Rethinking: Fools and Mad Men

A fool is known by six things: anger without cause; speech without profit; change without progress; inquiry without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends. Arabian Proverb

I think a foolish person (fool) is the one who knows, does and views things differently from wise men, as well as other fools. And that’s why neither the wise men nor the other fools comprehend, contemplate or communicate with him. And for the sake of convenience and respect the name given to this living being is “fool.” We always tend to relate foolishness to absence of common sense and knowledge. Fools are unwanted everywhere, because we feel they are just not worth our time and effort to be courteous and tolerant. But if you keep an open mind you may well realise that foolishness is not stupidity. It is thinking way beyond the logical, rational and unimaginative minds of wise people. I say this primarily for the following reasons.

Foolishness is not about a person, but a phase of life or a reaction to a situation.

You will agree that we all have been foolish in some instance, phase or stage of our lives. And we have seen the wisest of the wise men being foolish at times. For instance, scientists and researchers at NASA, had spent years and millions of dollars trying to find the right tool to be able to write in the space, since pens don’t work because of the lack of gravity. They then discovered that their counterpart in the then USSR (Russia), used pencils to solve the same problem. Now would you dare call NASA, foolish?

Even in our daily lives we make a mess sometimes due to our silly logic. But we call them ‘mistakes’, because these slip ups are not frequent or important enough to push us into calling ourselves ‘fools’. So the only matter of difference between the so-called ‘wise’ and ‘fools’ is of the frequency and magnitude of mistakes. Once you have crossed that line between predictable thinking and unpredictable thinking you are likely to be called a ‘fool’ by your contemporaries. To me it only means that you have gone beyond the thinking and imagination of your time and it’s time to move on.

To think fools are useless is foolish. All the real creativity that the world has ever seen came from those perceived as ‘fools’ or men thought to be ‘mad.’ It took some real madness to prove gravity with a falling apple. It took a real fool to assert than the earth was spherical when everyone else claimed it was flat. If Orkut or Facebook were to form a group of fools or mad people, it will surely have the following names registered: Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Archimedes, Aristotle, Galileo, Saint Kabeer, Mirza Ghalib etc. All of them, for most of their lives had been called ‘fools’ or ‘mad’ by contemporary society. It happened because they arrived in the world before their contemporaries were ready for them. So before we judge the ‘fools’ of our times, we need to wait for at least a century to confirm that they didn’t evolve into the geniuses of our era while we were stuck in the status quo wearing blinders.