But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern.  The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people's litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.

A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don't even realize it.  They're opposed to racism even as they act like racists.  They're opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists.  The world's gone weird.

First, it is a mistake to presume to know anyone's internal emotional landscape based on what external emotional signals they seem to be sending.  Second, you can apologize for something you have done, but only a fool apologizes for things that other people have done, for he has no authority to do that.

Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium - Y2K - when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed.

I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion.  So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it.

Why?  Why do the authorities allow the criminal gangs that terrorize neighborhoods and entire cities to thrive as they do?  Politicians, attorneys general, district attorneys, and the FBI have the power to destroy the gangs and prevent most of the crimes they commit, the murdering and raping and human trafficking and the endless flood of drugs across the border, the hateful murdering murdering murdering of faithful husbands and little girls in their Sunday dresses.  Yet the people with the power to stop men like Hamal and Lupo and Parker often facilitate their activities.  Maybe the majority of politicians and their appointees are corrupt, but not all.  Are those uncorrupted individuals so often ineffective because they are cowards or lazy or stupid?  Does loyalty to party, class, club, or ideology matter to them more than doing what is right?  Why?  Why can't such people see that the crime and anarchy they permit to flourish in poor and middle-class neighborhoods will eventually metastasize into the enclaves of the elite where they live their privileged lives?  Why do they have contempt for those not in their circle?  Why can't they see that being of the people rather than ruling over them is the only way that they themselves will survive?

Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance.

When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity.  Whole societies do go mad.  History is filled with chilling examples.