Trilling

On the fetishization of "madness" as a form of ultimate authenticity:

The falsities of an alienated social reality are rejected in favour of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ—but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished.

—Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 171-2.