In his essay, Derangements, Venkatesh Rao offers up the perspective that we have abandoned a world of logical reason in favor of a world of emotional “vibes,” which leads to the pervasive set of derangements that seem to plague our society.

Here’s his initial list.

The derangement actually stems from when a “vibe” doesn’t work.

A “vibe is meant to soothe, not explain,” and when it fails to do its job, the result is “derangement” and when someone is in a state of “derangement,” there’s no sense arguing or trying to persuade them that they are way off the path.

The characteristic symptom of a derangement syndrome is that emotional responses to it are not stable. You go from manic exhilaration at temporarily “owning” an adversary to utter despair at a turn for the worse.

And between those two extremes, you engage in frenzied bursts of effort to try and actually figure things out. That’s how you get things like that early exhibition of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the infamous “time for some game theory thread” by a Democrat strategist.

In short, when we’re in a state of ‘derangement,’ there’s nothing that can get us out of it and because it’s so easy to immerse ourselves in pools of people who share our state of derangement, it becomes a self-reinforcing state, getting progressively worse.

Which, he argues, is actually a good thing. When people become increasingly deranged about a topic, the way, say, CNN is about Trump or Fox is about AOC, they will aggressively seek confirmation bias of even the most minute example to substantiate their points.

This approach, however, eventually results in a type of cognitive dissonance, which the host of the derangement may not be able to identify because s/he is so stricken with the syndrome, but which eventually, Rao believes, force an ultimate reckoning of dealing with “reality.”

The thing I took away from it is that it’s really easy to identify when someone else is “deranged,” less so when you are the person who is “deranged” (BTW…deranged means that things are out of order, as in not arranged, which can lead to an emotional unhinging for people who are reason seekers).

And while I’m not as optimistic as Rao is that this moment in time will lead to a return of reason, what I do appreciate is that, like any great essay, it forces me to think about how I think and ask myself if I’m being deranged (crypto derangement syndrome?) about a given topic.

Plus, I shudder, particularly following my study of quantum physics, to think of any one thing as “reality,” since “reality” is an ever-changing thing based upon the perception of the observer.

But the point is this…we’re all susceptible to “vibes” which are like emotional sugar-highs designed to make us feel temporarily better about a situation.

Real strength of character, as the book Integrity (more on that later), reminds us is about the courage to confront the demands of reality, or as Jim Collins put it many years ago in “Good to Great,” the ‘brutal facts,’ and then go from there.

Identifying self-derangement, particularly in an era of omnipresent memes and vibes on multiple platforms may ultimately prove to be a Darwinian competitive advantage.

Or it may be a disadvantage.

If that’s the case, then society is deranged.