Has the World Gone Mad?

Why intelligence thrives in science and fails everywhere else

Progress Where Reality Enforces Discipline

We are living through a strange and revealing moment. In technology, medicine, and the hard sciences, progress is staggering. AI, biology, physics—these fields move forward because reality disciplines thinking. You can’t argue with results. You can’t posture your way past failure.

Everywhere else, thinking has deteriorated—not everywhere and not uniformly, but enough to shape outcomes that matter.

Norms are being defended without being examined. Institutions speak with confidence but act without coherence. Large numbers of supposedly intelligent people react to symbolic issues with hysteria while responding to real catastrophes with paralysis or a complete lack of common sense. None of this is disjoint. This is all connected.

Greenland and the Power of Symbolic Outrage

Greenland has roughly 56,000 people and controls a landmass of continental scale—most of it unused and uninhabited. Its status is a direct leftover of colonial history. That is real history.

But so is this: Denmark has long acknowledged Greenland’s right to full independence, though independence would end the annual Danish block grant. Greenland has not taken that step because it depends on roughly half a billion to over a billion dollars a year in Danish block grants and associated support. That dependency is the quiet fact behind all the moral rhetoric.

There is no serious discussion of whether it makes sense for a tiny population to hold absolute, unquestionable sovereignty over an enormous and increasingly strategic portion of the Earth—so long as someone else pays the bill. The moment the issue comes up, discourse collapses into symbolism, outrage, and taboo.

Donald Trump approached this with his usual bluntness and framed it in terms of ownership. That is his mindset. It is also true that the United States does not need formal ownership to accomplish its strategic goals. But obsessing over Trump’s tone misses the point. The underlying realities he is reacting to are real, while the public conversation pretends they are unspeakable.

The entire episode is becoming a textbook tempest in a teapot. Supposedly serious people continue to predict the end of civilization as we know it. Europeans strike grave poses and coordinate NATO military deployments to Greenland—gestures significant on paper and posture, but still far from the scale of action demanded by the underlying realities. A vast amount of moral energy is being expended on an issue with little practical consequence.

Ukraine and the Cost of Procedural Seriousness

Europe has the largest war since World War II happening in its backyard. Real death. Real destruction. Entire regions shattered. This is not symbolic. This is not theoretical.

In World War II, Ukraine absorbed catastrophic losses as part of the Eastern Front. Millions of Ukrainians—soldiers and civilians—were killed. Entire regions were destroyed. Europe did not defeat Nazi Germany without that sacrifice, and it was not evenly shared. The war was decided in the East, at a human cost borne disproportionately by places like Ukraine.

When Waiting Becomes Safer Than Acting

And yet today, Europe can wait—because waiting has become institutionally safer than acting.

For years, while Russia attacks Ukraine, deliberation substitutes for decision. What has kept Ukraine alive has been Ukrainian ingenuity, adaptation, and sacrifice—not decisive European action. Support has been substantial but slow, wrapped in conditions, approvals, and phased commitments that often arrive too late to shape outcomes rather than react to them.

Even now, European elites debate mechanisms—whether frozen Russian assets should be used directly, or whether alternatives such as EU borrowing should be pursued—while the war grinds on. Years of discussion, and still no resolution. Process replaces urgency. Procedure replaces responsibility.

Action Without Thought

This is the inversion.

A symbolic issue like Greenland produces hysteria, moral panic, and performative resolve. A genuine catastrophe like Ukraine produces caution, delay, and procedural seriousness. The smaller the reality, the louder the outrage. The greater the reality, the more restrained the response.

Symbolic gestures are easy. They require no real thinking, no tradeoffs, no risk. You can act instantly precisely because nothing meaningful is being decided. That is what we have a surplus of—not concern or intelligence, but action without thought.

That inversion tells you everything.

Distrust Is Not Ignorance

I am not a defender of Donald Trump, and I don’t like his behavior. But neither he nor roughly half of America is mentally conditioned to swallow elite narratives at face value. That half is routinely labeled “uneducated,” which is a convenient substitute for engagement.

Their skepticism is often clumsy and poorly expressed—but it is not irrational. Many are not rejecting facts; they are rejecting narratives that feel selectively applied, incoherent, and detached from reality. The real failure is not distrust of elites. It is that elites have made distrust reasonable.

I’ve written more than a hundred pieces since June of 2025 pointing to the same pattern: outside the hard sciences, public reasoning has become increasingly untethered from reality. Where evidence and feedback impose discipline, thinking improves. Where ideology, status, and narrative dominate, thinking decays.

Education Without Self-Questioning

If I were a student at Harvard submitting these essays, I would likely fail—not because the arguments lack coherence, but because they don’t align with rigid, approved frameworks. They question premises instead of operating within them.

This pattern is now global.

The Middle East. South America—not just Venezuela, but broadly. Different histories, different cultures, same dysfunction.

The educated classes, the ones supposedly trained to think clearly, are locked into rigid frameworks that no longer track reality. They debate endlessly, refine language, protect norms, and enforce consensus—while conditions on the ground deteriorate. Their thinking is sophisticated but sterile, internally consistent but detached from common sense.

Meanwhile, less “sophisticated” populations act. Their actions often look wrong, crude, or dangerous to elites. Their proposed solutions are clumsy. Their language is imprecise. But dismissing them outright misses the point. Action, even imperfect action, is often a response to paralysis masquerading as intelligence.

What elites interpret as ignorance is frequently the opposition’s frustration with systems that ostensibly explain everything yet fix nothing.

A Crisis of Seriousness

The backlash against universities comes from this exact perception. People see institutions that claim to teach critical thinking enforcing rigid frameworks increasingly untethered from common sense. They see confidence without correction, consensus without accountability.

That backlash is not confined to universities or politics. The masses are pushing back more broadly. What gets dismissed as “extremism” is often something simpler: a refusal to ignore what people can plainly see. There is a widening gap between official narratives and lived experience. It’s the same disconnect that occurs when governments announce that the economy is strong while people can’t pay their bills. At some point, rhetoric stops competing with reality—and reality wins.

Elites dismiss this backlash as ignorance or anti-intellectualism. That dismissal is convenient. It avoids confronting the possibility that the problem is not education itself, but a professional and credentialed class that has lost the ability—or willingness—to question its own assumptions.

That gap—between rigid, educated inaction and unsophisticated, imperfect action—is now global. And pretending it’s a moral failing rather than a thinking failure guarantees it will widen.

We are not living through a crisis of intelligence. We are living through a crisis of seriousness. And until we relearn how to distinguish symbolism from substance, the insanity will continue—no matter how advanced our technology becomes elsewhere.

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