*Essay on Madness*, by Evan do Carmo, is... Evan do carmo

*Essay on Madness*, by Evan do Carmo, is not a study of insanity as a clinical deviation, but a critical examination of social normality itself. The essay operates through inversion: madness is no longer the exception, but the condition in which the world functions, while what is called sanity appears as a form of unconscious adaptation. By shifting the focus from the individual to the collective, the text exposes how society names, excludes, and neutralizes what threatens its continuity .
Public suicide, institutional routines, moral discourse, and everyday reactions are presented as automatic responses, devoid of reflection. To call someone “mad” becomes an act of self-preservation rather than understanding. Madness functions as a symbolic label that protects the social order, allowing violence, inequality, and indifference to persist under the guise of reason and stability.
The essay shows that institutions traditionally associated with rationality—law, medicine, religion, and authority—are not antidotes to madness, but mechanisms that organize and legitimize it. There is no fully lucid character in the narrative, no moral guide for the reader. Everyone is implicated, revealing madness as structural rather than personal. This absence of a safe viewpoint forces the reader to confront their own participation in the system being exposed.
Language itself is treated as a site of insanity. Concepts such as justice, compassion, faith, and morality are repeated until they lose meaning, functioning more as masks than as tools of understanding. Excessive naming replaces genuine thought, producing a refined and socially acceptable form of madness.
Visible madness—delirium, collapse, suicide—appears not as the cause of chaos, but as its consequence. It is the point at which the individual can no longer sustain a life emptied by normalized absurdity. The essay neither romanticizes nor condemns this rupture; it presents it as the moment when the unconscious logic of society becomes undeniable.
Refusing consolation or solutions, *Essay on Madness* ends in exposure rather than resolution. Its power lies in destabilization, not explanation. By portraying normality as unconscious madness, the text does not accuse individuals, but reveals a way of life built on automatism, exclusion, and denial. In the end, it does not ask who is mad, but what it costs to remain normal in a world that calls its own delirium reason.