The Lunatics are Running the Asylum

There was a time when civilisations understood themselves partly as systems of restraint. Culture, religion, law, morality, and social expectation existed not merely to organise society, but to contain the destructive potentials within human beings themselves: narcissism, aggression, impulsivity, delusion, hysteria, and emotional volatility. Psychological maturity was associated with self-discipline; the ability to regulate emotion, delay gratification, tolerate frustration, and subordinate impulse to reality.

Today, many of those restraints are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Behaviours once regarded as signs of dysfunction are now frequently reframed as authenticity, moral virtue, or political enlightenment. Emotional instability is valorised as honesty. Fragility confers social status. Victimhood has become a form of moral capital. Expectations of self-regulation, discipline, or accountability are often interpreted as oppressive or “invalidating.”

What was once considered pathology is not merely tolerated, but increasingly idealised.

This transformation extends far beyond psychology. Across much of the Western world, we are witnessing the normalisation of moral and epistemic inversion: the inability - and in some cases refusal - to distinguish between truth and narrative, between justice and ideological theatre, between liberation and nihilism. Public discourse increasingly rewards emotional intensity over coherence, identity over evidence, and subjective experience over objective reality. Movements and regimes that openly glorify violence are reframed as resistance movements, provided they can be inserted into fashionable ideological binaries of oppressor and oppressed. Terrorism acquires moral ambiguity. Hatred becomes “decolonial struggle.” Barbarism is aestheticised as revolutionary authenticity.

These developments did not emerge in isolation. They are the cultural descendants of a deeper philosophical shift that began decades ago: the collapse of confidence in objective truth, stable moral categories, and shared standards of psychological health. The intellectual roots of this condition lie partly in postmodernism and its profound suspicion toward authority, universality, and reason itself. The consequences are now visible not merely in universities, but in media, politics, institutions, and the psychological life of society.

We are living through the normalisation of insanity.

The destigmatisation of mental illness was, in many respects, a humane and necessary development. Historically, psychiatric suffering was often met with cruelty, shame, institutional abuse, or silence. Greater openness about depression, trauma, anxiety, addiction, and psychological distress has undoubtedly enabled many people to seek help who otherwise would not have done so. But somewhere along the way, a subtle but profound shift occurred. We moved from compassion for suffering to the cultural romanticisation of pathology itself.

Psychological distress increasingly functions not simply as a condition requiring treatment or support, but as an identity category conferring social legitimacy. Psychiatric language has escaped the clinic and become a form of cultural currency. Ordinary sadness becomes “trauma.” Disappointment becomes “harm.” Social discomfort becomes “anxiety.” Disagreement becomes “violence.” Entire identities are now constructed around vulnerability and psychological fragility. The result is not merely overdiagnosis, though that is certainly part of the picture. More fundamentally, we have cultivated a culture in which emotional dysregulation is frequently rewarded rather than contained.

Social media has accelerated this transformation dramatically. Platforms structured around visibility and performance incentivise emotional exhibitionism. Suffering becomes public identity. Vulnerability becomes branding. The language of mental illness is woven into online self-presentation, often in ways that blur the distinction between authentic distress and performative identity construction. In many online subcultures, pathology carries prestige. To be wounded is to possess moral authority.

Christopher Lasch anticipated aspects of this phenomenon in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), arguing that modern societies increasingly produce personalities dependent upon validation, emotional gratification, and public affirmation. The contemporary therapeutic ethos, Lasch warned, weakens resilience by encouraging endless self-preoccupation under the guise of self-awareness. This does not mean suffering is unreal. It means suffering has become socially incentivised.

Historically, dignity often emerged through overcoming adversity. Increasingly, however, identity itself is built around the public performance of victimhood. Psychological struggle, rather than being integrated into a broader developmental process, becomes central to self-definition. In this framework, to recover may even represent a kind of status loss. Stability lacks the symbolic power of visible suffering. This cultural dynamic has profound consequences. A society that continuously rewards fragility will inevitably cultivate more of it.

The philosophical foundations of this cultural transformation lie partly in postmodern thought, particularly its suspicion toward objective truth and normative structures.

Few thinkers were more influential in this regard than Michel Foucault. In works such as Madness and Civilization (1961), Foucault challenged the assumption that madness was a fixed or objective category. Instead, he argued that definitions of sanity and insanity were historically contingent and deeply entangled with systems of social power. Psychiatry, in this framework, was not merely a scientific enterprise but a disciplinary mechanism through which societies enforced conformity.

Some of these critiques were valuable and necessary. Institutions do abuse power. Psychiatry has at times been coercive and politically manipulated. Social norms are not infallible. Foucault’s work exposed the hidden moral assumptions embedded within supposedly neutral institutions. But the broader cultural consequences of postmodernism extended far beyond healthy scepticism. Over time, suspicion toward authority evolved into suspicion toward truth itself.

If truth is merely constructed, if moral standards are simply expressions of power, if categories such as sanity, normality, or even biological reality are socially contingent narratives, then no stable framework remains through which societies can adjudicate between competing claims. Everything becomes interpretation. Everything becomes discourse. Reality dissolves into perspective.

