“Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy”: Book Review
We are living through a full-blown Pandemic of Lunacy, a contagious outbreak of self-deception, moral relativism, and outright delusion that has infected Western institutions, media, education, and everyday discourse. From the gender agenda, to the celebration of abortion up to birth and beyond, to the insistence that all cultures and behaviours are equally valid while Western civilisation is uniquely evil, the madness has become mainstream.
In his timely and powerful new book, Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy (2026), University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski offers a much-needed antidote. This is not another angry culture-war rant. It is a calm, rigorous, and intellectually honest guide to recovering clear thinking in an age of deliberate confusion.
At the heart of the current insanity, Budziszewski argues, is the widespread acceptance of relativism, the idea that truth, right and wrong, and even reality itself are subjective and "different for everyone." This seductive notion has been taught in universities for decades and now dominates popular culture.
The Texas philosopher dismantles it with clarity and precision. He distinguishes between what people believe is right and wrong and what actually is right and wrong. Cultural differences in moral practice do not prove moral relativism any more than differing opinions about mathematics prove that 2+2 equals whatever you want it to equal.
Drawing heavily on natural law tradition and Aristotle (with nods to the universal moral insights embedded even in the Ten Commandments), Budziszewski shows that certain basic moral realities are knowable through reason and conscience. Violating them does not liberate us, it sets off cascading consequences: broken families, declining fertility, mental health crises, social fragmentation, and eventually civilisational decline.
The book systematically addresses dozens of specific "lunacies," including:
The delusion that happiness is mere pleasure rather than living well according to our nature.
The sexual revolution's war on the natural purposes of sex, marriage, and family.
The refusal to acknowledge persistent group differences and biological realities.
The incoherence of radical individualism that inevitably leads to authoritarian control.
The rejection of objective reality itself, at the heart of postmodernism.
Budziszewski writes accessibly for the lay reader while maintaining philosophical depth. He shows how one false premise leads to another, how denying human nature in the name of autonomy eventually requires suppressing dissent, rewriting language, and medicalising healthy children.
In a time when institutions from universities to corporations to governments seem captured by ideology, Budziszewski equips ordinary people with the intellectual tools to resist. He demonstrates that you do not need to be a professional philosopher to recognise when the emperor has no clothes. Clear thinking, grounded in reason and observation of human nature, remains possible, and urgently necessary.
This is not a counsel of despair. Budziszewski offers real hope: the same conscience that our culture tries to silence is still there, waiting to be heeded. The pandemic of lunacy is real, but it is not invincible. Recovering the ability to think clearly is the first and most important step toward cultural and civilisational recovery.
If you feel like you're losing your mind watching the world descend into absurdity, read Pandemic of Lunacy. It will reassure you that you are not the crazy one, and give you the intellectual ammunition to push back. The link is here:
https://www.amazon.com/Pandemic-Lunacy-Clearly-Everyone-Around/dp/196761301X
