Kanye, Deranged Penguin

Freddie DeBoer made a great point about the cognitive dissonance Kanye forces liberals into: "mental illness don't do that!"

“20 year olds with absolutely no background in psychiatry confidently stare into their front-facing cameras and declare what mental illness can and can’t do. Mental illness can prompt people to cut out their own tongues, to light themselves on fire, to kill their children because they believe that CIA bugs are implanted in their brains, but it can’t prompt ordinary socially disreputable behavior or bigotry, apparently.”

That actually the more mentally ill someone appears, the less we want to give them the "mental illness" pass. It's incredible to see how Kanye makes mainstream liberals squirm, which is I think exactly why he does this.

Which is to say, I don't think Kanye is severely mentally ill, and I don't think he ever has been. He's probably "bipolar" in the over-diagnosed sense of the term, but does he have an actual real illness? Or is this just how his brain works, for better or worse? I've seen real bipolar up close—it can have characteristics like this, but it's a lot more nonsensical, and a lot less self serving (e.g. it doesn't usually coincide with an album release).

There are some free-radical members of the human race who react to being told what to think and what to say, particularly publicly, with extreme revulsion. I know because I am one of these people. They are the "deranged penguins" who leave the penguin heard and book it for the mountains a hundred miles away, sure to die in the process (for penguins, and humans, ostracization is death), but inspired by some divine insanity to do it anyway. Their behavior seems crazy and they seem "mentally ill" but I don't think that's accurate in the functional meaning of mental illness. These types have great potential because they can act in such unexpected creative ways, pulling stuff literally out of non-existence into existence, because they're playing not for human beings but for something else, you might say God. This is why the greatest artists always appear like outsiders—like rebels—despite being adored by all. Kanye actually has a great song about this on Donda, "Come to Life."

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