I have a heathly respect for reason it helped me sly (or is still helping me) the mystic view of religion. However, I found the following text to be a very helpful counter balance to reason and logic... I pulled this together after reading a quote from someone on our fasicnation with hero's... I reminded me somewhat of something Chesterton said when asked to write an essay on what is wrong with the world -- he wrote: “Dear Sir – I am. Sincerely Chesterton”

I struggle the concept of “super men” because while I agree we are all for some reason drawn to big characters who live outside of boundaries of societies perception of justice I find these characters strangely unbelievable.  Even Ayn Rand’s characters in Atlas shrugged are utopian, the pathway of objectivity that ultimate end of reason cannot deliver a logical conclusion just as the book couldn’t deliver anything believable. And yet inside the great institutions this age (media, technology, finance, government, education, military) there are men and women on whom the weight of this world rests albeit uneasily (fewer than you would think). These are the people who Socrates attempts to describe as the guardians, those that do look frequently up and down to try to get the image of justice as closely as possible replicated into the processes they build.

And yet, I would argue that still it is the men that protect the image, not the image the men. All the works of all these super men are to protect an image, that image may have changed over the last few thousand years but the struggle remains the same.

So I quote Chesterson:

“The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on: he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.” (The location of an asylum to the west of London) I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunkard poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has “Hanwell” written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.

We all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakeable as a falling house. Men deny hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell.

It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. But a moment’s thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else’s disease. A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane.

In short oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of dullness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the center is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of today discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea: reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exultation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is the head that splits.

It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We have all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as “Great genius is to madness near allied.” By Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied. Dryden was a great genius himself, and knew better. It would have been hard to find a man more romantic than he, or more sensible. What Dryden said was this, “Great wits are oft to madness near allied”; and that is true. It is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown. Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking. He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a skeptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people’s brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, “As mad as a hatter.” A more flippant person might answer that the hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.

And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.”

My own frayed logic therefore telling me there are great men, they do appear as subversive to our perception of justice but any attempt they make to wander alone down the path of reason and objectivity in search for justice or a “less evil” solution has mixed results. I can say I can see benefits of those guardians work so long as the do look to an image of justice… beyond that it’s the great romantic mystery, I seem to try so desperately to stuff the heavens in my head…