Lucian, circa 150 AD, speaking through the mouth of a parasite or sponger, who is justifying his trade:
And if you think I am not sane, put down my innocence of other professions to insanity, and let that be my sufficient excuse. My lady Insanity, they say, is unkind to her votaries in most respects; but at least she excuses their offences, which she makes herself responsible for, like a schoolmaster or tutor.
Humor, diatribe, practical jokes, madness, redirection and misdirection of insights via sock puppets, all of this is a literary genre, certainly, that of Menippean satire, going back through Lucian to Hippocrates, Democritus, and Diogenes. Going forward, we have the writers, particularly Swift, that we associate with the Age of Reason aka The Age of Madness. Swift's Digression Concerning Madness in the Tale of the Tub stands as the the high point of this tradition, at least until my own work, as an inmate of Wealth Bondage, the lunatic asylum, the inverted moral order (appetites over reason, logic in service to profit) that those who would enslave us call The Free Market, pending its collapse. Now, is that crazy or what?
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