Mad I may be! An upright citizen, pillar of the community, husband, father, householder, member of a learned profession and yet mad. I might ‘benchmark’ as sane, where benchmarking is looking at how someone is relative to others – these ‘others’ being the benchmark. This is what philosophers call relativism. So long as we are all mad, we will all seem to be OK. Folie à millions.

But why mad? The madness is being caught up a culture of blame. Consumer societies cultivate expectations that other people will do things for us or to us. If we don’t get what we expect we are encouraged to go elsewhere or complain. We are not encouraged to wonder whether we are expecting too much, or what we can do differently to help things to turn out better. It’s mad because ultimately it’s unsustainable. Of course, some argue that high expectations raise standards, which is often true. But if those high standards are unsustainable in the long term or they happen at the expense of others who suffer, then sooner or later we, or more likely our children, will pay the true price of our ‘folie’.

So what should we do differently? Maybe we should look out for people who are saying or writing things that feel uncomfortable. They may be the sane ones – the ones that benchmark off the scale. Or they may be even madder than the rest of us. Who knows! Perhaps as we head for the general election we’ll have plenty of chances to try this out, to see whether we have the wisdom to vote for the sane and not the insane oddity. But though there are plenty out there, these oddities are seldom heard, and that’s another story for another time.