The madness of America reveals how communication synchronises insecurity, reproduces antagonism and sustains institutions whose survival increasingly depends upon the disturbances they generate.
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 global civilisation. What we call madness is not foreign to ordinary human experience. Confusion, obsession, illusion and irrational conviction emerge from capacities we all possess. Everybody has their little arrangements with reality, some more accommodating than others. The distinction becomes consequential when these tendencies synchronise across populations, institutions and communication channels, acquiring a coherence that no individual possesses or controls.
Collective irrationality is not simply an accumulation of unreasonable people. It emerges when uncertainty becomes organised into relationships that preserve themselves by reproducing the conditions of their own necessity. Insecurity generates demands for certainty; certainty produces distinctions between belonging and exclusion; those distinctions organise antagonism; and antagonism renews the insecurity from which the arrangement began. The resulting organisation becomes increasingly coherent while its relationship with the world becomes progressively less reliable. Its participants experience this coherence as confirmation. Its institutions experience it as stability.
Communication does considerably more than distribute competing descriptions of reality. Its recurrence, timing, frequency and amplification determine which descriptions acquire meaning, authority and the appearance of truth. A belief is repeated, recognised, rewarded and returned to its believers as confirmation. The description changes behaviour, behaviour changes circumstances, and those circumstances subsequently appear to confirm the original description. Meaning becomes causally consequential through its own reproduction. Accuracy is no longer necessarily the property being selected. Familiarity, emotional intensity and social recognition become sufficient substitutes.
Religious, political and commercial institutions have long organised meaning through repetition and authority. Contemporary communication platforms have introduced an economic architecture capable of coordinating these processes across enormous populations. Advertising, behavioural surveillance, recommendation algorithms and competition for attention are material arrangements sustained through identifiable decisions. A 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 establish important features of the infrastructure, not a universal law of platform behaviour. The wider consequence arises from the relationships between commercial incentives, political participation and the reproduction of belief.
Insecurity is central, but it is not simply a psychological weakness. Every persistent organisation depends upon circumstances it cannot completely determine, relationships it cannot entirely control and future conditions it cannot guarantee. Its continuity is unresolved. 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 through increasingly rigid identities and absolute convictions intensify the dependencies they are intended to resolve. The machinery becomes increasingly dependent upon the insecurity it promises to overcome.
Opposing political positions become mutually sustaining. Their antagonism reproduces the distinctions through which each recognises itself, while disagreement becomes a resource for attention, belonging and institutional authority. The enemy supplies a boundary, the boundary supplies identity, and identity supplies the justification for continued conflict. Girard’s examination of mimetic rivalry illuminates this reciprocal organisation of desire and antagonism (Girard, 1977, 1987). Contemporary communication extends the process beyond immediate communities, allowing enormous populations to become synchronised through common rhythms of accusation, outrage and reassurance without requiring mutual understanding.
Foucault’s examination of madness established the historical relationship between distinctions of reason and unreason, knowledge, authority and exclusion (Foucault, 1965). His subsequent analysis of disciplinary power demonstrated how people regulate their own behaviour through organised possibilities of observation (Foucault, 1977). Contemporary communication introduces a further development. People observe, classify, reward and discipline one another while submitting themselves to the same machinery. Participation becomes both the instrument and the object of regulation. Surveillance no longer requires a conspicuous supervisor when populations willingly reproduce the distinctions through which they are governed.
America provides a particularly visible expression of these processes because its political institutions, commercial communication industries, cultural influence and extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power are deeply interconnected. The 2024 presidential election illustrated the prominence of social media news influencers within political communication, although no single medium explains an electoral outcome (Pew Research Center, 2024). Economic insecurity, historical grievances, struggles over belonging and the erosion of institutional trust provide material circumstances in which these relationships develop. The consequences are not evenly distributed. A frightened individual, a corporation selling attention and a government exercising coercive authority occupy different positions within the same organisation. Complexity distributes causation; it does not distribute power or responsibility equally.
