I think human populations that organize into units of millions of individuals have always lived with insanity. As a matter of practicality, the available energy (fire, human and animal power) for running the interrelated junctures of a complex society provided an upper limit on how stupid things could get.

But now with the dense energy of oil and other fossil fuels, the complexity of our human interrelatedness has surged to a “fantastical billions” that pushes insanity into new realms of planetary-wide destruction, disruption, and distress. Humanity will die back into the manageable millions or our species will just die off in a final crescendo of dense-energy insanity.