“insane”? really??
Some think that verbiage is over-the-top. But I think we live amidst a social insanity that’s as hard for us to recognize as the proverbial fish-in-water-non-recognition. It’s not just a question of irrationality (and not just a question of injustice).
Do New York residents walk around in Manhattan and realize their social environment is insane? More likely, like Woody Allen, they have in their minds a mystique about their idiosyncratic-but-romantic city.
The parabolic trajectories of our civilization have led to insane scales of . . . just about everything . . . the polities, economic empires, residential units, ecological imbalances, institutions, social atomizations, extents of alienation from nature, and (of course, most decidedly) the technologies. It’s simply insane to log into a network of two billion people. How can it possibly not lead to distraction and overwhelm? Of course it’s like the [untrue, I know] trope re: the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water in the sense that each generation goes incrementally toward new degrees of insanity without recognition of what’s being lost.
Thoreau (1850) could see that a globalized postal mail system would lead to an overwhelm of “correspondence”; that a national-scale train system would lead to an overwhelm of hypermobility. Moderns can’t possibly come anywhere near appreciating what Thoreau was saying. Moderns think their super-supermarket indicates progress and affluence. Such variety and choice! Greens have started, just started, to broach the idea that the supermarket is insane.
A Native American would have run away as fast as possible from the phenomenon that we confront as normal. Or cried, as did the “Crying Indian” (PSA of 1971). THAT reaction was a glimmer of intimation re: the pathway toward sanity.
We’ve come so very far since 1850, since 1971. In the terribly wrong direction. Benjamin Franklin all the way back in 1753:
“Our every attempt to civilize the Indians has failed. In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plentiful. They visit us frequently and see [what we call] the “advantages” that our culture and social organization procure us. They have never shown any inclination to change their manner of life for ours. When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and participates even briefly with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. On the other hand, when white persons have been taken prisoner at a young age by the Indians, and lived a while among them, if we attempt to bring them back — and treat them with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English — yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life. They can see how burdensome it is, and they take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard: The person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but upon realizing the care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-coat, with which he took his way again to the wilderness and the Indian community.”
Erich Fromm was absolutely correct to “go there” (contemplation of social sanity and social insanity). He used the apt terminology. Modernist lifeways are insane.
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By the way, in addition to Erich Fromm, Kirk Sale used the same verbiage. And he referenced a parable:
An old cautionary tale has it that there once was a kingdom in which all of the grain crop one exceptional year somehow became poisoned, causing anyone who ate its products to go insane. That posed a terrible dilemma for the king and his advisors, for the stores of grain from previous years were very modest, not nearly enough to feed the entire population of the land, and there was no way to procure food from without. The kingdom would face either widespread famine and starvation, if the harvest were destroyed, or widespread madness and chaos. After much deliberation, the king reluctantly decided to have the people go ahead and eat the grain, hoping its effects would be temporary, that at the very least human lives would be preserved. “But,” he added, “we must at the same time keep a few people apart and feed them on an unpoisoned diet of the grain from previous years. That way there will at least be a few among us who will remember that the rest of us are insane.”
