I know this topic is old, but time is meaningless...
Yes, humans are insane and there is not much anyone can do about it because it is so evasive. You too are also insane. You are part of the equation. You have been manipulated and your views distorted and there is nothing you can do.
If everyone is insane, that does not imply everyone is actually sane. That is insanity at it's best speaking(a sort of justification by the most insane of us for them to continue their behavior). Sanity is not relative. It is absolute! What makes someone sane is their ability to abide by the physical reality that we all live in and that no one can change. The laws of gravity, for example, are obviously sanity checks. If you think you can bypass gravity and jump off a building... that shows you are fundamentally insane. Reality has many laws like that and many more subtle, harder to verify laws... and this is where humans get in trouble and insanity is able to evolve itself in an uncontrolled away, up to a point.
i.e, for a human to exist, it must have some level of sanity, else it dies very quickly. But no human is complete sane because it has grown up and been effected, like Pavlov's dog, by the insanity that surrounds it. 99% of human beings fall on a skewed bell curve towards the side of insanity.
`Science of Sanity` speaks of humans in ability to abstract as a source of insanity. I think it is an extremely valid point. Learning to reason, which comes from learning about reality and no other source, as reality is the source of sanity, also provides one with the ability to abstract... but I think abstracting also can cause insanity. Humans are very good abstractors but it is a dangerous weapon when it is not grounded in reality. e.g., "We have to blow them up because if we don't they will blow us up first" is both an abstraction and insanity(since it is a generalization of known events and also an over generalization and logical fallacy/statistical fallacy).
The problem, I believe, with humans, is their abstracting capabilities have grown exponentially while their connection to reality has actually decreased in the last several centuries. We now can live in fantasy worlds that do not exist, have no meaning, and no way to prove things about them, yet people treat them on the same level as reality.
All one has to do is basically look at any aspect of humanity and you will find insanity. I typically use stack overflow and I'm always bombarded with questions showing up on the "recents" panel. Things like
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com ... ld-possess
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com ... -look-like
or question about D&D and other fantasy games.
These may seem, to the casual person, just games but they are actually displays of insanity. Those people that live in those worlds were they believe those questions are meaningful have a disconnect with reality... the reality that only matters.
e.g., asking about how one might kill a dragon is an insane question because dragons do not exist. So any answer is illogical and meaningless. Yet people toil over answering that question and rate those questions as better than others. One could argue that killing a dragon might be similar to killing a lion and so one could use the power of abstraction to form some valid answers. But since dragons do not exist there is no information to help make sense of that reality... until dragons actually exist in our reality it is impossible to deduce reasonable statements about them. Why? Because we cannot test such hypothesis... and hypothesis testing is how we discover what is true and hence, eventually, reasonable. This is how science works and why science has been so powerful in discovering so many things about reality.
The real harm in such things like the above, which can vary from imaginary dragons to imaginary enemies wanting to glow us up, is that they take us away from our own reality. Instead of dealing with the real problems that we face we stick our heads in an imaginary hole that distorts our perceptions of what we really face as humans.
e.g., world hunger, world ignorance, violence, wars, diseases, etc... all these things that actually can be solved because they are mathematical and physical problems(which covers the gamut). Yet we ignore them. That is insanity! It's obviously more complex than that but that is the basis of it.
The problems are so complex now that IMO, it is impossible to solve. You can't solve insanity with reason! You can't solve it with drugs! You can't solve it with anything but intelligence. A person that becomes more attuned to reality will become more aware of what insane and sane things are and generally avoid the insane things because they hurt that person and the people around them in the long run.
One could say the world needs more love, of course! But love is not enough... love itself can make people do insane things... but it is part of the solution.
Until humanity gets to the point where they, as a whole, stop valuing murder, excitement, instant gratification, and allowing the worst people to lead them, there is no hope... except that in time, the cycles that repeat might lead to something stable and good.
It is up to the sane people to lead the way... that is the only way out. Insane people cannot make sane choices and if the goal is sanity how is it possible they could take us there? It's like getting a thief to watch your valuables. Do you really think they will be safe? If you do, then you are insane... yet this is what many people do when they elect people that they know have a past of corruption. A lot of it has to do with ignorance. You can't imagine how ignorant the average person is about things. A semi intelligent person tends to project their understanding of reality on everyone else and thinks everyone tends to see things the same... it is far from the truth. It is like a bodybuilder who thinks everyone should be able to lift 300lbs. It is impossible for the average person to do so and it takes many years of training and a completely different mentality.
All these things I'm talking about, more or less, are understood by the most sane humans... but insane humans, at least 90% of the populace, really have no clue. I believe the only solution is education... proper education. Give humans enough correct information about reality and they will formulate correct logical deductions of any reality. One could say it is biological, I do not believe that... or at least that it has very little bearing as to be nearly insignificant. The human brain is a super computer that simply processes information using relatively basic principles that mathematics can describe. (of course, there might be far more to it, and we can fantasize about what really is going on in the brain all we want, but that is part of the insanity speaking... no different than imaginary dragons or boogie men).
IMO, 99%(a made up number, of course) of humans never really evolve out of the mental state of childhood or adolescence. Their bodies may grow but their minds remain stationary. They still see the world, effectively, through the same logical lens. The fantasy world that most children live in is not escaped from in adulthood. Movies, fantasy books, video games, etc are all vehicles of insanity(not innately, but that is what we use them for) that we now see a large part of the adult population spending their time investing in... No doubt because their parents brought them up on it by shoving a movie in the kids face while the parents went off to do other insane things.
