Facing My Friends' Trial: A Personal Defense

We first analyze why they said I had gone crazy and demonic. “Crazy and demonic” is a serious accusation. “Crazy” and “demonic” convey two different messages. “Crazy” is a judgment on one’s mental state, the opposite of normal, indicating an irrational condition. When J called me crazy, it meant he thought my views had gone beyond the normal range of his cognition.

There is some reasonableness in J’s reaction, because the Original Sin Theory is based on Christian teachings. For someone who has lived in an environment where positivism is the absolute mainstream since childhood, this exceeds his basic understanding of the world. A person trained in this kind of cognition is wary of religion and God, because they see God as a human fantasy, a cause of cognitive deviation, something detached from reality and harmful to effectiveness. So he called me crazy.

This view is a conflict in logical thinking, essentially a clash in the process of forming conclusions. A pure empiricist’s thinking comes from practical experience: experience summarized from practice becomes the scientific method, and eventually becomes a rational conclusion. Although my Original Sin Theory does not specify which god pronounced the original sin, nor does it explain which god can redeem people, and does not mention the existence of any god at all, the question of how sin brings suffering still introduces a hidden god in this view — a god that governs sin and makes sinners suffer.

J’s labeling me as crazy is precisely exercising a kind of rational judgment in the Foucauldian sense. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault points out that madness has never been an eternal natural category, but has been actively invented by the Western rational order since the 17th century through a series of institutional and discursive practices: the mad were locked in asylums, stripped of their right to speak, and ultimately became the opposite mirror through which rationality defined its own sanity.

Rationality needs an “other” to prove its own soundness, and this “other” is precisely those voices that break the closed loop of rationality and introduce things beyond experience. Today, in a cognitive background where positivism is the absolute mainstream, this rationality has been internalized as a collective cognitive mechanism. Tribunals and asylums are no longer necessary. Simply throwing out the word “crazy” in everyday conversation is enough to complete the exclusion of the heretic.

J’s long-formed cognition made him regard experience–practice–science as the only legitimate form of rationality. Even though my Original Sin Theory does not mention God at all, it still touches the forbidden zone of this closed loop: it suggests that suffering may originate from an inner mechanism that precedes experience, rather than being a direct result of external material conditions. In J’s cognition, this constitutes a typical feature of madness — a non-rational intrusion that cannot be falsified by scientific methods yet tries to explain reality.

Foucault reminds us that the definition of madness has never been a neutral medical diagnosis, but an expression of power relations: whoever holds the power to define what is rational also holds the power to brand others as mad. J’s judgment of me as crazy is exactly this kind of microscopic exercise of power. He did not need to provide any refuting evidence, nor did he need to delve into the logic of my arguments. He only needed to invoke the rational standards instilled in him since childhood to demote me from an equal conversation partner to an object that needs to be corrected or ignored.

This is not J’s personal subjective bias, but the conditioned reflex of the cognitive structure he inhabits. In positivist culture, religious or quasi-religious metaphors (even when philosophized) are preset as delusions and interfering factors. Any discourse that introduces hidden variables will be automatically filed under madness, because once one admits that such a hidden god might exist, J’s belief that practice yields true knowledge would face disintegration. Rationality would no longer be the absolute master, but would need to coexist with a dimension that transcends experience.

This is precisely the dialectic of madness and civilization described by Foucault: civilization maintains its own stability by constantly reaffirming the boundaries of madness. Therefore, J’s judgment of “crazy” seems casual, but is actually the subconscious output of a profound logical chain. It reflects not the absurdity of my views, but the incommensurability of two discursive systems: one is the madness tamed and silenced by rationality as described by Foucault; the other is the civilized discourse that must maintain its own purity through labels. My friends failed to reflect on what I said precisely because thinking itself would threaten the integrity of their rational order.

As for “demonic,” it points to a deeper level of moral and social vigilance. In the existing cognitive context, “demonic” usually does not refer to Satan in religion, but to a negative force that bewitches people and disrupts normal order. It implies that my views are not only crazy (detached from rationality), but also potentially harmful, spreading like a virus and corroding listeners’ understanding of reality.

By calling my Original Sin Theory demonic, J and Y essentially treated my discourse as some variant of non-scientific thinking or spiritual opium. They believed that although the Original Sin Theory was dressed in philosophical clothing, it secretly contained a non-empirical causal chain: sin is not the result of personal choice, but stems from some primordial mechanism beyond individual control. This mechanism could create a sense of fatalism or collective guilt, thereby weakening individual initiative and becoming an unproductive view.

