Franco “Bifo” Berardi in his latest doomsaying tirade on e-flux offers us a vision of the world gone mad: “Mental illness is not the rare malady of an isolated dropout, but the widespread consequence of panic, depression, precariousness, and humiliation: these are the sources of the contemporary global fragmentary war, and they are spreading everywhere, rooted in the legacy of colonialism and in the frenzy of daily competition.”

As we hear from Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in their  Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, America has grown a massive Security State that is not just concerned with turning its eye outward, but has entered into a private spy world aimed directly at its own citizenry. Since 9/11 the FBI’s counterterrorism structure had grown three times larger than it had been before. Straitlaced criminal investigators whose goal in life had been to send bank robbers…