In Bed With Madness: Trying to Make Sense in a World That Doesn’t

by Yannis Andricopoulos
Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK, 2008
191 pp. Paper, $17.90
ISBN: 978-1845401290.

Reviewed by Kathryn Adams
Australia

kathy@pacific.net.au

If you’re constantly thinking the world we live in has gone completely arse up… take heart, you are not alone. Yannis Andricopoulos, author of In Bed With Madness: Trying to Make Sense in a World that Doesn’t, validates this sentiment and encapsulates all that is heinous and nonsensical with modern society in one powerfully charged little volume. Tackling the big issues such as religious fundamentalism, global warming, warfare, rampant consumerism, and the role science and technology are playing in the collapse of our planet and the human spirit, Andricopoulos also comments on the inane; breast enlargements, McDonalds, advertising, virtual sex, ski holidays in Dubai and takes us on a philosophical snorkel through the polluted waters of contemporary culture.

And it is murky. Andricopoulos, who thinks of our world as being “…as fragmented as a broken mirror, as perverse as fighting for a place in the hell- express, as bland as a portion of Kentucky Fried Chicken,” has a Ph.D. in Diplomatic History, worked as a journalist in London during the 1960s and is the co-founder of Skyros, “…the holistic, community-based holiday centre on the island of Skyros.” His inspiration for writing this book, the first in a series of three, has been, he says, “…both his involvement with the truculent world of politics and the graceful, personal world of Skyros” which is evident in his writing style. Through a maelstrom of hard-hitting truths about humanity’s dysfunction, the profiteering of politics and our lust for progress, Andricopoulos manages to pepper his text with humour and provide his readers with a glimmer of hope by the final chapter, even though “change…” he says, “…requires nothing less than the shifting of the tectonic plates of our culture…”

This is tangible, compelling, driven and heartfelt writing at its best and the message is clear …humans have lost all connection to their environment, each other and themselves and through their constant, frenzied and soulless quest for more of everything, have lost a grip on reality. We live in a mad, mad, mad world, the author laments, where “…‘normal’…is living with extreme poverty, violence or environmental degradation…’abnormal’… is… the refusal to kill fellow human beings.” Man, through technological advancement and the spoils of capitalism, has been saddled with too much power, which the author notes, “…he is bound to misuse and abuse with catastrophic consequences. Combining the power of a giant with the wisdom of a simpleton can only turn life into a lived-in nightmare.”

A profusion of quotes by artists, poets, philosophers, novelists, historians and various theorists to support the author’s claims are included to stimulate debate and entertain, from Plato to Quentin Tarantino. Andricopoulos shares the insights of Nietzsche, Kafka, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad and Flaubert, to name just a few, and it is difficult to find a topic that hasn’t been touched upon - sex, human cloning, nuclear waste, George W Bush, fast-food chains, war and morality. It is also difficult not to feel pulverised after being confronted with such powerful realities, for as we are told, “…humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Andricopoulos believes we are “…as conscious of our existence as a post box is of itself...” and that “progress…has arrogantly turned into our master, throwing the whole of our existence into a state of crisis. The crisis is not just social, environmental, institutional, personal or cultural. It is …a spiritual crisis which has paralysed the will and left us abandoned to the four winds.” He shares Clifford Stoll’s belief that without change we risk taking the next generation into “…an insubstantial universe…empty and heartless, arid, unsatisfying….”

Considering the current shift in world politics, the faltering of capitalism and the ongoing global economic crisis, this timely book brings into sharp focus the need for change at a point in time where, again, so much seems possible.