Insanity is not a precise scientific or medical term. Generally, it means mental instability. In medical profession, it is called mental disorder or psychosis and defined as "loss of contact with reality." Anyone with mental disorder is called psychotic. Interestingly, psychotics hardly realize that they have become psychotic. If anyone calls an insane person insane, s/he invariably replies, "I am not insane, you are." This shows insanity is relative like relative motion. While sitting on a stationary railway train, we often get confused when another train moves beside us. We get a wrong impression that our train is moving and the other one is stationary. Similarly, if two trains move side by side in the same direction and at the same speed, the passengers in both the trains feel like none is moving! This is relative motion.
If insanity is also relative, how would two psychotic patients look at each other? If both of them are psychotic to the same degree, by all probability they will find each other to be perfectly normal persons.
I wonder what the world will look like if all of us lose contacts with reality at the same time!  Of course, we shall appear completely normal to each other even though we may be doing completely strange things. This is what I call collective insanity.
Now, let us look at ourselves for a moment. What are we doing? We are burning buses, trucks and other automobiles indiscriminately on the streets, often with the intention of killing innocent people inside. We are throwing cocktails at pedestrians. We are deliberately derailing railway trains putting passengers at great risks. We have blockaded all rail, road and waterways without considering the plight of the passengers. We are destroying properties of people we do not agree with. We have closed all educational institutions disrupting their examination schedules. By the way, we do the same irrespective of the parties in power or in opposition. Why?
We do so because all the acts I mentioned above appear to be quite normal to us. We are accepting what is unacceptable in a civilized society. Yet, we have no worries or repentance! Does it not mean that we all have become collectively insane? Why else should all such abnormal things appear to be so normal to us?
It is possible to treat a few psychotics individually, as I mentioned earlier, but is there any treatment for collective insanity?

The writer is a former chief engineer of Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission.