The Arc Bends Toward Madness or Whatever is Trending

Dispatches from a Civilisation That Mistook the Asylum for a Utopia

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ACT I - The Church of Word Salad

Part the curtains, if you would, on our new civic theatre: a place where the ushers carry bullhorns, the critics fear adjectives, and the scenery is repainted between acts to match the volume of the applause. The program notes are written by committee and proofed by a therapist; the lead is whichever chorus member screams longest; the hero’s journey is outsourced to TikTok—and the villain, as ever, is objective reality, which insists on existing without a PR department.

We begin with the catechism of the style desk. If the New York Times can split the atom of womanhood into “women” and “non-trans women,” then we may congratulate ourselves on detonating one of the world’s last load-bearing beams. Not content with two millennia of philosophy and a few billion years of biology, we’ve recruited a copy editor to conquer ontology¹. This is the era of the neologism—new words with all the charm of a tax form and all the precision of a drunk darts player.

Neologisms² are the linguistic equivalent of artificial sweeteners: they mimic the form of nourishment while leaving you malnourished, and after enough of them, you can’t remember what sugar ever tasted like.

They are word-soup life rafts for people drowning in reality, where the point is not to describe the truth but to redact it in soft syllables.

Marvel as a sentence—calibrated for the sensitivities of a focus group—reclassifies half the species as a footnote to a neologism. Why stop? If reality is a vibe to be curated, let us also abolish the tyrannies of time, age, and height.

Why should the clock colonise our mornings? I identify as early, even when I’m late. Why should I be trapped in the barbaric numeral of fifty when my spirit animal is a dissolute twenty-three? Why should a short man reach for the top shelf when he can simply self-describe as “altitudinally fluid” and demand a ladder trigger warning?

In this brave new etiquette, volume is virtue. Suppose you shout down the room—preferably with an acronym—the argument surrenders from exhaustion. The decibel is the new syllogism³. Power belongs to those who can project a grievance into the microphone without noticing that the microphone is attached to the mains electricity of the very civilisation they denounce. “I scream, therefore I am” is the graffiti of our metaphysics, Descartes rewritten by a kettle.

And as for sadness—do stop. Melancholy is no longer the tax levied by existence; it’s a pathological software bug. To feel bleak on a rainy Tuesday is not to be human; it is to suffer from an acronym devised by the Word Scrambler on TikTok—a sort of Las Vegas slot machine for diagnoses. Pull the lever and out comes a confetti of letters—PMSDADHDNOS—with a pastel infographic promising salvation in twelve self-affirmations and an affiliate link. The ancients had stoicism; the Victorians had a stiff upper lip; we have nap time.

The old religions offered you a sky daddy who would eventually forgive your sins; the new ones offer a sky daddy who already has, because you were just “misregulated.” You are not tragic; you are trending.

The TikTok Pathologizer™

Enter the TikTok Pathologizer, a crowdsourced diagnostic oracle that assigns a disorder name to any negative feeling.

Sample Outputs:

1. MPEAS – Micro-Purpose Existential Alignment Syndrome
   
   Cause: Realising the coffee shop is out of your favourite syrup.
   Cure: Three hours of “lo-fi beats to rewire your serotonin” and an oat-milk enema.
   

2. ACDT – Acute Chronological Discomfort Trauma
   
   Cause: Being reminded of your actual age.
   Cure: Self-identifying as “pre-21” until the next equinox.
   

3. SHAD – Seasonal Honesty Avoidance Disorder
   
   Cause: Someone telling you the truth.
   Cure: Block them. Write a Medium essay about boundaries.
   

4. NRMS – Negative Review Meltdown Syndrome
   
   Cause: A stranger didn’t like your Etsy crochet owl.
   Cure: Digital detox except for the three hours a day you spend rage-commenting on their page.
   

5. FGMC – Feeling Gross in Mirror Crisis
   
   Cause: Looking in a mirror and not seeing a Photoshopped version of yourself.
   Cure: 30-day “mirror fasting” plus daily affirmations whispered into a ring light.
   

   

   
   

Death, Violence, Censorship, and Beauty—Revised for the Idiot Age

If “woman” is now a negotiation, time a suggestion, age a pronoun, and height an emotion—what standards remain? Arithmetic? That too can be humbled; two plus two equals “your tone is violent.”

Geography? Colonial. Grammar? Elitist. A ladder? Ableist. At this point, reality is a houseguest we keep upstairs because we’re embarrassed to introduce it to our friends.

So let’s go further. Let’s reframe death as the final act in the theatre of self-care: “transcendence through cessation.” The funeral industry can rebrand as “Life Completion Services,” with cremation marketed as “thermal recycling.” Murder? A form of “urgent liberation.” Suicide bombings? “Community fireworks with participatory casualties.”

Violence as kindness? Your mugger isn’t stealing your wallet—he’s freeing you from the burden of materialism. The arsonist isn’t torching your shop—he’s conducting an “urban warmth intervention.” Punching a stranger in the face? That’s a “jawline realignment project.” The domestic abuser is merely providing “emotional percussion.”

Censorship? Freedom. To remove your words is to liberate you from the tyranny of having to stand by them. Hate? Love in its most unfiltered, adrenalised form. The dictator’s purges are a form of “passionate restructuring.”

As for beauty—why should it be shackled to sunsets and symmetry? Let’s hang oil paintings of deposits of shit in a toilet, with gilded frames. Let’s exhibit a run-over raccoon crawling with maggots at the Venice Biennale. TikTok influencers can pose in front of it, pouting in slow motion, with captions reading: #RotCore #DecompButMakeItFashion.

Let’s make it hip to curse passers-by on the street. Call it “public honesty therapy.” A grandmother carrying groceries gets told to “learn to deadlift, hag” on a livestream.

And now, as if to prove that aesthetics themselves are on trial, we have American Eagle choosing Sydney Sweeney as its new face.

She is beautiful—classically, unapologetically, and, yes, insanely hot, which to most sane people is the point. Yet there’s a curious strain of public commentary that treats this as some sort of moral failing, as if the proper marketing choice would have been to find someone aggressively “relatable” with the body proportions of a small cargo vessel, just to keep us all grounded.

It’s as though beauty and sexuality—which are, let’s not pretend otherwise, inherently attractive—have become suspect qualities, guilty until proven politically correct.

The Victimisation Loyalty Card—Rewards You Can Bank On

And now we come to the justice system’s latest magic trick: replacing the scale with a sympathy ledger. The point of judicial justice, in the Age of Unreality, is no longer to hold people accountable but to make excuses for them—grand, embroidered excuses with gold trim and an external locus of control so valuable it could be traded on the stock exchange.

Judges now weigh “immigration status” and “ethnicity” in sentencing, as though a criminal record were a scrapbook of unfortunate life events.

If you pile on the right stack of biographical misfortunes—trans, in a wheelchair, tough childhood, recent immigrant—you might accrue enough points to be granted near-criminal immunity.

It’s time we formalise this. Every citizen should carry a Victimisation Loyalty Card, stamped like a Starbucks rewards program. Commit a crime, swipe your card, and the judge plugs your details into the Sentencing Softener™. Accumulate enough points and—congratulations!—you go free, perhaps with a coupon for 15% off your next felony. Perhaps there could be bonuses, such as getting one free assault on the third Tuesday of every month.

Why stop at court? Police could carry portable scanners for roadside sentencing adjustments. Speeding 40 miles per hour over the limit? The officer dismisses it when your card scores high enough on the victimhood index. Robbery? The shopkeeper is reminded of your tragic background and offered counselling for their materialism.

This is the distilled moral lesson of our age: when you do evil, blame your mother. And your teacher. And the weather. And society. And remember to keep your Victimisation Loyalty Card handy at all times—you never know when it might turn a custodial sentence into a congratulatory hug from the bench.

Act II: The Cult of Compassionite Nihilism

Now to the second sermon, in which the devout have decided that the truest display of compassion is to canonise nihilism itself.

In the more enlightened boroughs of the West, Hamas—an organisation whose charter reads like a suicide note stapled to a blood libel—has been elevated to the status of rebel chic.

The sales pitch is that it’s about maps; the reality is that it’s about people—Jews, specifically—though the moral accountants discreetly scribble the asterisk in invisible ink. A faction committed not to borders but to bodies has been recast as the underdog in a morality play.

