The Madness of America: How Communication Reproduces Collective Irrationality

Something peculiar has happened to America, although the peculiarities have been accumulating for generations. The country has become a conspicuous expression of something occurring throughout a global communication system in which meaning itself is being renegotiated. What we call madness is not foreign to ordinary human experience. We recognise confusion, obsession, illusion and irrational conviction because we possess the capacities from which they emerge. Everybody has their little arrangements with reality, some more accommodating than others.

The distinction becomes consequential when these familiar tendencies synchronise across populations, institutions and communication channels, acquiring a coherence that no individual possesses or controls. What appears to be collective madness is not simply an accumulation of unreasonable people. It is an organisation of relationships through which unreasonable behaviour becomes increasingly reasonable to those participating in its reproduction. The pathology emerges when uncertainty becomes organised into patterns that preserve themselves by reproducing the conditions of their own necessity.

Communication does considerably more than distribute competing descriptions of reality. Its recurrence, timing, volatility and amplification shape which descriptions acquire meaning, authority and the appearance of truth. A belief is repeated, recognised, rewarded and returned to its believers as confirmation of the world they already inhabit. The description becomes a condition of experience, and experience subsequently confirms the description. Religious, political and commercial institutions have long performed versions of this manoeuvre, but contemporary platforms have given the process a particular economic architecture.

Advertising revenue, behavioural tracking, recommendation algorithms and competition for attention are not abstract properties of communication. They are commercial arrangements designed and maintained through identifiable decisions. A 2024 Federal Trade Commission investigation documented extensive personal-data collection and monetisation among major platforms, while Pew Research Center found that 21 per cent of American adults regularly obtained news from social media influencers (FTC, 2024; Pew Research Center, 2024). These findings do not establish that every platform rewards outrage, but they reveal how commercial incentives and political communication have become materially interconnected.

Global communication allows identities and convictions to synchronise without requiring agreement or mutual comprehension. Opposing political positions become mutually sustaining, their antagonism reproducing the distinctions through which each recognises itself. Meaning is not simply transmitted between independently constituted minds. It emerges and persists through relationships that continually regenerate both the meaning and the people for whom it means something.

Insecurity is central to this organisation, although it is not simply a psychological weakness or cultural habit. Every persistent organisation depends upon conditions it cannot completely determine, boundaries it cannot perfectly maintain, and relationships whose future behaviour remains unresolved. Its continuity is never guaranteed. What appears in human experience as insecurity is one expression of this more general incompleteness. Human beings experience these dependencies through fear, desire, uncertainty and the need for recognition; institutions through threats to legitimacy, resources and authority; communication systems through competition for attention and participation.

Attempts to eliminate uncertainty can amplify the dependencies that generate it. Certainty becomes compensatory, rigidity becomes mistaken for stability, and exclusion becomes a means of defending boundaries that were never secure to begin with. Language participates in producing the distinctions and identities through which experience becomes intelligible. Social media makes this conspicuous at planetary scale, where insecurity becomes a resource for engagement, antagonism sustains participation, and repetition acquires the authority of familiarity.

Yet these tendencies are neither inevitable nor equally distributed. The person seeking recognition, the corporation selling attention and the government exercising coercive authority occupy different positions within the same relationships. Their capacities to influence outcomes differ enormously. Complexity distributes causation; it does not distribute power equally.

Foucault’s examination of madness reveals how distinctions between reason and unreason emerge within historically organised relationships of knowledge, authority and exclusion (Foucault, 1965). His account of the panopticon extends the problem: people organise their behaviour around the possibility of observation, reproducing discipline without requiring a continuously visible supervisor (Foucault, 1977). Contemporary communication introduces a peculiar variation. People observe, classify, reward and discipline one another while submitting themselves to the same machinery.

Girard’s account of mimetic desire and rivalry illuminates how imitation generates competition, antagonism and the production of enemies (Girard, 1977, 1987). The enemy supplies a boundary, the boundary supplies recognition, and recognition reproduces the identity that requires the enemy. These relationships have material histories. Economic insecurity, changing employment conditions, declining trust in institutions and political struggles over belonging provide different circumstances in which identities become organised around perceived threats. The circumstances are not interchangeable, and neither are the political choices made within them.

The American presidential election of 2024 also demonstrated the growing visibility of social media news influencers, whose audiences and political orientations were documented by Pew Research Center (2024). The significance lies not in attributing a national outcome to one medium, but in recognising how historical grievances, commercial infrastructures and communicative recurrence become entangled. What is defended as an enduring identity is continually reconstructed through relationships experienced as threatening it. The result is a peculiar stability maintained through permanent disturbance.

These dynamics also operate within institutions ostensibly dedicated to understanding them. Universities, governments, corporations and media organisations depend upon funding, legitimacy, reputation and the reproduction of their authority. Bias is not merely something introduced by prejudiced individuals into otherwise neutral systems. Every act of distinction privileges some differences over others; every organisation selects possibilities while excluding alternatives. Such selectivity is unavoidable in systems that cannot process every relationship simultaneously. The ethical problem emerges when these selections become insulated from correction, particularly when institutions mistake their established categories for the boundaries of reality itself.

Institutions that reward certainty over correction reproduce ignorance; systems that reward attention independently of understanding reproduce volatility. Yet reproduction is not destiny. The same incompleteness that makes organisations vulnerable also makes their reorganisation possible. Changing the rewards for participation, limiting the commercial exploitation of insecurity, making algorithmic selection accountable, protecting independent inquiry and strengthening institutions capable of responding to criticism alter the relationships through which behaviour persists. These are not interventions from outside the system. They are changes to its conditions of reproduction.

Their effectiveness must be evaluated through observable consequences, including whether disagreement becomes more informative, whether institutions correct demonstrable errors, and whether those affected acquire meaningful influence over decisions. Understanding how things fit together is not secondary to understanding what those things are. Their identities and capacities emerge through their relationships, and changing those relationships changes what becomes possible. No grand conspiracy is required. The incentives are quite capable of attending meetings without one.

America’s madness is not an isolated national pathology. It is an unusually conspicuous expression of processes operating throughout global civilisation. Those exercising disproportionate power bear disproportionate responsibility, but condemning them does not explain why these arrangements persist. Opposition itself becomes part of their reproduction when antagonism sustains the identities, institutions and commercial interests organised around it.

The problem extends beyond politics. Global communication increasingly determines what attracts attention, acquires authority and becomes accepted as reality. Insecurity generates engagement, engagement rewards repetition, and repetition lends familiarity the appearance of truth. The machinery reproduces the conditions upon which it depends, even when those conditions progressively undermine the people participating in it.

Nor is the madness confined to conspicuous individuals with extravagant appetites. Wealth, status and authority depend upon collective recognition. Admiration, resentment, aspiration and opposition all help sustain the arrangements through which power acquires significance. We are not equally responsible, nor equally capable of changing them, but none of us exists outside the relationships through which they persist.

The possibility of correction lies in changing those relationships: what receives attention, what institutions reward, how authority is established and how errors are recognised. A civilisation need not abandon reason to become collectively irrational. It need only organise its institutions so that preserving their authority becomes more important than correcting their mistakes. At that point, madness no longer appears as a failure of the system. It becomes one of the ways the system maintains itself.

References

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (2024) A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services. Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission.

Foucault, M. (1965) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.

Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred. Translated by P. Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girard, R. (1987) Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Translated by S. Bann and M. Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Pew Research Center (2024) America’s News Influencers: The Creators and Consumers in the World of News and Information on Social Media. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.