Can Madness Save the World? Where R.D. Laing—and Star Trek—Meet

We’ve reached a point where the extinction of life on earth, the end of human civilization, is not only possible but, according to our most sane scientists, might actually be inevitable. What were once just the mad ravings of deluded prophet-psychotics are now sane, accepted facts. The end is nigh.

And worse: the things we think we’re doing that will save the world might just be bringing the end closer. Our current predicament after all resulted from “normal” thinking: sane experts reassuring us that business as usual would bring a bright future. Now they’re reconsidering. Many fear the rational tone of their climate change warnings might just have lulled everyone into complacency, and “green” industry promoters wonder if all the hype about recycling, electric cars, and solar houses just spreads false hope. And how about this one: what if the world is already ending and we just won’t admit it? What if it is already too late?

A lot of us can’t even think about any of this… the overwhelming emotions are just too much. Hopelessness is the new normal. But what kind of “normal” is that, exactly?

Albert Einstein (who was a socialist by the way) said, “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive”. So maybe instead of calm TED talks about “transition to renewables” what we really need is some… panic? A bit of madness?

I remember the nights in my twenties, alone in a San Francisco apartment: spiraling around the facts of the end of the world. I was researching inequality and ecocide, habitat loss, the military industrial complex, forest depletion… I was trying desperately to write about global warming for a socialist magazine, at a time when only a few on the left took ecology seriously. I was staring it all down hard—and it was staring back. Not sleeping, not eating, talking back to voices in my haunted descent, frenzied with fears and messages and connections. My life, my traumas, all the personal history I had never faced, it all led me to a vision I had to share, but couldn’t. I was trapped in that apartment in San Francisco, and my vision crashed down on me, my own personal end of the world.

I was locked up at UC San Francisco Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, and diagnosed psychotic. My desperate questions about saving the world? Symp­toms of a paranoid, maniacal thought disorder.

Looking back, I’m not so sure: Which is more mad, to ask questions about the end of the world, or… to not ask questions about the end of the world? Is it really sane to treat the questions as not even worth asking?

In the years since, my suspicions have grown. Mad visions are true all around us. Surveillance online, phones that are practically implanted microchips, poisoned food, infertility… and I’m just getting started: microplastics in our organ tissue “need further research”, and robots are coming after everyone’s jobs. Not too long ago it was crazy, now here it all is.

So since what is mad is now normal, can madness teach us something about saving the world?

I think Star Trek might help.

When did we last really ask how we could save the world—I mean really ask it, collectively? My guess is the late 1960s. It was a fierce juncture; the end of the world was everywhere on everyone’s mind: our Orwellian masters lost their grip; the nightly news gave us a raw glimpse. We stared in the mirror of our own annihilation.

The US war machine rampaged on TV every night. Military industrial puppet masters (in this author’s humble opinion) murdered Fred Hampton, and maybe even Dr. King, Malcolm, and not one but two Kennedys. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove exposed the US driving the Cold War and pushing for a nuclear first strike to dominate a depopulated aftermath. Spiritual speakers like Krishnamurti sought the sources of violence within our division of Us and Them. And in 1967’s Politics of Experience, R.D. Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist who ruthlessly dismantled psychiatry’s violent lies, diagnosed war and nuclear threat as our collective madness, symptoms, he wrote, of “adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.” As the psychiatric survivor movement surged, more and more people asked what it meant to be called “crazy” in a world so obviously, blatantly crazy.

And in 1967, television’s Star Trek aired its critically acclaimed episode The City on the Edge of Forever.

As with so much of the original Star Trek, it was an explicit commentary on the social upheaval of its day. And it was quite the commentary. Writer Harlan Ellison won both the Hugo and Writers Guild of America awards; he and show creator Gene Roddenberry felt so strongly about the powerful script they defied NBC censors and insisted on keeping the profanity in as Ellison wrote it. And so viewers heard Captain Kirk, for the first time in television history, say “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I think this episode has some clues for us. A synopsis (spoilers ahead):

During a time distortion, Dr. McCoy accidentally injects himself with a dangerous drug. He erupts into a frenzied madness, screaming “Assassins! Murderers! I won’t let you!”, and flees down to the source of the distortion on the planet below. Kirk and Spock form a landing party to follow McCoy, but he jumps through a mysterious Guardian of Forever time travel portal into the past.

Unable to contact the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock realize that McCoy must have somehow changed history. McCoy’s actions in the past affected the future (their present); as a result the Enterprise no longer exists. The landing party is stranded: for them, it’s the end of the world.

Kirk and Spock attempt to prevent whatever McCoy did, to set history right again and restore the Enterprise. They jump through the portal into Earth’s past and arrive in 1932 Chicago a few days before McCoy. Hungry and with no money, they find the 21st Street Mission, a soup kitchen run by Edith Keeler. Keeler gives them food and shelter, and preaches her vision of pacifism and utopian optimism: she believes in humanity’s bright technological future of space exploration. Struck by the uncanny sympathy with his own life as starship captain, Kirk falls in love with her.

