John The Baptist
The Denial of the Wild Voice, a commentary on John the Baptist. The piece entitled John the Baptist reads like this. Speaking to a friend today, I learned that John the Baptist was crazy and hated.
He was not allowed to do something or another, I remember not. Regardless, he was denied on account of some or another defect of the mind, a defect that was truly a defect and not something adorable, such as musical prodigy. Fragment, John the Baptist.
- Prologue.
The voice they don't want to hear. Certain voices seem impossible to integrate, not because they are wrong, but because they are outside, outside the usual structures of agreement, decorum, and benefit.
These voices don't wear badges, they don't write resumes, they don't advertise, they disturb, they interrupt, they speak without invitation, and speak of things we wish not to examine. This commentary concerns one such voice, historically known as John the Baptist, but we will not engage him through the lens of sanctity, divine purpose, or theological prophecy. Rather, we examine him as a type, a phenomenon, an archetype of the untamed speaker whose presence society finds unbearable.
- Wilderness and margin.
Let us first place him where he lived, not in a palace, but on the margins, the desert, the riverbank, the edge. These are more than physical places, they are symbolic indicators of dislocation.
He did not live among the people, he lived near them, close enough to be seen, far enough to be dismissed. When we place someone on the edge of things, we don't just remove them from power, we remove the need to engage. What they say becomes optional, decorative, fringe.
This is a protective reflex of the social body, to place what threatens coherence on the perimeter. And so it was with this man, a voice from the fringe, regarded not with curiosity, but with suspicion, a warning perhaps. But no one wants the warning before the party.
- The threat of uncontrollable speech.
The fragment that opens this commentary frames the man as crazy and hated, a concise, brutal summary of how society often perceives non-conforming insight. This raises an essential question.
What kind of speech provokes this combination of contempt and dismissal? The answer, speech that is not available for transaction. That is, speech that cannot be bought, co-opted, softened, or reduced to entertainment.
He wasn't cute. He wasn't entertaining. He didn't inspire.
He accused.
He interrupted.
And he did not relent. That is when society reaches for the twin hammers of character assassination, madness and defect. In practical terms, this means the speaker's cognitive structure is declared invalid.
This frees listeners from having to contend with the content of the message. There is no need to rebut a delusion.
- Types of defects.
The fragment contrasts true defect with the kind of benign quirks we sometimes glamorize. Autism as genius, OCD as artistry, or eccentricity as brand. The speaker makes a critical distinction.
John's condition was not something that could be turned into a Netflix documentary or inspirational meme. It wasn't a curiosity. It wasn't a gift in disguise.
It was a problem, at least from the perspective of those trying to manage him. We have no framework as a culture for handling unadorned cognitive rupture.
We have only two lanes, pathology or genius. If a person is difficult but brilliant, we keep them. If they are difficult without obvious utility, we discard them.
The tragedy is that many of the most disruptive and accurate voices fall into this gray zone. Their intelligence is not measurable by existing tools. Their urgency does not obey conventional timing.
Their insight lacks social lubricant, and so they are excluded.
- A voice not admitted.
The phrase, he was not allowed to do something or another, may be vague, but the imprecision is meaningful. It reveals how society often bars people without explanation.
The specifics of what someone is denied, be it office, platform, dignity, are often irrelevant to the core operation. Exclusion. Bureaucracy is a costume.
What matters is the decision to deny. What we see here is the slow, silent machinery of social quarantine. The moment when a person is deemed unacceptable, not through trial or judgment, but through the quiet erasure of access.
It is not that he was formally sentenced. It is that he was functionally unwelcome, and no explanation ever truly satisfies the weight of that decision.
- Not mad enough to ignore, not normal enough to respect.
In social terms, this man occupied a space that was too coherent to ignore, but too irregular to embrace. That is the most dangerous kind of speaker. The raving madman can be dismissed.
The polished intellectual can be debated, but someone who speaks with clarity from an incoherent location. That person unsettles everything. Such a figure exposes a breach.
He cannot be neatly labeled or countered. His language is accessible, but its implications are unlivable. It forces a kind of reckoning, and that is why, historically, these speakers are either killed, quarantined, or mythologized.