In the thinking framework they received, any statement that attributes suffering to inner sin rather than external material conditions will be automatically classified as making excuses, because it challenges the core idea that practice yields true knowledge. Y’s agreement further amplified this judgment. As soon as J’s evaluation came out, Y followed almost without hesitation. This was not a consensus based on independent thinking, but a typical group dynamic: when one person first throws out a strong label, another person quickly echoes it, often to maintain relational harmony, to avoid questioning a friend’s judgment alone, or simply as a reflexive alignment because it sounds reasonable.

This echoing may happen unconsciously, because it does not require deep analysis of whether my Original Sin Theory holds up. It only needs to confirm that the thing does not sound like the rational category we are familiar with, and then safely file it under crazy and demonic. J provided the judgmental framework, and Y’s agreement made that framework seem more objective and unquestionable.

Essentially, this condemnation of my views was a kind of witch hunt. I was the heretical, bewitching witch trying to distort people’s hearts with Original Sin Theory and Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis, while my two friends were the church pastors, ready to purify my delusion with the flames of rationality, logic, and materialism. In medieval witch trials, the pastors did not need solid evidence. As long as the suspect showed any signs inconsistent with orthodox doctrine — such as abnormal behavior, strange speech, or unsettling heretical thoughts — the trial process could be started. The purpose of the trial was never to pursue truth, but to remove sources of pollution that threatened the church’s order.

My friends’ trial of me also followed a similar simplified logic: J, as the first pastor to speak, first delivered the verdict of crazy and demonic; Y then played the role of the congregation by silently agreeing, jointly completing the encirclement and suppression against me. They did not need to carefully unpack the internal mechanism of how sin brings suffering in the Original Sin Theory, nor did they need to ask whether the Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis could find observable correspondences in specific phenomena. They only needed to confirm that my words exceeded the experience–practice–science category they were familiar with, and that was enough to judge me as a witch in need of purification. This modern version of the witch hunt has its church not in a medieval religious institution, but in the collectively shaped cognitive paradigm. This framework defines rationality extremely narrowly: anything that cannot be directly verified by repeatable material practice in the present is preset as illusory and dangerous.

The flames of J and Y were not the real fire on the pyre, but the lightly spoken yet highly destructive label in social situations — crazy and demonic. Once this label was uttered, it demoted me from an equal dialogue partner to an object that needs to be corrected or isolated. It cleverly avoided substantive discussion: instead of discussing whether the concept of original sin can explain certain cycles of suffering that cannot be fully attributed to the external environment, they directly declared it a bewitching heresy; instead of examining whether reversed causality logically reveals the limitations of linear causality, they classified it as a delusion detached from reality. What is even more interesting is that this kind of trial is often carried out under the guise of caring for a friend. When the pastors light the fire, what they have in mind is not destruction, but helping you return to normal. J and Y most likely genuinely believed that their denial was protecting me from sliding into a spiritual abyss, while also protecting themselves and each other from intellectual pollution.

In their cognitive map, any discourse that introduces a hidden god or inverted causality is an erosion of the positivist worldview and must be extinguished at the budding stage. This is where the witch hunt is most efficient: it simplifies complex spiritual conflicts into a binary opposition of good and evil, and reduces cognitive differences to normal versus crazy and demonic, thereby sparing the trouble of deep thinking. However, the real cost of this trial is the complete interruption of dialogue. While the pastors are busy purifying the witch, they are also closing off their own possibility of exploring the unknown. J’s first verdict and Y’s quick agreement together built an invisible wall, blocking any ideas that go beyond their paradigm.

The same crazy and demonic trial logic was also directly applied to the second view I shared, the Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis. This hypothesis essentially questions the linear thinking in daily experience that puts cause before effect, proposing that in some cases the effect is already latent before the cause, or that cause and effect are circular at a higher level. Like the Original Sin Theory, it does not introduce any god that can be directly falsified by experience, yet it similarly touches the forbidden zone of the positivist rational closure. Therefore, J may have immediately classified it as crazy upon hearing it: it breaks the rational order described by Foucault, a scientific discourse that must take repeatable practice as its only starting point and advance linearly.

