Having experienced this myself, I can say that it is a very terrifying, yet numbing state (hence the panic). I felt that I had no more bearings in the world, that nothing made sense, and I could not think clearly or rationally. I was very much in hell.

Happily, one can — and I did — recover. Recovery meant having to shed illusions, disdaining comfort, and accepting and integrating harsh truths. I often find myself standing outside society in order to embrace it.

This is beautifully, powerfully, intelligently written! I’ll have to read it multiple times before I can get my mind entirely around it, let alone embrace the many implications for self and society that come out of it. It seems as if it should be an essay in a stand-alone book on The Anxiety Culture, or something like Totem and Tabloid, just to be tongue-in-cheek about it. Kubrick’s Strangelove might be the perfect film to explore as a corollary to your ideas about paralysis and mental warfare, weakened fathers and compensatory “small” or injured men, self-destruction and irrational flagellation, let alone species cooperation — I believe you are exactly right — as the pure antithesis it is, or was, to Cold War (narcissal) culture.