01/06/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15y4dfgUrC/
"The world has lost its sanity."
It would be tempting to suggest that the totalizing "might-is-right" dominance in contemporary world affairs is an anomaly, and that our pilgrimage into a prickly purity-preserving politics - indexed in part by the apparent return to pre-1945 sentiments - represents a betrayal of the hard-won achievements of global agreement structures like the UN Charter.
It might be just as compelling to presume that our frightening descent into predation, theft and colonization as popular justification for safety and security is best explained by the policies of a few "bad actors". And that the thing to do is to hope for new electoral seasons to restore sanity.
But sanity is a retrospective arrangement of events that succeeded. Sanity is what the victors of the moment call their symmetry. It is the name we give to the accommodated, the repeatable, to the stable-enough-to-be-certified by institutional memory. It is not universal. It is not final. It is not immune to rupture.
So, when we say the world has lost its sanity, what we may actually be saying is that the feedback loops that reinforced a prior balance of powers have collapsed, and the biases once ritualized into norms no longer hold the weight of truth.
And when we long for sanity’s return, we often mean: bring back the predictability of yesterday’s arrangements, even if those arrangements were themselves complicit in quiet violences.
Thus, the betrayal is not new. It isn’t a fall from purity, anymore than the right-ward swing of the pendulum is an affront to a grandfather clock. It is an unveiling of the fact that purity was never there.
The "return to 1945" is hardly a return. The logic of predation was always there, lurking in the creases of dignified diplomacy, in the moral climate that governs the neurotypical subject. Rather than a return, I'd suggest that this is an exfoliation. A peeling back. A wound remembered. A crack showing what has always been beneath: the brutal genealogies of power, the erotic pull of empire, the myth of a moral center. What feels like descent may in fact be disclosure.
And in this sense, the work is not to restore sanity, but to grieve it. To gather in the ruins of its architecture and listen for what still wants to live, what wants to be grown differently, from different seeds. Our work is not against individuals, but within mycelial fields of posthumanist desire. It is Eros we must meet. It is the trickster Exu we must convene around.
This is not an anomaly. This is a reckoning.
Báyò Akomolafe
