Mad World: The Seduction of Insanity

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." - Blaise Pascal

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.

The problem is that these people believe and repeat stories that cannot possibly be true … above all, the stories of religion. They base their entire lives on plainly wrong ideas.

Humanity is shaped by falsehood, by absurdity, which is why humanity has so many difficulties, and so many people are so discontented and dissatisfied with their lives.

Human thinking is fatally entangled with ersatz truths, faux truths, simulated truths, fake truths, human truths, story truths. Humans subscribe to word-based stories. Reality, however, operates according to number-based non-stories. In that dichotomy lies the human condition, the human-all-too-human struggle to understand existence. It is literally impossible for humanity to grasp the Truth via words (stories, opinions, beliefs, religions) rather than numbers (reason and logic).

Perception is what passes for reality. For humanity, story is perceived to be reality. But, of course, story isn't reality. Story is story. The human tragedy is that humanity has insisted on regarding stories as truths. Humanity cannot evolve until it recognizes stories as fiction, and numbers (non-stories) as facts. Humanity hates mathematics because there's no story there.

Here's the central human problem: humans think narratively, but the world isn't a narrative. The world is a calculation. It's math, not story.

According to the Bible, God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh (the classic narrative). According to Pythagoras, all things are numbers and number rules all (the classic non-narrative). Who's right?