We have gone beyond the Age of Anxiety and have entered the Age of Schizophrenia, the darkest of ages. Our personalities are no longer merely disturbed. They are split, from top to bottom, among the leaders and among the people. The most dangerous lunatics in society are those who are not committable, those who would pass any psychiatric tests for insanity, but who nevertheless suffer from grandiosity, delusions of persecution, and enter public life to expose some plot that is threatening all of us. If an individual behaved in their manner, he would promptly be placed in a mental institution.
Private lunacy gets a padded cell.
Public lunacy all too often wins a throne seat. The world, as Balzac grimly predicted, is an insane asylum run by the inmates. He is a short, chunky, near-bald man, with a shrewd eye, an aggressive jaw, and a ready joke for all occasions. His beliefs are firm and explicit, in every realm, from the economic to the psychological to the aesthetic. He is a man who knows his own mind, and expresses himself freely and pungently.