And so we perform the ancient sport of making the most persecuted, most inventive, most Nobel Prize-laden people on Earth into demons, while the grotesque, the sadistic, the coffin-stranglers of ten-month-old babies are beatified as holy warriors.

(Oh, forgive me—we’ve done this before. Many thanks to my Jewish friends for pioneering the role of indispensable scapegoat.)

Yes, the official line is that the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria merely want their “ancestral land.” Or perhaps the land their forebears acquired in the 1920s, then vacated in ’48 on the understanding that they’d return just as soon as the Jews had been exterminated. One can see the appeal of that real estate deal.

And spare me the fiction that Arab hostility to Jews began with the Balfour Declaration. Long before 1948, antisemitism in the Arab world was not a sudden infection but a thick geological layer laid down by law, religion, and later fertilised by imported toxins.

Under the Ottomans, Jews lived as “protected” dhimmīs: permitted existence at a legal crawl, taxed for the privilege, and regularly reminded of their inferiority. In 1840, the Damascus Affair imported the European blood libel into Arab soil, proving that the local prejudice was a ready host for foreign pathogens.

With the British Mandate came pogroms—Jerusalem (1920), Jaffa (1921), Hebron and Safed (1929)—not spontaneous “outbursts,” but rehearsed violence, steeped in nationalist fury and religious venom.

By the 1930s, Berlin was broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Arabic, fusing Hitler’s racialist delusions with Islamic idiom, a synthesis embodied by the Mufti of Jerusalem himself. In Baghdad, the Farhud of 1941 showed just how quickly the fuse could reach the powder. The sequence was clear: protection salted with contempt, prejudice hardened into doctrine, “resistance” inaugurated with Jewish corpses.

If Israel were populated by Norwegians—non-Jewish Norwegians—the so-called solidarity brigades would drop the cause overnight. But our moral compass is smashed, and we’ve decided to call the shards a kaleidoscope.

Final Benediction in the Church of Delusion

We might as well push it to the grim horizon: “ethical arson” to cool the planet; “consensual embezzlement” to decolonise ledgers; “dietary cannibalism” to reduce food miles and honour ancestral protein; “heritage looting” as reparations with better lighting; “compassionate assassination” for leaders who harm your mental health. If a hashtag can trick your compass, it’s not a compass; it’s a weathervane with trauma credentials.

And yet, beneath the influencer cosplay, the stubborn matter of consequences remains.

A society that treats reality as a debatable opinion will eventually be mugged by it. A culture that confuses ferocity with principle will raise an elite of loud cowards.

The fetish for “resistance” that cannot distinguish between a dissident and a death-worshiper is the political version of snorting Ajax because the label is printed in a cool font. You can praise the purity of the flame all you like; it still burns the library.

We were told to be compassionate, and somehow we decided to be credulous. We were told to be tolerant, and somehow we decided to be stupid.

If you must have a sky daddy—choose one that makes you braver, not louder.

And while you’re at it, let’s finish the work: if drunkenness hasn’t yet been officially rebranded as sobriety, let’s fix that clerical oversight immediately.

Sometimes, it already feels like it has. After all, a society this intoxicated on its virtue can hardly tell the difference between a barstool confession and a parliamentary speech. Cheers to that—bottoms up in the Age of Unreality.

And perhaps—just perhaps—Martin Luther King Jr., or whoever first coined the bromide about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, was wrong. Arcs don’t bend toward justice automatically; they bend toward whatever lunacy the mob currently applauds.

They bend toward madness cloaked as progress; they bend toward the Areopagus of absurdity, where the loudest voice wins and hashtags outvote history. They bend toward moral fashion instead of moral clarity, where the high street of slogans replaces the hard road of principle. And worst of all, they bend toward the moment when sanity bows to the crowd and consensus itself becomes a carnival of delusion.

So no, the arc does not bend toward justice. It bends toward whatever is trending in the agora of the absurd. Today, that is madness. Tomorrow, it may be something worse.

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1. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being, existence, and reality—basically, the study of what exists and what kinds of things exist.

2. A neologism is a newly coined word, expression, or phrase—or an existing word used in a new way.

3. A syllogism is a form of logical reasoning where you conclude from two connected premises. It’s the classic “If A, and if B, then C” structure.