You do not see prominent Yellow/Pink bloggers or influencers supporting his fight. Why? Because it hits too close to home. It involves people orbiting that specific political circle.
The Courage to Be Mad
A time is indeed coming—perhaps it has already arrived—when men will go mad. Not in the sense of losing reason, but in the deeper tragedy of surrendering it. Madness here is conformity: the quiet acceptance of borrowed thoughts, the uncritical repetition of slogans, the refusal to stand apart from the crowd.
And when such men encounter someone who resists this contagion, who insists on thinking independently, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”
Ambrose Bierce’s definition of madness is paradoxical: “Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual.”
By this measure, madness is not weakness but strength. It is the refusal to be absorbed into the collective mind, the courage to stand at odds with the majority, and the willingness to be unusual in a world that worships sameness.
History is filled with such “madmen.” Socrates, condemned for corrupting the youth, was guilty only of teaching them to question. Galileo, branded a heretic, was guilty only of seeing further than the dogma of his day.
Rizal, executed for treason, was guilty only of loving his country enough to expose its chains. Each bore the mark of Bierce’s madness: intellectual independence, moral courage, and the audacity to be different.
The tragedy of our age is not that there are too many madmen, but too few. The majority, intoxicated by the comfort of conformity, mistake silence for wisdom and obedience for virtue. They fear the unusual because it exposes their complacency. And so, when they encounter someone who refuses to bow, they lash out—not because he is wrong, but because he reminds them of their surrender.
To be “mad” in Bierce’s sense is to embrace solitude, criticism, and misunderstanding. It is to walk a path where applause is rare and attacks are frequent. Yet it is also to live authentically, to preserve one’s dignity, and to see the world with clarity unclouded by the fog of consensus. The madman is not the one who has lost his mind, but the one who refuses to lose his soul.
The time is coming—and perhaps it is already here—when the choice will be stark: to conform and be safe, or to be mad and be free. The wise will choose madness, for in madness lies truth, and in truth lies the only sanity worth living for.
Dr. Tony Leachon