Where is the Voice of Sanity?

Paul Levy had the following comments in his column

A little while ago I ran into a friend I hadn't seen for awhile. He asked me what I had been up to. I told him that I was writing a book about the collective psychosis that was wreaking havoc on our planet. He asked me what made me think there was a collective psychosis going on. His question left me speechless, literally not knowing what to say. What made him think that there wasn't a collective psychosis, I wondered.

You could look in any direction and find endless examples which proved that our species has gone out of our minds. There was so much overwhelming evidence for the collective psychosis that I didn't even know where to start.

To see our collective madness, all we have to do is simply look at what we're doing to each other, not to mention the very planet we depend upon for our very survival. We seem to have gone so crazy that many people haven't even noticed, as our madness has become normalized, which is just further proof of our collective psychosis.

Where is the voice of the psychiatric establishment in pointing out the obvious situation: not only that our leader is mad, but that Bush's madness is a reflection of the fact that we, as a species, have fallen into a collective psychosis?

In a personal conversation I had with the late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack about exactly this point, he expressed his opinion that the psychiatric community doesn't see it as their job to deal with collective pathological situations such as we are in. Amazingly, Mack was pointing to the fact that the psychiatric community doesn't see it as their responsibility to track collective psychic epidemics.

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The evil that is being enacted on our planet could only happen because of a sufficient number of people who are passively standing on the sideline and doing nothing about it. Not doing anything about the evil we see being acted out in the world is to ourselves become an unwitting instrument of evil, as our in-action allows, enables, and feeds the further propagation of evil in the field. Evil is truly calling us to pick up an empowered role, whatever that is, and "act," as if we are actors in a play or characters in a dream. Recognizing our responsibility for the collective situation we find ourselves in, we access our ability to respond creatively in the world and act-ively do something about it.

Something is being revealed to us about ourselves by the fact that we are being ruled by people who are mad. Imagine, what would we do if we truly recognized that our government is being run by people who have collectively gone mad?

What would we do if we realized that the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, the person with his finger on the button, is a genuine psychopath? This is not a make believe question: How would we respond if enough of us not only recognized that our leaders were truly insane, but that we urgently needed to do something about it? What do we imagine we would do? This is a very relevant question, as this is the true nature of our current situation.

Do we go belly-up, imagining that there is nothing that we could possibly do about our insane situation? Do we imagine ourselves collapsing into impotence, being totally dis-empowered, unable to do anything about being ruled by a bunch of psychopaths? Or do we imagine that enough of us, realizing the gravitas of our situation, connect with each other and access our collective genius so that we can truly make a positive change in the world?

The question is: Will the darkness that is manifesting in our world destroy our species or wake us up to our true nature? The choice, and responsibility, is truly ours.

While there may be some debate over the political issues, this guy seems to be on to something. The symbolic and psychoanalytic jargon that is found in the middle of his column I could very much live without, but the several paragraphs above are gold, indicating a fundamental limitition in the psychiatric view of the world.