Mad World: The Seduction of Insanity

Blaise Pascal said, "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Crazy people get locked up. Their madness is easy to detect. They have drastically disordered thoughts. It's as if their dream content is leaking into their daytime reality. They don't make sense. They can't keep it together. They're incoherent. They can't interact meaningfully with others. They have lost touch with reality. But what if there's a second kind of madness, a much more subtle and dangerous kind that goes unnoticed? In this version of madness, people have ordered thoughts, indeed often highly ordered. They make sense. They keep it together. They can meaningfully interact with others, often brilliantly, and they seem completely in touch with reality. What's not to like? Not one of them is locked up. Far from it. In fact, some of them are running our world.