Overview

Across four centuries of history, governments have repeatedly mistaken order for wisdom-and morality for control. Crazy History: When Governments Lost Their Minds is a panoramic chronicle of how rational intentions become catastrophic systems, told through ten true stories that span empires, ideologies, and pandemics. Each chapter reveals a different version of the same fatal pattern: the bureaucratization of virtue. From the tulip traders of seventeenth-century Holland who legislated beauty as currency, to the Jacobins who mechanized justice under the guillotine's blade, to the American engineers who dreamed of ""peaceful"" nuclear explosions, Bill Johns traces the enduring logic by which institutions transform conscience into calculation. Madness, in these pages, is never emotional-it is administrative. The narrative moves from the colonial moral theater of the Opium Wars and the genocidal paperwork of Indian removal to the data-driven obedience of the twenty-first century. China's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution show how ideology perfects its own cruelty through procedure. The CIA's MK-Ultra program reveals the intimacy between reason and paranoia. And the global pandemic of 2020-2022, with its dashboards, mandates, and moral rituals of safety, brings the story to its contemporary apotheosis: a world that confuses protection with meaning. Written in the measured, reflective style that has made Johns a singular chronicler of the intersection between power and morality, Crazy History is not a study of lunatics but of believers. Its protagonists are reformers, technocrats, and visionaries-people who thought they were saving the world. Their failures are disturbingly familiar because they are rational. This book unfolds as both historical narrative and philosophical anatomy, tracing the evolution of what Johns calls ""the procedural mind""-the belief that every problem can be solved by better management. The result is a global history of good intentions gone deranged: a record of how the will to improve becomes the will to purify, and how the machinery of virtue, once built, never stops running. From the bloodless calculus of empire to the hygienic optimism of digital governance, Crazy History exposes the recurring delusion that control is compassion. It argues that the true madness of modern civilization is not its violence, but its calm-the serenity with which it destroys in the name of reason. In the tradition of Hannah Arendt, Simon Schama, and Timothy Snyder, Johns writes with moral precision and cinematic scope. Each chapter stands alone as a parable of power; together they form a single argument about the peril of perfect systems. Governments, he reminds us, do not lose their minds through chaos. They lose them through clarity. Crazy History: When Governments Lost Their Minds is at once a work of historical investigation and moral diagnosis-a study of how rational cruelty is born, and why it keeps returning in ever more enlightened forms. It asks not how governments go mad, but how reason itself becomes a kind of faith.

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