J’s empiricist logic made him regard linear causality as the cornerstone of rationality. Once one admits that causality may be reversed, it is equivalent to introducing a hidden mechanism that precedes experience. In J’s cognitive map, this constitutes another typical non-rational intrusion: a delusion that cannot be immediately falsified by current scientific methods yet tries to reinterpret reality. Y once again silently agreed, making this label collective, as if the consensus of two people could prove the absurdity of the hypothesis.

At the demonic level, the Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis is also seen as a bewitching heresy. It suggests that the everyday belief that effort leads to results may be only surface appearance, and that true causality has already been inverted at a higher dimension. This would create a sense of fatalism or doubt in the idea that man can conquer nature, thereby challenging the core tenet of practice yields true knowledge. In J and Y’s framework, this is not only crazy (detached from linear rationality), but also demonic (corroding productivity and social order like a virus).

Thus, the gavel of the witch hunt struck again: J first threw out crazy and demonic, Y echoed, and the two did not need to test whether the hypothesis could find correspondence in concrete phenomena. It was enough to confirm that it exceeded the experience–practice–science closed loop to deem it a delusion in need of purification. Essentially, J and Y’s condemnation of the two views was two sides of the same trial: the Original Sin Theory provided the hidden dimension of inner sin, while the Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis provided the subversion of temporal logic. The two together threatened the complete boundary of their rational order. My friends failed to reflect on what I said precisely because any reflection would create cracks in that wall.

However, I do not accept the verdict of this witch hunt, nor do I think that being labeled crazy and demonic means my views have no value. My defense is not to prove the correctness of the Original Sin Theory or the Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis, but to defend a more basic right — the right to think seriously, and the right to bring complex ideas into conversation rather than having them immediately excluded.

First, J and Y’s standard of rationality is not some self-evident absolute truth, but a product of a specific cultural context. As Foucault reveals in Madness and Civilization, rationality has always defined itself by constantly drawing boundaries.

Today in the positivist mainstream environment, these boundaries have been narrowed to the extreme of what can be verified by immediate experience, so that any attempt to introduce hidden mechanisms or non-linear causality is automatically treated as a threat.

This is not a problem with rationality itself, but the exclusivity produced when rationality becomes dogmatic. If we truly believe in the spirit of science, we should allow hypotheses to come first. Even if they cannot yet be fully proven by practice, they deserve to be temporarily suspended in judgment rather than having the discussion ended abruptly with the word crazy and demonic.

Historically, many ideas now regarded as common sense were once seen as absurd or unscientific by the mainstream rationality of their time.

The two views I shared are similarly attempting to break through the limitations of linear experience to capture the deeper reality that cycles of suffering or subtle inversions of causality may point to. If even preliminary discussion is burned away by flames, how can we still claim to be pursuing truth?

Second, the biggest problem with the witch hunt is that it replaces substantive dialogue with moralized labels. The pattern of J delivering the first verdict and Y quickly agreeing, although it seems efficient in social settings, deprives both sides of the opportunity for joint exploration.

I do not demand that they immediately believe in the hidden god in my Original Sin Theory or the logic of reversed causality. I only hope they can at least ask me questions: if this idea holds, how would it explain the phenomena we observe daily? Or if these views are truly operating, how should our behavior change?

Rather than directly casting me as a heretic who needs to be saved. This hasty denial does not protect their rational order. Instead, it exposes the fragility of that order. Their order is so afraid of any possible crack that it must maintain superficial integrity through labels.

I chose to share these views not to bewitch or distort anyone’s heart, but because I believe that true friendship and intellectual exchange should tolerate a certain degree of cognitive gap. J and Y responded to me with “crazy and demonic,” perhaps out of goodwill: they worried that I was sliding into a spiritual abyss. But goodwill does not equal the correct method.

Reasonable care should be the willingness to temporarily set aside one’s own cognitive map and explore the edge of the unknown with me, rather than hastily lighting the pyre to burn me back onto their familiar track. My Original Sin Theory and Reversed Cause & Effect Hypothesis may not be correct, but at least they deserve to be treated as serious hypotheses rather than viruses to be immediately quarantined.

Perhaps this is the core of my defense against this witch hunt: I am not a witch, and they are not pastors who must defend orthodoxy. We are simply three ordinary people, in front of lamb skewers at a barbecue restaurant, trying to describe the same reality in different languages.