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In college, I lived in a self-governing Co-op house where the philosophy allowed doing whatever you wanted, as long as it didn’t impinge on others’ rights to do the same. After graduating in history, the struggles for minority civil rights intensified; sexual freedom arrived; life choices expanded for both genders; and feminism revived. A counterculture blossomed with new possibilities. The truths about the War on Vietnam emerged, including government decisions that violated our country’s professed ideals, and much indiscriminate killing of civilians. King and Kennedy were assassinated, as were some Black Panthers (by the police/FBI). Clearly, there were major problems in society, but why?
I began work on a project studying the “change and development of college students”—studying patterns and possibilities in human growth—and later enrolled in graduate school at Berkeley. There I found faculty and administration reluctant to regularize student input, even from systematic surveys asking students to rate their academic programs. I finished my dissertation, helped raise a family, and got involved extensively in the K-12 schools. Again I saw unnecessary rigidities in the systems and harmful perspectives among some parents. Visits to Europe helped me to think comparatively across related cultures. My search for the basis of society’s problems (and how to fix them) culminated in this book, but only after another 8 years of reading and then synthesizing material from history, social psychology and its methods, politics, the environmental, geological and biological sciences, and more.
Website: jeffreywynterkoon.com.
Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Cultural Insanity, the Key to Understanding Our World and Ourselves by Jeffrey Wynter Koon is a non-fiction work of primarily expository writing in a persuasive format. Koon's theory on why civilizations derail into frenzied, insane reasoning when absolutely no reason for these beliefs exist is broken down into four parts. The first part is a detailed, foundational explanation and a look at contemporary examples of cultural insanity following an intensive examination of the whys and hows. Part two leans into witchcraft and centuries of insanity through vessels of faith as a means of power, control, subjugation, and continuity of all. Part three pinpoints the churning out of flagrant misinformation as a means of advancing the bedrock of the authority of the Church over science. Part four transitions through the historical development of evolution and time as it applies to terrestrial evidence, contradicting long-standing proclamations and belief systems that limit the earth to an age of just a few thousand years.
Jeffrey Wynter Koon takes his time peeling back layers of theoretical structure, employing in-depth case studies and other applications of empirical support where they exist. The part that I found to be most interesting in Cultural Insanity, the Key to Understanding Our World and Ourselves was in part four, chapter 35's The Challenges Diversify and Extinctions Confirmed. I loved reading about early attempts to explain away an emergence of fossils that directly contradict archaic beliefs of the age of the earth and its inhabitants over millions of years to a devout populace who deemed extinction events impossible, but Noah's flood to be fact. This is a heavy read with a lot to offer and the research to back it up. I have no doubt it will be embraced by those who appreciate a thorough analytical construct of cultural insanity.
