Could there be a relationship between availability of energy and sanity? It looks to me like if we have enough energy available to be comfortable, ie enough to keep the 150 or so Joules per second we each need to be comfortable, this is the optimal state that enables us to think most creatively and most constructively, in other words, to add most value.
If we have less than that, we get desperate, and will obviously resort to desperate measures to try to get back to being comfortable.
If we have more, as in many, many times more, surely there has to be some kind of almost physical force field associated with that, which literally warps our ability to think.
I have wondered this over the years, observing folk like Besos and Musk, from the days when they were young technologists, to now stupidly rich businessmen.
Besos was known for one of the most innovative technical developments, the idea of service oriented architecture ("SOA"), which he insisted Amazon would use throughout, obviously paid off, it still is one of its unique strengths, it works something like a brain itself, connecting any service with any other. Love it or hate it, we have to admit it is clever. But the wisdom and technical knowledge he used to do that, seems to have all but disappeared, since he moved to publicity stunts of hoisting ex star trek stars into space in penis shaped rockets - this is not even in the same league as the technical savvy he must have had to develop SOA.
Same goes for musk, his initial idea of an electric car with sports performance outperforming ICE engined cars was very innovative, but it should have moved on, from requiring batteries on planetary devastation scale, to maybe hydrogen.
Sending one into space on a rocket, then putting up Starlink, a load of cheap shrapnel waiting to destroy an awful lot of other very expensive satellites, and the latest show of a Starship taking off to cheers, and raised champagne glasses, only to see it explode a few minutes later, none of that was very clever, it seems to me.
