The Stone of Madness

In the essays that make up the book «The Stone of Madness», Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut continues the theme he began in his bestseller «When We Stopped Understanding the World»: despite humanity's striving for rationality, the development of science, and progress, the outlines of reality blur before our eyes, the world unfolds as an incomprehensible chaos, whose logic is accessible only to the madman. Reflecting on recent events: the pandemic, the use of artificial intelligence, protests in Chile and other countries, — Labatut contemplates the reasons for the current crisis of narratives that have collapsed under the pressure of the unstoppable onset of the new. As the world becomes stranger and stranger, the scientific approach, cold facts, and figures cannot remain the only key to understanding; perhaps, to avoid waking up one day in a nightmare, we need to listen more often to our most insane dreams.