Actually, you can see this disconnect from reality at work almost any day of the week: In your workplace, in the educational system, in private life–the adoption of absurd strategies or the spontaneous irruption of destructive and self-destructive behaviors–seemingly for no reason at all, with no basis at all.

It’s less disturbing that we see such strategies pursued in Iraq than that we see these strategies pursued everywhere.

We see that the the economic system is foundering, or educational system is failing to educate, or that the society at large is more and more cumbered with the impoverished and the lawless. In response to this, some project is initiated, whose basic premise is that the use of coercive power (and large expenditures) will bring intractable realities to heel.

The whole society is encased in monolithic structures that don’t work and which have a structural disconnect from reality. These structures are headed and controlled by people who are heavily invested in this disconnect–because these structures confer power and prestige upon them–people with a deep implicit belief that these vast structures, mere empty fabrications of diseased minds, may be maintained by force of will and money. (I mean all of the social, economic, and political structures of the whole society.)

To be brief, these structures are headed and controlled by people who are insane, more or less by definition, since this what is implied by absolute belief in a delusion.

The continual emergence of insane behaviors and insane strategies is precisely what you would expect. The delusional structures collide with reality, and the collision demands some further elaboration of the delusion, some further application of coercive power to enforce the delusion.

We seem to have reached the point where insanity requires neither apology nor explanation, and is unresponsive to reason and objective reality, and the disbelief in the latest deluded project is merely heresy–since there can no longer be even a pretext that it is supported by fact or reason.