Craziness: The History of Mankind (Part One)

(Page Update 10/4/25)

Teachers, Coaches, and Leaders

In 1968, I asked myself a question that has never left me: What the hell is wrong with this crazy world of ours?

Over the course of decades of research and reflection, I've come to realize that this question is not new. Humanity has always struggled with craziness (i.e., imbalance, fragmentation, folly). And standing at the frontlines of this struggle are three roles that appear again and again: teachers, coaches, and leaders.

They are the ones who carry memory, instill discipline, and activate collective will. They are the ones entrusted to keep societies sane. Yet history shows a paradox: they have been both the custodians of sanity and the amplifiers of madness. This page traces their story: How Teachers, Coaches, and Leaders Confronted Craziness Across Human History.

What can we learn from their successes and failures?

Development: Teachers as Guardians of Sanity and Carriers of Illusion

The upward arc of development begins with teachers. They transmit memory, shape perception, and give meaning. However, what teachers transmit is not always wisdom. Sometimes they reinforce illusions, prejudices, or conformity.

Socrates and the Greeks

Socrates claimed that the unexamined life was not worth living. He taught by questioning, exposing assumptions, and unsettling certainties. In doing so, he confronted Athens with its own craziness: The contradictions between its democratic ideals and its injustices. For this, he was condemned to death. A teacher's gift was also his society's threat.

Confucius and China's Warring States

Half a world away, Confucius responded to chaos with a different method. Instead of relentless questioning, he codified virtue, ritual, and role. His disciples memorized rén (benevolence), yì (righteousness), and lǐ (ritual propriety). For him, sanity meant stability. Against the craziness of constant war, the teacher was a preserver of order.

Medieval Monks and Islamic Scholars

When Rome fell, violence and ignorance threatened to erase centuries of knowledge. Teachers in monasteries preserved texts by candlelight, copying manuscripts through plague and invasion. In the Islamic world, scholars such as Avicenna and Averroes taught Aristotle alongside medicine and mathematics, keeping reason alive while Europe fractured.

Modern Teachers: Science and Ideology

With modernity, teachers shifted from scriptures to laboratories. They taught evolution, relativity, and germ theory; powerful correctives to ignorance. But teachers also became agents of ideology. In fascist or communist states, classrooms transmitted propaganda, teaching citizens to conform to collective delusion.

Our Lesson

Teachers have always been humanity's anchors of consciousness. At their best, they protect against craziness by expanding awareness. At their worst, they perpetuate madness by narrowing the scope of thought.

Performance: Coaches as Disciplinarians of Human Will

If teachers form minds, coaches form habits. They drill, train, and discipline performance. But here too, history also reveals ambiguity: coaching can stimulate resilience, or it can normalize brutality.

Sparta and the Discipline of the State

The Spartan agōgē took boys from their families at age seven, drilling them into soldiers of the city. Discipline was absolute, individuality erased. Craziness was met with training so severe that it became its own form of madness: Sanity bought at the price of the illusion of freedom in the name of egoic fragmentation.

Rome and the Legions

The Roman legion was the most disciplined force of antiquity. Soldiers built camps in a night, marched miles in formation, and fought as a machine. Coaching involved systematic training, including repetition, coordination, and endurance. It preserved the republic, but later served the interests of imperial ambition. The coach's whistle could guard order or extend domination.

Guild Masters of the Middle Ages

Not all coaching was martial. Medieval guilds trained apprentices in craft skills such as stonemasonry, weaving, and carpentry. These disciplines preserved skill and identity when chaos threatened the community. In this sense, coaching preserved sanity by embedding order in the very texture of daily work.

Modern Coaching: Industry and Athletics

In the Industrial Age, factories became new training grounds for coaches. Workers were trained to synchronize with machines, their bodies subordinated to the demands of production. In athletics, coaches honed speed, strength, and toughness, sometimes nurturing resilience, sometimes reducing players to statistics.

Our Lesson

Coaches embody the tension of performance. They can cultivate integrity between will and action, or they can train obedience without the purposiveness of integrity of wholeness.