Spock’s computer reveals that in their original timeline, Keeler died in a traffic accident. He sees that somehow McCoy is going to prevent her death, and in the new timeline created by McCoy’s actions Keeler lived on and became a pacifist leader. Her influence helped delay US entry into World War 2, and as a result the Nazis won the war. In the future of this alternate timeline, the utopian Federation was never created. And so McCoy changed history and the Enterprise no longer exists.

With this information, Spock pronounces coldly to Kirk that, in order to restore history and save the Enterprise, Edith Keeler must die.

McCoy finally arrives in Chicago. The drug overdose wears off, and he finds his way to the 21st Street Mission, where he meets Edith Keeler and also becomes fond of her optimism. Spock and Kirk run into McCoy and rejoice, but when Edith Keeler crosses the street to join them, she doesn’t see an oncoming truck speeding towards her. Kirk lunges forward to pull her away, but Spock yells to him and he stops. McCoy also tries to protect Keeler, but now Kirk holds McCoy back. The truck hits Edith Keeler, and, with a horrible scream, she dies.

Shocked, McCoy asks Kirk if he knows what he just did. Kirk remains silent; Spock replies “He knows.”

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy jump back through the Guardian of Forever portal to the present and rejoin the landing party. The Enterprise has re-appeared: Kirk says the line, “Let’s get the hell out of here” and the episode ends.

At first, we may think we know the show’s message for us at the end of the world: Do the right thing—even if it means a painful sacrifice. But The City on the Edge of Forever (like all great science-fiction) has turned things so upside down we question this apparent, surface meaning. It’s that final profanity. Like Kirk, we can’t shake the sense that something much more shattering is going on, something much deeper than just a tragic story about letting go of what we love for the sake of a higher duty to survive.

On the surface, The City on the Edge of Forever seems to say that the ends justify the means. An innocent, good person, a pacifist and idealist, must die or the Nazis win. The world is dangerous! They are evil! We must do bad things (like going to war or letting an innocent woman die) to defeat Them. Any action claiming to be ethical, however high minded, must be judged by its outcome, assessed by the inescapable calculus of history.

This theme is a preoccupation in the Star Trek universe; its constant advocate is Spock. In The Wrath of Khan Spock says “Logic clearly dictates: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

So if Spock were asked about climate emergency, global inequality, militarism, ecological collapse… and all the other signs of “civilization apparently driven to its own destruction,” he would calculate the means needed to achieve the end of survival. Logically. What sacrifice must we make? What risk must we take? Is it worth it to build colonies on Mars? Seed the atmosphere with sulfates? Logic will decide: our survival depends on it.

The allegory seems to fit—but this would miss the real meaning of Edith Keeler’s hopefulness, McCoy’s mad frenzy, and Spock’s pronouncement.

Star Trek tells us Mr. Spock’s perspective is needed. But his proper place is not in charge, but second in command, under Kirk. Science and logic have great authority—Spock is the first to be consulted when the Enterprise’ survival is at stake. But this authority is always limited: Spock doesn’t have what it takes to solve the problem himself. Spock is half Vulcan, a constant reminder that science on its own can never be fully human. Those pointed ears emphasize the grave danger of thinking otherwise: Spock’s logic always risks disaster, to follow it is to be tempted by the devil.

Instead, at the center of humanity’s utopian possibility, Star Trek puts Captain Kirk. Kirk listens to Spock’s reason and relies heavily on science, but at each episode’s decisive moment Kirk defies the logic of his second in command. Kirk defies everyone: the rules, the Federation, the Prime Directive, authority, the odds, the officers on the bridge… He risks the many for the one. He does the irrational thing. He proceeds alongside Spock’s guidance, but then, when it counts, he follows his gut, he jumps with his intuition. What makes Kirk Kirk is that he doesn’t logically go, Kirk boldly goes. By putting Spock’s disciplined logic second, and the volatile, impulsive, intuitive, emotional Kirk first, Star Trek tells us exactly where to find our hopeful future: the human heart.

Except in The City on the Edge of Forever. Kirk betrays his heart; he follows Spock. There is no conversation, no deliberation, Kirk is compliant to Spock the expert, and he kills the woman he loves. Spock believes it was logical, to save the world: logic dictates. But when Kirk says “Let’s get the hell out of here” we know he realized something Spock, with all his reason and logic, couldn’t.

Edith Keeler was devoted to her pacifism and soup kitchen service. And just as passionately, Kirk too has his own 21st Street Mission: returning to command his ship. Mission and Enterprise: both Keeler and Kirk are dedicated to their image of the good ends. Like Kirk, Keeler has her own command; like Kirk she looks to the future for humanity’s promise; and like Kirk, she falls easily in love. Kirk was sent by the Guardian of Forever portal to meet Keeler because she is a reflection of himself.

