Not too many things in this world are completely certain, but it is certain that self-destruction is an insane act. If we are collectively insane, it can only be because the majority of us are individually insane as well. Maybe not alot, but even just a little bit of insanity adds up in a large population.

It is common for people to feel a little crazy sometimes. So common, in fact, that we are even used to thinking of it as being natural. But what if it's not natural? What if it's pathological? What if it's the most dangerous thing in humanity's history?

Our inner life is divided into thinking and feeling, analysis and emotion, head and heart, and the experience of the two are very different. The head and heart frequently have battles; we get conflicting signals from them, drawing us in different directions. One might even argue that the primary challenge of being human is to surmount and conquer that inner conflict. Unfortunately, few of us ever really conquer it; most settle for just masking and repressing it, remaining secretly divided all our lives, a condition we hide sometimes even from ourselves.

When Freud discovered the existence of the unconscious, a secondary, sub-level of the human psyche, he was dismayed, and throughout the rest of his life he remained convinced that this binary structure was evidence of pathology, and that the common human mind was dysfunctional. Folk wisdom would agree, holding that "everyone is mentally ill to some degree", and that "we only use 10% of our full mental capacity".

"Unconscious phenomena are so little related to the ego that most people do not hesitate to deny their existence outright. Nevertheless, they manifest themselves in an individual's behavior. An attentive observer can detect them without difficulty, while the observed person remains unaware of the fact that he is betraying his most secret thoughts or even things he has never thought consciously. It is, however, a great prejudice to suppose that something we have never thought consciously does not exist in the psyche."
- Carl G. Jung

Most people aren't even aware they have an unconscious; it is no more real to them than the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny. Considering that science discovered the existence of the unconscious about 100 years ago and has been building temples to it ever since, this is pretty amazing evidence of the strength of the division in the human mind. Even after a whole century of confirming research, the average person still goes around in his life totally ignoring, discounting, or overlooking the fact that half of his own mind is AWOL, mistakenly assuming he is the uncompromised master of his own psychological domain. In reality, the average person is still hopelessly divided, half of his own being is utterly foreign to him.

When we fail in the task of reconciling and integrating our two inner selves, our minds tend to splinter and scatter, which can lead to mental states of extreme anguish and stunting, both in the individual and in the collective, in society. When you consider that the ideals of America's Democratic party are perfectly aligned with the nature of the unconscious mind, and the Republican party with the conscious mind, you get some appreciation of how profoundly this inner division affects and shapes our world. Because we are divided as individuals, the world we collectively create is divided as well. We are constantly confronted by this struggle to resolve the relationship between our two halves, and all too often, we choose disassociation instead of integration, both as individuals and also collectively. Instead of trying to get the two elements to work together in some sort of harmonized balance, we frequently identify exclusively with one side and disassociate entirely from the other side. What this does is raise the stakes, changing a healthy differentiation into an unhealthy division. Our two halves then no longer interact very well at all, but instead begin to splinter apart. In many, perhaps most people, the differentiation of conscious and unconscious suffers from this very pathology, progressing from mere differentiation into full flown disassociation. Communication between the two halves fails, throwing the whole system into dysfunction. Instead of being integrated, the components of the system split apart, resulting in fragmentation, repression, and alienation.

Our appetites are betraying us. The most popular beverage in the world carries a label on its side that basically declares it to have no nutritional value whatsoever. Many who have completely conquered the outer world end up getting brought down by their own inner wars; we've seen so many exalted public figures destroyed by sexual indiscretions that it's become a cliche. We seem to do everything we can to avoid what's going on inside us; a century ago half of all women in America were addicted to some sort of narcotic, and today we have more kinds of addictions than there are even names for. We find ourselves using ever greater amounts of ever more powerful drugs and pain killers (and other distractions) to mask the ever-increasing pain and dissatisfaction we endure in life.

Why are we so dissatisfied? Perhaps because we have built a society in which the workings of justice are having less and less to do with right and wrong, and more and more to do with who can afford the best lawyers and politicians. But hey, we accept this in our stride. We live in and accept a society in which known criminals, murderers, thieves, and rapists are set free every day on pointless technicalities, and corrupt politicians are re-elected again and again, all while well-meaning people trying to make a positive difference in the world are being hamstrung, and everyone's children are being mortgaged into the poorhouse.

Our collective insanity knows no limits. Not only have we all apparently agreed to allow 10% of the population to control 90% of the wealth and power, but when given half a chance, many of us opt to give even more of our power and wealth away (by doing things like not voting, playing the lottery, and uncritically accepting everything that governments and mainstream media tell them).

There is simply no question that we are collectively opting for self-destruction. The primary causes of death in our culture are heart disease, cancer, diabetes, drug abuse, AIDS, gang violence, and warfare, all of which are largely preventable ailments. We could easily avoid a great many of these deaths, but instead we as a society seem to do just about everything we can to hasten them. Judging by our actions, an outside observer could only conclude that we all have a death wish .

But we don't want to think about that. Instead, we prefer to focus our attention on worshiping youth and health, and hide all our old and sick people away inside invisible institutions where they won't remind us of any unpleasant inevitabilities.

And just as the average individual member of our species is still divided within himself, still at war with himself inside his own heart, so too our collective, our culture and society, has pretty much always been at war with itself as well. After 6,000 years of so-called civilization, we still haven't quite figured out how to live in peace with one another (something every other species has done). We like to think of ourselves as sophisticated, civilized, and highly advanced, but that's a blatantly false ego trip. Humanity has been around on this planet for over forty thousand years, but the last century has witnessed as much war and bloodshed as anything that could have ever happened before.

One definition of "insanity" is continuing to try the same thing while expecting different results, but each new human generation seems to write yet another attempt at global domination and/or genocide into the history books.

The craziest thing is that we all know these facts already. There is nothing on this list that is not common knowledge. We also know what they mean, how all these facts add up. We can all read the writing on the wall, but we go through our days as if we didn't know, as if everything was ok. It's the elephant in our room; everyone knows it's there, but no one wants to talk about it.

Everything is not ok. We are a very sick species, and we all know it.

We just don't know what to do about it.