This marks the tenth anniversary of when I was attacked by someone wielding a box cutter who managed to sever the anterior branch of my carotid artery, My attacker was caught and convicted of attempted murder but was also declared insane so she was incarcerated at Patton State Hospital in San Bernadino. It turned out that she'd already been convicted of seventeen misdemeanors prior to her attacking me, including her attacking two men with a knife just a few months before, and she'd been released on unsupervised probation when she attacked me.
I've gone into how I achieved what I consider closure by trying to understand what it means to be insane. I'll summarize it again, using an essay taken from Gilbert Keith Chesterton's Orthodoxy called The Maniac. People paraphrase Chesterton at their own peril, but simply put, it's not about a person's ability to reason. It's about the size and shape of their universe of facts. And nowadays, facts are no longer about truth. They are as much about the things we experience individually that prompt us to believe that certain things are true, or worse, are indoctrinated to believe are true.
While this understanding helped me reach what I consider a healthy perspective in terms of how I view the person who tried to kill me, I find that this understanding seems to apply to most of what's going on in the world nowadays. And the reality is that most people have no idea of how insane they've become. And they'd rather to continue to believe untruth rather than acknowledge that they've been manipulated by events or by those who want them to believe as they do.
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