Spock says Keeler can’t see how her devotion leads to Nazi victory and the end of the world. But what about Kirk’s devotion? How could Kirk know the future outcome of his own mission? Doesn’t the Guardian portal reveal that any outcome far enough in the future might turn into the opposite of what was intended? With the US empire at war in Vietnam just a TV channel change away (and US forever wars today streaming to our phones), is it so hard to imagine it might be Us, not Them, who is the bad outcome? And doesn’t that make Kirk as blind in his dedication as Keeler?

And so we see why Kirk remains silent and wants to “get the hell out of here.” He betrayed what he knew in his heart for the false image that Spock and his computer alone showed as the truth.

Isn’t that where we find ourselves today? Today’s scientists peer into computers and pronounce that, oops, civilization’s mission of progress was in fact blind devotion, an image of optimism and status quo hubris: maniacal technological recklessness now threatening all life on earth. Our beliefs led not to a bright future, but to the end of the world. So should we look again into the same computers for solutions? Or will we just see our own devotion displayed in more untrustworthy images? Remember Einstein—can we really survive without a new type of thinking?

In 1967, the year The City on the Edge of Forever aired, Laing struggled with the same question. He gathered 1960s political, philosophical, and artist revolutionaries (including Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Carolee Schneeman, Gregory Bateson, C.L.R. James and Stokely Carmichael) to the Dialectics of Liberation Congress. In his speech, notably titled “The Obvious,” Laing addressed the US war in Vietnam and march towards the end of the world, declaring that “Orwell’s time is already with us… the cynical lies, multifarious deceptions and sincerely held delusions to which we are now subjected through all media—even the organs of scholarship and science—force us to a position of almost total social skepticism. There is almost nothing we can know about the total social world system… We can put no trust in princes, popes, politicians, scholars, or scientists… But it is possible to know that we cannot know.”

Sound familiar? It’s the dilemma of our politics-as-outrage-theater era of war and inequality. And like Kirk, Laing goes further: he doesn’t just confront the horror of annihilation, but also faces the unreliability of any image or projection posing as a solution.

The Nazi threat was real, just as surely as climate emergency and global militarism and inequality and ecological collapse and poison in our food are all real. Star Trek is optimistic and doesn’t reject technology and reason: it keeps science close by. But Kirk knows well how to “put no trust in princes, popes, politicians, scholars, or scientists”—he just lost the courage to trust himself when he let Keeler die.

“We have to begin,” Laing says, “by admitting and even accepting our violence, rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it.” (emphasis added). Kirk might have begun that admission. But with his “Let’s get the hell out of here” he flees instead, and the episode ends with devotion to his mission restored. Kirk ran away, fearing the madness of what he learned. Yet Laing urged, and the psychiatric survivor movement continues to demand, that we instead listen to madness. The City on the Edge of Forever tries to make madness Kirk’s teacher.

Kirk and Spock declare McCoy, in his wild frenzy, to be paranoid and delusional. But was he? What if Kirk and Spock are in fact the true “assassins and murderers” McCoy ranted about? What if McCoy could see, in his mad visions, that Kirk and Spock were on their way to kill Keeler, out of devotion to their own mad image of saving their world?

The episode asks us, following Laing, to consider that the mad and sane, us and them, have more in common than we want to believe. Laing is often portrayed as championing madness as superior to sanity. This is incorrect. Instead, Laing saw both madness and sanity equally alienated from being fully human. Spock’s computer or McCoy’s drug injection: the point is that both sanity and madness fail to see the Obvious. Was McCoy ranting “Assassins! Murderers!” more delusional than Kirk and Spock killing a woman for a future they could ultimately never be sure about?

So maybe what Kirk betrayed most in this episode is the irrational, illogical part of him, the part that follows the heart, the part that is also madness. Because isn’t love a kind of madness?

Maybe everyone, the mad and the normal, us and them, is chasing their own mission. Maybe everyone has their own image they cherish, the false belief they can know the ends that they use to justify the means of their choices. What if the only choice we can really make, and trust, is the irrational, even mad, choice to love? What would saving the world look like then? Can we, with Dr. King, refuse Us versus Them but still have the courage to save someone we love from an oncoming truck, still take a stand against the Obvious violence that surrounds us?

Kirk never had a chance to ask these questions. When Spock pronounced that Keeler must die, there was no conversation, no questions about the dilemma the computer displayed, no one listening. With his friend Spock there was no communion, no heart, only the dictates of logic.

Those nights in my San Francisco apartment, before psychiatry locked me up, I was trying in my own way to save the world. Just as Kirk did, just as so many of us try. For a long time, I thought I went mad because of the questions I asked, because of not having any answers. Now I know that what tormented me wasn’t staring into the abyss of our endangered future; it wasn’t my personal history of trauma, or even the crazy world we live in. What tore me apart was having no one there with me. What drove me mad was that when I faced the end of the world, I was alone.

Editor’s Note: This piece was adapted from a presentation by the author at the 10th annual R.D. Laing in the 21st Century Symposium.