, a lot of people don’t like searching, searching is scary, it’s solitary. So those people stop looking, they settle down, build houses, create communities and anchors to stop them from trying again. They’re tired of hoping for the world to make sense so they make sense of the world. New rules, new laws, explaining what can’t be explained. The world couldn’t be seen so they put a box over it, decorated the whole thing and called it “reality”.
Those people… Those people they’re us. You know that, you know that’s why I’m telling the story, right? We’re so obsessed with our own opinions and ideas that we shape the world the way we want it to be. Doesn’t matter if the earth goes around the sun or the opposite, as long as everyone agrees to it. We don’t want the truth, we want certainty. We want to nod and see people in front of us nodding in agreement, in our own bubble outside of common sense.
The worst part is… We don’t see it. Our eyes are shut, stitched from the inside. It’s like La Hormiga, by Marco Denevi. It’s about an ant, she lives in one big community under the earth, never seen the sun, never seen nature. She could have sworn nothing existed outside of her world. But one day, by accident, she goes out and discovers this whole new reality. She doesn’t quite understand it but it’s alright, she searches, she learns, she realises the magnificence of the truth, and submerged by all those new possibilities she runs back to tell her companions and… They kill her. Oh god, they killed her!
She was shattering their world, their whole world that they had spent so much time building and they couldn’t stand it. So she became the mad one, simply because they couldn’t understand; her words were all unheard melodies and their symphony was too foreign, too strange to be appreciated. Maybe, she really was the mad one, mad to think they would accept to reconsider their beliefs.
Do you think we kill people too? I think we have in the past. We keep telling dreamers and thinkers “it’s impossible, it’s unheard of, it would not make sense, you’re crazy” until one of them doesn’t give up and their discovery is slowly, carefully, as to not break anything, incorporated in our reality. We might not destroy their bodies, but we kill their essence because we’re afraid of their gaze, their shinning eyes might light up the dark part of our lives. We think them crazy because they see so much more than we do, and when we hide, they run towards the brightness, towards the outside world. What if… What if we’re mad ones.