Children are blank slates and every event that the child experiences is written on that slate. That child "grows up" and all those experiences still remain and are still computed in the giant equation that the brain works on constantly to make decisions. Educating children properly, I think, is the only way out. Some adults that are on the threshold can be educated, but most cannot because their slate is too filled with junk. Drugs can help clean this slate but it must be filled with relevant experiences afterwards.
But our current state of affairs is to fill our children's mind with crap... and fill their bodies with crap. The near future is bleak. We will almost surely have some type of global war that the powers at be(The rich, who are also insane and contribute mostly to the problem since they have the most delegated power) will create once things start going down hill for them, caused by the metastasis that is taking place right now.
Remember, children grow in to adults, and what you feed a child determines it's future. Same with all living organisms. If you take a plant and feed it crap you know the outcome(at least semi-intelligent people do).
While the future is bleak, there still is forms of hope. There are humans in the world that are relatively extremely sane(compared to the worse case). Information is becoming extremely fluid(which is good and bad since there is so much "disinformation" too). So it is possible, that given the right conditions, things will work out for the better. Either we will have a global war within the next few decades or things will settle down as the next generation, which is generally has more capacity for intelligence, is able to figure it out. Or may be aliens will come.. or whatever.
For me, personally, after having my moments of realizations about how I think things work, have come to the conclusion that the best I can do is simply live the sanest live I know how and to teach that to my children and the people around me. To try and influence as many people as I know how in the ways of reality and sanity. If I am the insane one say, then so be it. This means the world is actually really good(since it's obvious that I am an outlier)... and if I'm one of the reality sane humans, then I have a duty to help the rest of humanity out of this problem.
Remember one thing, no one is at fault. Blaming people is part of the insanity. We were all born as children with (nearly) blank slates and taught insanity. Our parents, teachers, friends, governors, etc taught us what we know... but they were children too, taught similar things in similar ways. The blame game is a sign of insanity and that was one of the realizations I had that helped me, I believe, get out of the insanity. Look at politics, it's all the blame game... and nothing ever gets better from it. We can only solve this problem when we work together and realize everyone is at fault/no one is at fault. We all have differences and that is actually a good thing, but we must learn to work together and overcome the insanity that pervades our reality(it is a disease IMO, maybe an evolutionary disease). Each persons experiences are unique and that person, in some ways, is extremely unique, far more than each person can perceive. e.g., try and imagine someone elses life experiences that are far different from your own. e.g., a terrorist who beheads someone. Imagine the actual event the best you can in all it's insanity. Imagine what must have led that person to do something like that. Imagine what kinda events that person must have experienced as a child to lead them down that road to make those choices. Or, imagine a serial killer. What events in that persons life had to happen to turn them in to the insane person they are? If you can't imagine the worse things(possibly being raped and beating on a daily based, being psychologically abused, low education, no love, etc) then you are too insane and must work through it. At some point you will understand that the reason people are insane are due to events that you probably never even remotely experienced(I'm not talking about superficial experiences like reading a book, I'm talking about the actual experiences), but do exist! You can't imagine what it is like(or I can't, since it didn't happen) to be raped as a child... but if I try, I can only conclude that if something like that happened to me I'd probably be quite insane. My reality distorted by the events that were out of my control and would surely effect every decision I would make after that. So, no wonder why many woman are screwed up and make bad decisions because they go through this type of stuff(raped by family member or other insane sexual experiences)... then, on top of that, our society makes it worse by injecting insanity on top of that. E.g., Christianity with all it's insanity that denigrates sexuality which further distorts that persons experiences. e.g., the woman who was abused and has that to deal with now has to deal with the fictitious abuse(real abuse that is based on fantasy) that society and religion brings. Will god not love her because something happened to her that was out of her control?
These things go on and on and are the undercurrent of our insane reality. More complex than any human could hope to understand. Case after case after case... and none of us are free from it. Every child has had experiences that has warped their sanity. Some have been relatively lucky to escape with minor bruises but many are have lost limbs, brain damage, etc. Some look "physical" normal but are mentally broken.
But all these things that make humanity what it is today was created in the past and those things that made the past what it was that created what we have today were created in the pasts past. It's a recursive process and it's something that we can't escape.... it's part of the design of reality. But by understanding how things work we can fix them... that we know. That is something our insanity has taught us well, and so in some sense, our insanity has both made humanity great and weak. But IMO humanity is at a turning point where the negative aspects of insanity are far outweighing the positive. If humans kill themselves off, what was the point of any of it? A near total waste of all the hard work that every human being contributed to this grand experiment... wasted, for what? For the Gods? I don't think we have to let the gods play dice with our species. We now have the power to control our own destiny and if every human understood that, we could truly have an amazing experience(not in our life times, but we can give this as a present to our future self's(our children's children's children, who can live in a near perfect world(relatively speaking))... and if reincarnation is a thing, we will actually benefit directly. But seriously, is there any reason not to strive for perfection? Is spending your life drinking beer in a club meaningful? Is being a con artist politician meaningful? Or do these only produce self gratification that is a biological response to some psychological insanity that exists in your brain? Educate children what's really going on in reality and I think it will, at the very least, help and maybe they can lead the way.