The political implications of this epistemological collapse have been enormous.

The postmodern rejection of objective truth merged with activist ideologies rooted in identity politics and critical theory. Increasingly, moral legitimacy came to depend not upon empirical evidence or ethical consistency, but upon positionality within hierarchies of oppression. The world was reframed through binaries: oppressed and oppressor, colonised and coloniser, marginalised and privileged. Within this moral framework, power itself became the primary determinant of ethical judgment.

As philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously described, postmodernism represented “incredulity toward metanarratives.” But the irony is that postmodernism did not abolish grand narratives; it simply replaced older ones with new ideological narratives centred on identity, oppression, and historical grievance. The destabilisation of objective truth did not produce liberation from dogma. It produced a vacuum increasingly filled by ideological absolutism.

Nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary political discourse surrounding conflict, violence, and terrorism.

The response within parts of the Western intelligentsia to Islamist extremism reveals a profound moral inversion that would have been unimaginable in earlier generations. Organisations such as Hamas or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), despite explicit commitments to theocratic authoritarianism, antisemitism, political repression, and violence against civilians, are frequently reframed within activist discourse as symbols of “resistance” or anti-colonial struggle.

The atrocities themselves become morally secondary to the ideological narrative into which they are inserted. This inversion operates through a highly simplified moral lens inherited from postmodern and neo-Marxist frameworks: power determines guilt. The weaker party becomes morally sanctified by virtue of perceived victimhood, while the stronger party becomes inherently suspect regardless of context or conduct. Complexity disappears. Historical nuance disappears. Objective analysis disappears.

The moral calculus becomes almost entirely emotional and symbolic.

Hannah Arendt warned that ideological thinking possesses a totalitarian tendency because it subordinates reality itself to theoretical narrative. Facts become inconvenient obstacles to moral certainty. Once people are conditioned to interpret the world primarily through ideological abstractions, they lose the ability to perceive reality independently of those frameworks.

This dynamic now permeates much of contemporary media and political culture. Journalistic objectivity increasingly gives way to activist framing. Emotional narratives supersede empirical complexity. Public discourse rewards outrage, tribal signalling, and performative moralism over intellectual honesty.

This is not simply political polarisation. It is epistemic destabilisation.

A society loses its psychological coherence when it can no longer distinguish clearly between: aggressor and victim; truth and propaganda; justice and vengeance; compassion and indulgence; freedom and chaos. The result is collective disorientation, or in common parlance, insanity.

Underlying many of these developments is a broader cultural regression toward psychological adolescence, an infantilisation of society itself. Mature adulthood requires the capacity to tolerate ambiguity, regulate emotion, accept limits, and submit desire to reality. Civilisation itself depends upon these capacities. Freud recognised this in Civilization and Its Discontents when he argued that civilisation necessarily requires the sublimation and restraint of instinctual drives.

Contemporary culture increasingly rejects restraint altogether.

Impulse is recast as authenticity. Discipline is viewed as repression. Boundaries become violence. Moral judgment becomes intolerance. Personal responsibility is reframed as victim blaming. The self is encouraged to externalise blame rather than cultivate resilience.

This is especially visible in institutions tasked with socialisation and intellectual formation. Universities increasingly prioritise emotional safety over intellectual challenge. Concepts such as “triggering,” “harm,” and “unsafe speech” often expand beyond legitimate concern into mechanisms for avoiding psychological discomfort altogether. The ability to endure disagreement - once considered essential to democratic life - is weakening.

A psychologically mature society teaches individuals how to confront reality. An infantilised society reorganises reality around individual emotional sensitivities. The consequences are profound: declining resilience; rising anxiety; ideological radicalisation; narcissistic self-preoccupation; emotional fragility; and increasing social fragmentation. Paradoxically, a culture obsessed with emotional validation appears to be producing unprecedented levels of psychological instability.

None of this means we should return to cruelty, stigma, or authoritarian moral rigidity. Human beings suffer genuinely and often profoundly. Compassion remains essential to any humane society. But compassion requires the ability to distinguish between healing and indulgence.

A healthy civilisation cannot survive without norms, boundaries, truth claims, and shared standards of psychological functioning. It must retain the confidence to say that some behaviours are destructive, some beliefs are irrational, some ideologies are pathological, and some forms of emotional life are healthier than others. The refusal to make distinctions in the name of compassion ultimately destroys compassion itself.

Likewise, a society that abandons objective truth in favour of ideological narratives eventually loses the ability to sustain moral coherence. When reality becomes infinitely malleable, power rushes in to fill the vacuum. Emotional manipulation replaces reason. Identity supersedes evidence. Politics becomes theatre. Public life becomes psychologically unmoored.

What began as a critique of oppressive structures has evolved into a broader cultural inability to distinguish between liberation and disintegration.

The normalisation of insanity is not simply a psychological phenomenon. It is civilisational. A civilisation that cannot say “this is unhealthy” will eventually lose the ability to say “this is true.”