Sanity as Rebellion: What the Last Messiah Got Wrong
Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990), Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, stands among the bleakest voices in existentialism. Unlike Nietzsche, who sought to transmute suffering through will and creation, Zapffe gazed at human consciousness and saw a flaw—an evolutionary mistake. We became too aware. We gained the ability to reflect, to project, to imagine our own death—but not the resilience to bear that knowledge.
Animals live in the present. We live in anticipation and dread. To survive the burden of this self-awareness, Zapffe believed humans devised unconscious strategies: we ignore certain truths, bury ourselves in ideologies, immerse in distractions, or sublimate despair into art and thought. We cope, but we do not solve. We endure by illusion.
In his 1933 essay The Last Messiah, he argued that those who pierce these veils—the fully awake—often collapse under the weight of what they see. For Zapffe, sanity was not the norm. It was a rare and accidental stability, fragile and fleeting. Mental illness was not a deviation from health—it was humanity's natural state. The healthy mind was the real exception.
This inversion is no small gesture. Zapffe's vision displaces the optimism of psychology, the structure of religion, the arc of progress. And like Copernicus dethroning Earth, he demands we dethrone the fantasy of a stable human psyche.
Yet, for all his clarity, Zapffe erred. Diagnosing the pain with precision, he prescribed extinction. He believed the only solution was to halt reproduction and let our tragic species fade out. But this conclusion, while logically neat, ignores a deeper human possibility: transformation.
Today, we do not merely suffer the burden of consciousness. We are bombarded. If Zapffe lived in our time, he would see his nightmare accelerated. The collapse of mental health is not an anomaly. It is the outcome of a system designed to confuse, overstimulate, and destabilize.
The modern media machine, always on, always contradictory, exceeds what any mind can process. The news teaches fear. Social media erodes attention and rewards neurosis. Truth is provisional, morphing by the hour. The old forms of distraction have been replaced by something more potent—overload. It is no longer that we avoid existential despair. We are force-fed a thousand shallow crises, until the mind fractures.
Even identity, once rooted in biology and community, now drifts. Children are told they are fluid. Certainty is suspect. To question is to sin. What once were rare psychological states are repackaged as identities, not for healing, but for adoption. Culture does not ground the self—it pulls it apart.
Meanwhile, the economy thrives on our dissatisfaction. Algorithms monetize our attention, pharmaceuticals sell us borrowed calm, and the wellness industry grows fat on the promise of a fix that never arrives. Capitalism has evolved beyond consumption. It now cultivates dependency. It needs us anxious, uncertain, medicated.
And so Zapffe’s claim grows sharper. Sanity—clear, grounded, coherent being—is not a birthright. It is a rebellion. We live in a time that calls madness health, and treats lucidity as a threat.
But unlike Zapffe, we must not surrender. If consciousness is a wound, it is also a frontier. To be sane today requires deliberate work. We must reject the noise. Not in retreat, but in discipline. We must return to the body, to rhythm, to sleep, to silence. We must seek knowledge that deepens, not fragments. Thought must be slow again. Speech must be honest.
This is not nostalgia. It is resistance. The modern self is a product under revision. To say no to that is to begin again. We must create meaning, not consume it. We must endure hardship and raise children who can, too. Not by sheltering them from reality, but by showing them how to walk through it upright.
Zapffe was right about the problem—but he was wrong about the solution. In a world gone mad, the answer to existential despair is not self-extinction—it is transformation.
In an era where insanity is being normalized, the ultimate rebellion is to stay sane.
Staying sane is the final revolution. Trust that consciousness heals its own wound. Trust in whatever you want, but do not give up hope.