Diogenes contested saneness itself by reversing every customary expectation

Evidence

This meant consistently doing the opposite of what people expected. Like Zhuang Zhou before him, Diogenes thought every “sane” person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance. Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving. Asked how he wanted to be buried, he answered: “Upside down. For soon down will be up.” In the meantime, he would roll over hot sand in the summer, and hug statues covered with snow. Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life, he was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon. While many philosophers were ascetic, Diogenes made a show of even that. Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living.” Another time, he loudly admired a mouse for its economy of living. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 246

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Diogenes’ theatrical negation relates directly to the ‘dress as signaling’ essay’s premise that moral display is class/identity signaling — here stripped down to punish the customs sustaining a corrupt world.
• CANDY: The ‘gluing pages of a book’ and child beating him in plainness stories are tweetable anecdotes.