Let’s Be Mad

In recent years, the world seems to have gone mad. A sense of unreality is increasing, between the lies of our leaders, the misinformation, and the myriad forms of violence and nonsense that fill our daily lives. The landscape we observe on social media appears increasingly chaotic and anxiety-inducing. Gaza is the height of destructive madness: watching genocide unfold on our screens, while media propaganda denies its reality. But is it true madness we are facing? Is it truly unreal, absurd? Or are we not rather following a colonial, patriarchal agenda, pushed to its limits?

The reason of the unreasonable

To understand the madness we feel, we must return to the notion of “rationality.” The real problem is what has been presented to us as reasonable, and what we have learned to internalize as such. The idea of a “rationality” that has been imposed on us by our leaders is based on a set of data and standards, particularly scientific, that were (and continue to be) constructed by white, colonialist, racist, sexist men. These standards—criticized by different thinkers from Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault to Mona Chollet—have served to classify, exclude, and dominate rather than to liberate.

In recent decades, the notion of liberation has increasingly bowed to the anarchic convolutions of imperialist capitalism. Capitalism and modernity are imperialist “rationalities” that aim to maintain domination over Indigenous populations, the Global South, and minorities in general. This “rationality” has taught us to normalize violence and domination in the name of productivism. It has begun to trivialize the slow, silent violence produced by exploitation.

Faced with the acceleration of cataclysms due to capitalism, leaders have begun to resort to propaganda to invent an artificial truth that has increasingly distanced us from social reality. Little by little, the “rationalization” of the worst has taken hold—what journalist Adam Curtis calls “HyperNormalisation.” We live in an era in which we increasingly trivialize horror, the mass deaths in Gaza, the genocides, and the exploitation of individuals across the world, generated by a broken system.

The pathologization of the lucid

This “rationality” that leaders offer us is created in opposition to sensitivity, empathy, freedom, and social justice. All these essential qualities and states of being are presented as irrational. It goes further. Our system discredits, even criminalizes, deeply human behavior. It pathologizes minorities and dissident acts. As soon as an activist interrupts the dangerous matrix with a brave action, they are categorized as deviant or deranged. Human rights activists have long been pathologized.

Let’s look at history. Women who opposed the patriarchy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were labeled as hysterical and were often forcibly confined to asylums and institutions. Just like the Black activists in Detroit, who in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, were forcibly interned—diagnosed with schizophrenia or “Black psychosis”—in the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan (The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, by Jonathan M. Metzl). Let us also remember that acts of rebellion against slavery were seen as a result of a mental illness called “Drapetomania,” a pseudoscientific, racist theory. Today, it is “wokism” that is pathologized by our leaders.

In the fascinating essay “Racing Madness: The Terrorizing Madness of the Post-9/11 Terrorist Body,” from the book Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, researcher Shaista Patel discusses how Orientalist and Islamophobic narratives have created the image of the “mad Muslim terrorist” who threatens the white social order, “and therefore must be incarcerated or eliminated.” The “mad” Muslim was invented to stand in opposition to the supposed rational civility of the West, homeland of the “Age of Enlightenment.”

She analyzes how the supremacist West has set itself up in opposition to “the East” and to an “Orientalism,” so aptly deconstructed by Edward Said. The West characterizes all Muslim people as barbaric, driven by unstable passion, and therefore not credible. The “lunatics” would also be those who refuse integration imposed by white institutions, this refusal being a sign of irrationality, extremism, and incoherence, etc. This pathologization aims to disqualify acts of resistance to oppression.

Go beyond the frames

Let’s talk about the term “mental health.” The mental health advocated by governments only locks up and makes docile all those who would like to escape this “rationality.” The psychiatric complex is just another facet of the prison complex. Brilliant thinkers from the margins of society, like Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, explored mental health from a perspective of liberation and revolution. Mental health, as it is perceived today by our leaders, has nothing to do with liberation. It is an extension of social and neoliberal control. The most vulnerable individuals are psychologically mutilated, alienated, and traumatized, only to be imprisoned or offered pharmaceutical solutions when they are crushed. Everything is a chain of greed, which we must learn to break.

Personal development is simply an extension of this fascism. It has created an ultra-individualistic and capitalist “well- being” dedicated to posh people, linked to an idea of “disconnection” from the world, of a cocoon in which the other becomes a danger.

Never, during the genocide in Gaza, have we seen so many yoga and Pilates teachers calling for the extermination of innocent civilians in the name of their own serenity.

We are therefore not fighting against madness, but against a “reason” established for centuries, which is not the right one. Let us now overturn the narratives. To do this, we must break free from all the frameworks imposed as rational. We must break free from the supremacist, colonial, and capitalist framework, break free from the neoliberal and individualist framework of current care, knowing that all these frameworks form an asphyxiating jail which kills any prospect for the future.

Let us overflow.
Let us disorganize.

If we are considered mad, then let us embrace utopian madness in the face of destructive “rationality.”