sheer insanity

I've always thought it would be neat to be amish. I love reading books about the amish, imagining what it would be like - the horse drawn carriages, the simplicity, the old-time values and morals. From what I know, attention of any sort is not really preferred - so they've got to be having a rough time with this. I hope that their faith is the kind they can lean on in this. My prayers are with them. Execution style, without reason? How does one make sense of something like that?

Here's the question that's been bouncing around my head for a few days now - how does one go from slightly crazy to completely, over the line, all-out nuts? I think everybody is a little bit neurotic and crazy in their own way - but what happens to make that 'edge' of insanity full blown? What makes the craziness seem to make sense? Seem to be normal? Seem to be right? You know that with that kind of planning he certainly wasn't wondering if his line of thinking was rational any more. It just WAS. To him, he was most likely being extremely rational - or at least thinking that his behavior was a direct and equal reaction to what happened to him (what that is, no one is still 100% sure).

So, how does one get to that point? Is it that he kept everything bottled up for so long and never evaluated it? Is it that he kept mulling it over and mulling it over until it finally built up to something so catastrophic that it dictated this type of response? What makes a person just flip like that?

Of course what I'm getting at here is: What keeps any one of us from ending up like him someday? Is everyone prone to sheer insanity and we all are coping with it and keeping it restrained? Is the craziness something we all of a sudden gain one day?

If the completely irrational (as far as society's morals, norms, laws) seems rational at that point, what guarantee is there that what we think is rational right now in our heads actually is by societial standards?? If the standards we use to determine if we're rational is our own gage of it in our heads - how do we know we're not already crazy?