Madness Amok

Friday, August 28, 2026

There are very sick people in this world – very sick.  It used to be they lived in dark corners and you had to go looking for them.  Even if you heard their stories, you had to imagine the worst parts.  But now, in the internet age, even when the story is told by an outlet intended to bless people, it provides access to the sickness via link.  I refused to follow the link in the story I just linked and I hesitated to include the link I just did.  The material covered is pure hatred and celebrates the ritualization of some extraordinarily ugly stuff.  Stuff like this has been around forever, but never has it been so easy to access.  And that is a big part of the problem.

The second law of thermodynamics says the disorder of an isolated system must always increase over time during any spontaneous process.  Properly understood, this “law” of physical chemistry is limited in its application and quite frequently misanalogized.  But I think it illustrative in this instance.  Imagine a box of monkeys, half grey, half brown, neatly sorted between the colors with a divider between.  Now remove the divider.  Very soon, the colors will be random throughout the box – that’s the second law.  You have to put work into the box to sort it out and keep it neat, left on its own, disorganization will reign.

So, it is with the human mind.  We must study and work and put in effort to keep it from turning to mush.  I did not go looking for the filth discussed in the article I linked above, but there it was, and now it is in my head running around like a grey monkey amongst the brown ones.  That’s one of the big issues with the internet, stuff that would never cross our minds, crosses our minds – and we have to deal with it.  Ready access to information requires that I put in more effort to organize and control my thoughts, and yet the internet is designed to present all that information without effort.

Unsurprisingly, pot use is on the rise.  Equally unsurprisingly, so is Cannabis Use Disorder.  Legalization has, of course, fueled these increases, but so too has the internet where those whose brains are already in a permanent pot-induced haze can get information into already disorganized brains, hoping to increase the number of people walking around in a pot induced haze.  They are called “influencers” for a reason.  And so, in a time when more effort is required to organize and control our thoughts, we popularize agents designed to move mental states in exactly the opposite direction.  Now longer have we just removed the barrier between the monkeys, we are actively stirring the box.

Is it any wonder then that we find out, “When psychology professors are asked whether they’d put the truth before social equity concerns, 66.4% of male professors said yes, but fewer than half of female professors (43%) agreed.”  It is deeply troubling that both of those numbers are not 100%, but in a world of disorganized brains and “pot”-stirring (pun intended) can we truly find it remarkable?

And so we begin to see how dangerous political ideologies take root.  Despite warnings and testimony and history – socialism and communism are popular.  As someone who visited both the Soviet Union and The People’s Republic of China, I cannot tell you how horrifying that news actually is.  Having seen first hand the devastation these ideologies can create, their popularity does nothing but generate sorrow and fear.

We live in a world designed to create mental chaos.  And the more mental chaos a person suffers, the more likely they are to hold such political ideologies.

We need to ask ourselves what force is sufficient to counter the mentally disorganizing effects of modernity.  I can think of only one.