The prophets wore it,
woven of thorns and laughter..
the jeering crown,
the mark of those
who dared to name the truth.
Kierkegaard wore it,
penned as insane,
pushed to the margins
by voices too clever
to risk listening.
The fool’s crown
is given freely
to any who refuse silence,
to any who lift their voice
against the beast,
against the fortress,
against the lie.
It weighs heavy;
not of gold
but of ridicule,
a diadem of mockery,
a garland of exile.
Yet it fits more honestly
than all the jeweled circlets
worn by the deceivers,
for it is fashioned
from truth spoken aloud.
If the crown is madness,
let it rest heavy.
For it is made of truth,
and truth is the only jewel
worth bearing.
In every age there are voices that attempt to confuse liberation with license, or ******* with freedom. Erich Fromm named this distortion with surgical precision:
the flight from freedom is not into responsibility but into its counterfeit—submission to external idols or the exaltation of an isolated, empty self. To have without being, to enthrone pathology over love, is the mark of an age that has lost sight of its own humanity.
Kierkegaard, long before, had already discerned this same danger. His warning was not abstract but painfully exact:
when the crowd forsakes truth, when reason itself is inverted, what should be called sickness is exalted as health, and the very house of care becomes an asylum of unreason.
It is here we remember his words: “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. And when reason is banished from the asylum, madness passes for wisdom, and truth is left to cry in the wilderness.”
History brands its truth-tellers as fools, its prophets as madmen. Kierkegaard bore that crown. So did the prophets before him. To be mocked, dismissed, and pushed aside is the inheritance of all who dare speak truth against silence. This piece embraces the crown of madness—not as shame, but as the only crown worth wearing.
And if the crown feels unbearable, take heart.. others have worn it, others have staggered beneath its weight, and even in their anguish they saw it as the strange seal of truth. Kierkegaard himself, mocked and maligned, turned his scorn into a confession of holy madness. His words remind us what it means to bear such a crown…
"No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them?
Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?"
~S.K.
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