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It is in the interest of healthy adults to remain sane, even when the powerful matrix of society is going crazy around them. I don’t think you can overstate the capacity of societies to go crazy. We still marvel at the murderous cruelty of Germany and Russia in the mid-20^th century, the sickening slide into industrial barbarism, and the technical proficiency they achieved in pursuit of their lunatic ends. And what provoked those terrible journeys into collective madness? Isn’t it part of the horror that no explanation seems to suffice. They were both losers in the First World War. Boo hoo. Many societies sober up when they lose a war. Both opted for organized mass murder instead. Joseph Stalin summed up Russia’s collective psyche in that period when he said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The regime that promoted that particular view of the human condition lasted seventy years and then dissipated like a mere bad dream, an extremely fortunate outcome for Russia, and not so easy to account for, either.

And so what of us in this new century, faced with the gravely serious problems of resource scarcity, ecocide, climate uncertainty, demographic stress, cultural breakdown, and financial bedlam? How do we…