After the fact. John, it seems, received all three. The seventh ritual of disposal.
There is a familiar cycle to how society treats disruptive speakers. It follows a pattern. Ignore.
Let the voice go unheard.
Mock.
Frame the speaker as ridiculous. Diagnose. Assign pathology to explain the deviation.
Quarantine.
Remove the speaker from influence.
Eradicate. If necessary, silence permanently. Reclaim.
Later, once safe, convert the memory into symbol. This is not conspiracy.
It is social reflex. Culture protects itself by removing what destabilizes, and speech from the edge, speech without payoff or entertainment, will always be destabilizing. Even if it is correct.
Especially if it is correct. The cost of unusable truth.
The real threat this figure posed was not in what he said, but in what he asked of people. To speak of radical change, of confrontation, of acknowledgement, without offering comfort, without compromise, is a kind of terror. People do not fear change.
They fear unsanctioned change. Change that does not offer a role for their current self. This is what a voice like John's strips away.
It makes no promises. It does not care for branding. It is not part of a movement.
It doesn't have a manifesto. It simply stands in the dirt and says, this is false. This is dying.
This cannot continue.
And then, worst of all, it waits.
It does not explain itself.
- The strange geometry of margins.
One might expect a society to listen to such a voice, especially in crisis.
But the opposite is usually true. The more accurate the alarm, the more intensely we seek to silence it. Why?
Because a true alarm upends not only the enemy, but the listener's position in the system. To hear the call and do nothing is to become complicit. To act on the call is to risk ruin.
Easier than to call the speaker mad. It is a way to preserve narrative geometry, to keep the center stable by exiling the unstable to the periphery. In this way, madness is not a medical designation.
It is a geopolitical tool, a form of conceptual deportation. And some are deported while still alive. Ten.
- Who gets remembered and why?
The irony, of course, is that once a person like this is dead, they often become useful.
Their name can be included in books. Their image can be placed on murals. Their message can be softened, stylized, or set to music.
This is how culture converts former threats into assets. Through the lens of history, the once unbearable figure becomes quaint. The defiant becomes sacred.
The marginal becomes myth. But this process has a cost.
We lose the voice and keep only the figure. The wildness is tamed, the contradictions smoothed, the anger forgotten, the urgency collapsed into vague nostalgia. And so it is possible to venerate someone you would never have tolerated alive.
John the Baptist, if that was his name, joins a long list of such figures. The socially unaffiliated, the inconvenient seers, the non-participatory critics, the truth-tellers with no institution behind them. We build statues to them only when their voices are gone.
- The edge is not empty.
To call someone crazy and hated is not a factual statement.
It is a confession. It is society saying, we do not know how to handle this, so we will destroy it.
That confession, if taken seriously, reveals something about the margins themselves. They are not empty. They are crowded.
With all the voices we did not want to hear. All the warnings we did not heed. All the knowledge we deemed unusable.
And among those voices, some are not broken. Some are simply too clear. Too wild to be familiar.
Too urgent to be comfortable.
Too near to be safely ignored.
- Lessons without doctrine.
So what remains? We are left not with a doctrine, but a shape.
The shape of rejection. The shape of interruption. The pattern of how inconvenient voices are processed by society, and how defects are often only such because they cannot be made adorable.
This figure, whether we call him John or anything else, is not an answer. He is a signal. He represents the moment when society's language breaks, and something unmanageable speaks through the crack.
It is not about religion. It is about what happens when someone cannot be contained.
- Final reflection.
The value of the uncontainable. There are people among us, now, as before, whose voices exist outside the structure. They will not give TED Talks.
They will not be invited onto panels.
They will not be sanitized for easier handling.
They may smell like dirt. They may speak without order.
They may cry too much. Or not at all. But listen carefully.
What if, buried in their so-called defect, is a clarity the rest of us cannot bear? What if some minds are not broken, but simply unsuited to deception? And what if the desert is not a punishment, but the last place left where speech can still be honest?
We must ask, who are we denying today?