"Our Society is Run By Insane People"

John Lennon's earnest statement in 1968 and Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" in 1964

A few years ago I saw a recording of an interview that John Lennon gave on June 6, 1968 that has haunted me ever since.

Four years before Lennon gave his interview, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was released in US cinemas. In the following scene, the titular character — who seems to be a mishmash of former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and game theory guru John von Neumann—explains why he concluded that a computer-automated “Doomsday Machine,” designed to exclude “human meddling” from rational decision-making in the business of waging nuclear warfare, was not such a great idea after all.

I have long regarded as Dr. Strangelove as the strangest and most fascinating film ever made. Equally fascinating is the evolution of Kubrick’s thinking as he got into the project.

It began with him acquiring the rights to Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert—a deadly serious Cold War thriller about the terrifying ease with which a nuclear exchange could be triggered by a single deranged American general and the frantic efforts to recall the bombers before they triggered Mutually Assured Destruction.

As Kubrick got into developing the screenplay with George, he found the material’s inherent paradoxes impossible to treat with a serious tone. He later explained that while he was trying to develop the scenes realistically, he repeatedly had to suppress details that were ridiculous or paradoxical to keep the story from becoming absurdly funny. The logic of mutual assured destruction, fail-safe protocols that could be subverted by one paranoid officer, and political and military leaders calmly calculating megadeaths as acceptable trade-offs struck him as so preposterous that it could only be treated in a comedic fashion.

What could be more absurd, he suggested, than two superpowers prepared to erase human civilization over accidents and ideological differences that future generations would likely regard as an adolescent ideological pissing contest.

The comedy does not dilute the horror, but enhances it by exposing how systems built for rational deterrence can easily be derailed by human fallibility and insane rationalizations that normalize the unthinkable.

It seems to me that the people who run our society today are just as insane as they were in the 1960s, perhaps even more so.

Since I published the video trailer to my new book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, a few people have told me that the video is too relentlessly over-the-top in its depiction of chaotic insanity—that the viewer’s mind is overwhelmed and cannot process it. And yet, all of the imagery and news clips are real, taken directly from archives.

I would be most grateful if my readers would take five minutes to watch the trailer and to let me know in the comments what you think.