Many years ago I had a philosophy prof, former Marine and great brilliant gentleman, who in his gruff way spoke to us about insanity.
He observed that insane minds produced bad results, not in conformity with reality. But in the modern world we are more and more exposed to the artificial and the aberrant. Garbage in… garbage out. We are more and more becoming insane.
I picked this up from the indispensable Laudator:
Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Emeryville: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006), p. 93:
Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets.
