September 30, 2025

suffering fools

The word “fool” has been cheapened. It used to mean a crazy person. That’s the correct meaning. A person who has lost their wits.

We in the USA currently face two conjoined challenges:

1. we are surrounded by fools.

2. we are governed by fools.

I will explain why this is a problem.

The book of mental health conditions, the DSM-5-TR, currently runs 1,222 pages and covers nearly 300 mental health ailments, from insomnia to schizophrenia; the latter results in delusions and disorganized thinking.

In a severe case, untreated schizophrenia is like walking around after a car crash with one or both of your legs cut off. Unlike such a violent amputation, where loss of blood might prevent you from getting very far, persons with delusions and disorganized thinking can get quite far.¹

But “far” depends on where you begin.

If you don’t start life at the top of our social hierarchy, – i.e. if you are born into poverty – an untreated mental illness will most likely lead to your being forced to live on the street; “thrown away”, like an animal, and/or in a prison or jail. (As I’ve remarked here before, the LA County jail is America’s largest mental health facility. Judge us accordingly.)

But if you were so lucky, through absolutely no effort of your own, to have been born into relative wealth and into a white body, or even a white male-presenting body, and a middle class to upper class family, your untreated schizophrenia may not affect your relative standing in society; nor will it necessarily limit your access to power and/or material comforts.

While not everyone is born into such power and privilege. anyone who serves the interests of power and privilege may be afforded similar discretion. Laura Loomer, whom you must know, was committed twice by her father. Today she is one of President Trump’s informal advisors.

In fact, under the right conditions, certain mental illnesses may increase your access to power.

It’s electric.

Just as laughter can be contagious, and a song infectious, so too can delusions be shared, transmitted, disseminated.

While researchers no longer use the term “mass hysteria” –see “hysteresis” for why – they nonetheless recognize the very natural, very much unavoidable human behavior of shared delusions.

Groups of people can come to exhibit disorganized thinking and delusions. Just how large those groups can get is as much a function of our society – and its technology, such as its (mass) media.

🚨 🚨 🚨 False beliefs are not delusions. However all delusions are false beliefs. (Ice cream is a desert but all desert is not ice cream.) 🚨 🚨 🚨

For example, the false belief that White Men are superior to Black Women is not, in fact, a delusion but rather, simply, untrue; it is also morally repugnant and antithetical to the values enshrined in the USA’s Declaration of Independence.

Categorized under “Other Specified Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorder,” shared delusions are difficult to study and thus seldom discussed for good reasons: their diagnosis, let alone the treatment, involves an exercise of power.

Simply put: labeling someone as “crazy” (or, say, being infected by “the woke mind virus”) is not only a way to avoid engaging with other people’s ideas, it is also a very old and very effective way to strip people of their rights. Full stop.

Citations here and here and here. If you have time to only click one, let it be the last one, for “Drapetomania”. Once you’ve read it, repeat after me “woke mind virus.” Now consider that our political system has allowed the most famous proponent of this epithet to be rewarded with a possible $1 trillion dollars in wealth – and the power it buys. Capitalism has rotted away our freedom.

But just because something is or was difficult to do, does not mean it cannot be done. Or should not.

Less than 9 hours ago, I was fully unconscious, in an operating room, with a laser blasting away at both kidney stones and bladder stones. I have been… enlightened, and now I am free of an ailment.

Similarly, it is possible to shine a light on the delusions that have gripped American society, past and present. And thus free ourselves of what ails us.

While I was awaiting my surgery, I was able to watch America’s military leaders greet two madmen with silence. In the right context – and this surely is a textbook example of same – such silence speaks tomes.

The Wikipedia list of mentally ill monarchs is quite long.
If the word “monarch” makes you think of distant, ancient times you are sadly, dangerously unaware of the present we are living in.

I’ll share with you the search prompt I used this time and save you the click: “[a] dispassionate discussion of the unitary executive theory, a supine SCOTUS, a craven congress under the republicans, and its similarity to life under monarchical rule.”

Russ Vought is not insane. He is, however, both a moral degenerate and an avowed enemy of the Constitutional order. He is also hardly alone given that he works for the billionaires (oligarchs, plutocrats, robber barons) whose avarice and pride have severely damaged the liberal democracy that once made America a city on a shining hill.

Russ Vought, and his patrons, have put a madman on a throne of their own design.

But, also, Rupert Murdoch, and now his son Lachlan, have put a madman on the throne, of their own design, by promoting both disorganized thinking and delusions.

(Whether Larry Ellison and his son David will follow in their footsteps remains to be seen but would you bet they’re going to pursue an open society? Or bankroll its enemies?)

It is impossible – or, at least, immoral and illiberal – to address the problem of shared delusions and disorganized thinking in our media, schools, HR departments.

The consequences of attempting to do so will be censorship, epistemic collapse, political persecution.

Rather, the only way to address madness – pardon my French – is with some fucking enlightenment.

MEDIA LITERACY APPLIES TO TECHNOLOGY.

ALSO, famously, LITERACY => REASON => FREEDOM.

I will stop here, for now.

The foolishness our greed our worship of the “free market” has unleashed is hurting millions and might kill as many, sooner rather than later (a-c-e-t-a-m-i-n-o-p-h-e-n).

However, capital is but a tool in need of perfection.

It is possible, for example, that the rollout of AI may improve mental health. Certainly, I do not expect this from the company that launched a social network today, in the year of our lord 2025.²

In the meantime

If you want to experience the power of reason, in real time, over foolishness – which is not the same as madness – I strongly recommend listening, carefully, to Ta-Nehisi Coates suffering a fool in conversation with Ezra Klein.

or, if you’re in the mood for something a bit more exciting

I highly recommend the high school sequence in the movie “One Battle After Another”. It is, in fact, possible to make documentaries of the future. It’s called literary fiction.