Mass Insanity

I just saw a great quote on Facebook. It was not the kind of great quote that you see and say “That’s it, that’s exactly right” although I like seeing those from time to time, too. This was more of a “Whoa, that’s something to think about that I’ve never thought about before” kind of quote. It was from psychologist Erich Fromm and unfortunately I am not able to either copy or link to the quote, but it was something like this: we tend to measure the insanity in our society by the number of insane individuals, but maybe we should consider that our society as a whole is insane.
Baboom! On the one hand, we are all individuals and some of us are a bit nuttier than others, and others are even nuttier than that, but on the other hand we are all a part and a product of the society, the human environment, in which we were raised, so we can’t help being a little bit nuts, just by being part of that great, crazy collective.
Is it insane that people all own cars and drive everywhere, because we know for an absolute fact that that is destroying the air we breathe, and yet we keep on doing it. It is insane that we all know the media is lying to us non-stop, and yet we still look to them for information. It is insane that vacant buildings and homeless people both exist in the same reality, because a bit of simple mixing and matching would solve that problem. It is insane that we have continuous wars for no other reason than that the arms manufacturers want to make money.
Although it’s a bit frightening, it’s also pleasant to consider that maybe we, as a species, as a society, are insane. Because that lets us, individually, off the hook.