The problem extends beyond electoral politics. Universities, governments, corporations and media organisations reproduce themselves through established arrangements of funding, legitimacy, professional recognition and authority. Every organisation must select some distinctions while excluding others because no system can process every relationship simultaneously. The difficulty emerges when those selections become insulated from correction. Institutions begin defending their established descriptions rather than examining the circumstances those descriptions were intended to explain. Disagreement becomes disloyalty, uncertainty becomes incompetence, and correction becomes a threat to institutional continuity. The organisation remains coherent by becoming progressively less responsive to reality.
This reveals a deeper problem in the relationship between intelligence and civilisation. Intelligence does not guarantee that the systems organising it will behave intelligently. A society can accumulate extraordinary technical capacities, increasingly sophisticated models and unprecedented access to information while diminishing its ability to respond coherently to its own consequences. The problem is not insufficient information alone. It is the organisation of communication through which information becomes meaningful, credible and actionable. When recognition is rewarded more reliably than correction, collective intelligence becomes subordinate to collective reproduction.
The consequences extend well beyond America. Climate disruption, geopolitical instability, technological dependency, resource competition and the proliferation of autonomous systems demand forms of coordination that antagonistic communication increasingly undermines. Global interdependence is growing while the identities through which populations organise their responses become more defensive and exclusive. The same communication infrastructures that make planetary coordination possible also reproduce the rivalries that obstruct it. Civilisation is becoming more tightly connected without necessarily becoming better organised to survive its own connectivity.
This is where the future becomes particularly consequential. Artificial intelligence will accelerate the production, selection and circulation of meaning, including the manufacture of convincing descriptions whose relationship with reality is uncertain. Automated communication increasingly participates in the conditions under which subsequent communication becomes credible. Synthetic agreement, manufactured controversy and personalised persuasion introduce additional recursive processes into systems already struggling to distinguish recognition from understanding. The danger is not simply that machines produce falsehoods. It is that the distinction between information and its apparent social confirmation becomes progressively harder to maintain. Greater computational sophistication offers no automatic protection against collective irrationality.
None of this requires a grand conspiracy. The incentives are quite capable of attending meetings without one. Nor does the analysis imply that these arrangements are inevitable. Persistent systems remain dependent upon changing circumstances, and those dependencies provide the conditions of their reorganisation. Changing what receives attention, how authority is conferred, what institutions reward and how they respond to demonstrable error changes the probabilities of what happens next. Accountable algorithmic selection, independent inquiry, institutional responsiveness and meaningful participation are not external remedies imposed upon society. They reorganise the relationships through which society reproduces itself.
Their effectiveness must be judged through consequences rather than declarations of virtue. Does disagreement produce greater understanding or merely renewed antagonism? Can institutions correct their errors without treating correction as existential defeat? Do those affected by decisions acquire meaningful influence over them? Does communication improve collective capacity to anticipate consequences, coordinate responses and preserve the conditions upon which continued life depends? These are practical questions concerning the persistence of organised civilisation, not exercises in political optimism.
The madness of America is neither an isolated national pathology nor an aberration from an otherwise reasonable world. It is an unusually visible configuration of processes operating throughout the civilisation observing it. Wealth, authority, status and belonging acquire significance through collective recognition, while admiration, resentment and opposition reproduce the relationships that sustain them. Even spectacular individual self-interest depends upon an audience capable of recognising its significance. The madness is shared, although responsibility for its consequences remains profoundly unequal.
The question ahead is whether civilisation can reorganise its communication before the consequences of its existing arrangements overwhelm its capacity to respond. An organisation can remain internally coherent while destroying the conditions necessary for its own persistence. That is the distinction our institutions increasingly struggle to recognise. The alternative is not a world without disagreement, uncertainty or conflict. These are unavoidable conditions of organised existence. It is a civilisation capable of sustaining disagreement without converting it into permanent antagonism, preserving difference without requiring enemies, and correcting its behaviour without experiencing correction as annihilation.
Humanity does not need to eliminate uncertainty to survive. It needs to stop organising its future around the profitable reproduction of its own insecurity.
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.
