Futility of Trying to Reason With Lunatics

Widespread jubilation at the cold-blooded murder of Charlie Kirk reveals not only ideological possession, but also widespread mental illness.

The Vienna Narrenturm is the oldest insane asylum in Europe.

Author’s Note: I wrote a version of this essay two years ago, and it now strikes me as more relevant than ever.

For several years I’ve been turning over in my mind an idea that initially struck me as far-fetched, but now strikes me as a distinct possibility. Could it be that people suffering from some degree of mental illness are now heavily influencing or even directing cultural, political, and economic affairs? To put it more bluntly, are we now being constantly buffeted and even, in some jurisdictions, governed by lunatics?

I’d already been pondering this for some time when I stumbled across an essay that Carl Jung wrote in 1957 titled The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society. His opening reflections strike me as an apt description of the irrational and destabilizing phenomena we’ve witnessed in recent times. I have highlighted in bold the sentences that strike me as the most relevant to our situation today.

Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities, who—sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice—hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. . . .

Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could, at an optimistic estimate, put its upper limit at about 40% of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities. And even where it exists, it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness.

Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases, and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results, which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.

In this state, all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason, come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every manifest case of insanity, there are, in my estimation, at least 10 latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly, but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors.

There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychosis, for understandable reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than 10 times that of manifest psychoses and of manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people.

Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish fantasies. In a state of collective possession, they are the adapted ones and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, spawned by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there, for they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous sources of infection, precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self knowledge.

The expressions of jubilation at the coldblooded murder of Charlie Kirk while he was speaking at a college campus reveal that we are now facing a psychic epidemic in the United States along these lines.

Social media is full of posts by totally deranged people making exclamations of joy and excitement while recounting—in pornographic detail—the spectacle of a young man shot in the neck by a high-powered rifle.

There was a time not so long ago when expressing homicidal blood lust was considered the exclusive domain of psychopathic killers. Now one may peruse thousands of posts by people doing precisely this, and their posts are liked by hundreds of thousands of people in aggregate.

Given that Dr. McCullough and I have been relentlessly censored on social media for talking about early treatment of COVID-19 and vaccine safety concerns, we find the current state of affairs especially indicative that the lunatics are now running the asylum.

Especially discouraging is Jung’s observation:

Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases, and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies.

To me, one of the many astonishing things about Charlie Kirk is that he made a bold, valiant, and persistent effort to try to speak with young, overheated lunatics on college campuses. I would rather take my chances at bull riding or venomous snake handing than try to reason with deranged college students.

It saddens me to write this, as I spent many of my happiest years in college, graduate school, and as a research fellow at an academic institute in Vienna. However, the events of recent years have taught us the futility of trying to reason with lunatics.