Socialist millionaire, then-Beatle, John Lennon, said it plainly in a June 1968 interview: the people running things are not simply cynical or corrupt. They are madmen pursuing mad ends. He added that he had sensed it since adolescence, and that expressing the observation risked being labelled insane himself. That remains one of the clearer things he ever articulated, but of course, he was looking at things from his Leftist position. Still the general point survives that thought contamination.
The distinction between evil and insanity is not semantic. Evil implies calculation: the deliberate choice of harm for gain, status, or ideology while still recognizing the reality of consequences. Insanity is different. It is the inability or refusal to see reality clearly, the construction of elaborate rationalisations that turn the absurd into the necessary, and the serene confidence that the resulting wreckage is progress. When power is exercised by people who have lost contact with ordinary cause and effect, the damage compounds in ways that pure malice rarely achieves.
Stanley Kubrick understood this years earlier. Dr. Strangelove began as a serious thriller about accidental nuclear war. As Kubrick worked on it, he found the logic of mutual assured destruction, the fail-safes that could be overridden by one paranoid officer, and the calm discussion of megadeaths as acceptable trade-offs so preposterous that comedy was the only honest register. The film's power comes from treating the system's internal consistency as the joke. The characters are not cartoon villains; they are functionaries whose premises have detached from the world the rest of us inhabit.
That detachment has not diminished. It has scaled. Consider the pattern of recent decades: policies that treat biological reality as optional, economic measures that punish production while rewarding financial abstraction, public-health regimes that demand compliance with shifting and often contradictory claims while suppressing open scrutiny, and cultural campaigns that pathologise normal human preferences while elevating the fringe. These are not always the product of secret cabals carefully maximising their own advantage. Frequently they look more like the output of people who have immersed themselves so thoroughly in models, slogans, and institutional incentives that contradictory evidence registers only as heresy or "misinformation."
Insanity of this sort is self-reinforcing. Once a group accepts that certain questions cannot be asked, that certain data must be ignored, and that dissent itself is evidence of moral defect, the feedback loop closes. Reality becomes an inconvenience to be managed rather than a constraint to be respected. The resulting decisions can appear purposeful, hence the charge of evil, yet the purpose itself is often unmoored from measurable outcomes that ordinary people care about: safety, prosperity, competence, continuity.
Lennon's observation retains its force because it refuses the comforting alternative explanations. If the ruling class were merely greedy, one could bargain with them. If they were merely ideological, one could defeat the ideology with better arguments. When the problem is a form of collective derangement: protected by credentials, insulated by bureaucracy, and rewarded by the media and administrative systems that share the same premises, the difficulty is deeper. The people with the greatest capacity to reshape institutions are the least able to notice when those institutions have become instruments of harm.
This is not a claim that every official or expert is clinically mad. It is a claim about the operating culture of elite institutions: the progressive detachment from empirical reality, the substitution of narrative for evidence, and the confident enforcement of policies whose failures are then explained by insufficient zeal rather than flawed premises. The result is a society that feels increasingly ungovernable not because the problems are unsolvable, but because the people entrusted with solving them cannot admit the nature of the problems without undermining their own status.
Lennon was no systematic thinker, and much of what he said and did was foolish, including his Leftism. But on this point he was right. The danger is not only that power is held by the unscrupulous. It is that it is often held by people who have convinced themselves that their particular form of unreality is the highest form of wisdom.
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/our-society-is-run-by-insane-people