Research: Teachers and Coaches Seeking Higher Patterns

At certain moments, teachers and coaches transcended their immediate roles and became seekers, stepping back to research the patterns behind performance, meaning, and reaching for comprehension and understanding.

Pythagoras and the Mental System

Pythagoras was more than a mathematician. He was a teacher who turned numbers into philosophy, a coach who trained disciples in the ways of life, and a researcher who formulated a mental system of reality, Hylozoics, encompassing three aspects of existence: matter, motion, and consciousness. His effort was an early attempt to dissolve craziness by providing humanity with a comprehensive worldview.

Buddha and the Training of Consciousness

The Buddha was both teacher and coach. He researched the nature of suffering, then taught a method — the Eightfold Path — to discipline body, speech, and mind. His research was not speculative but practical, aimed at dissolving the madness of craving and delusion.

Renaissance Humanists and Scientists

Figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and Newton merged teaching, coaching, and research. They experimented, documented, and abstracted principles into universal laws. Their research confronted craziness by replacing superstition with comprehension.

Our Lession

Lesson: Research is where teachers and coaches test themselves against reality. When successful, they expand humanity's frame of reference. When neglected, societies recycle the same madness.

Activation: Leaders as Stewards or Amplifiers of Madness

Leaders are the ones who activate knowledge into public life. They stand at the pivot point where society's fate is decided. At their best, they integrate teacherly wisdom and coach-like discipline. At their worst, they unleash craziness at scale.

Early Exemplars: Cincinnatus and Aśoka

Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who accepted dictatorship in crisis and relinquished it afterward, embodied leadership as stewardship. Aśoka, the Mauryan emperor who renounced conquest after bloody wars, carved his dhamma into stone pillars: non-violence, tolerance, compassion. Both showed that leaders could restrain madness and activate sanity.

Medieval Monarchs and Popes

In the Middle Ages, kings and popes claimed divine sanction. Some preserved order; others plunged Europe into crusades and schisms. Leadership here often blurred the line between sanity and insanity, stabilizing with one hand while tearing apart with the other.

Modern Leaders: Sanity and Madness in Scale

• Sanity in action: Lincoln preserved the Union, Gandhi mobilized non-violence, and Martin Luther King Jr. called for justice through love. These leaders activated higher law, confronting madness with conscience.
• Madness in action: Hitler, Stalin, Mao turned leadership into a cult of terror, harnessing matter (institutions), motion (will), and consciousness (propaganda) toward destruction, the resulting activation became fragmentation weaponized.

Our Lesson

Leaders are the ultimate amplifiers. They magnify either wisdom or folly, sanity or craziness. The stakes of leadership are always collective.

The Cycle of Roles

Teachers, coaches, and leaders do not exist in isolation. They form a cycle much like the LPPC model of development, performance, research, and activation.

• Teachers shape consciousness.
• Coaches train performance.
• Researchers abstract principles.
• Leaders activate them in society.

When balanced, the cycle stabilizes humanity. When one role dominates or collapses, craziness spreads. History's most significant failures often come from imbalance: leaders without teachers, coaches without principles, teachers without practice.

History's Pattern of Craziness

The primary wicked problem of craziness recurs because humanity forgets the importance of integration, integrity, and wakefulness. Teachers become indoctrinators, coaches become drillmasters, leaders become tyrants. Sanity flickers when all three roles recall their single-pointed purpose of serving mankind, evolution, and unity through harmony of matter, motion, and consciousness. From Socrates to Confucius, from Spartan drillmasters to Roman legions, from Cincinnatus to Hitler, history reveals a consistent truth: mankind's craziness is not an accident, but the predictable result of imbalance. Teachers, coaches, and leaders have always been the frontline actors in this drama.

Closing Reflection

This page does not conclude the story. It sets the stage for its continuation. For if teachers, coaches, and leaders are the custodians of sanity and madness across history, then what about the rest of us? What about the student, the seeker, the one who sits under their authority, trying to make sense of contradictions?

That is the story of The Seeker's Craziness — the other side of humanity's biography, told not from the guides' perspective but from the guided.

Back To: The Anchor Story: Part IV: Coaching as Laboratory