MADNESS:

The Deep Driver of Our Climate Crisis Lessons From My Family Farm by Jim Mason - A Review

I understand why many might not yet fully appreciate Jim Mason’s genius - his advanced thinking, his practical vision for a better world, and his clear steps to get there. I know of no one else with his unique combination of firsthand farm experience, deep moral clarity, and intellectual originality, honed further by his work across all sectors of society.

MADNESS Exposes… Well, the Madness

Beginning with his early life as a farm boy in the 1940s - a time without electricity, phones, TVs, or even running water - Mason weaves together his personal history with the deeper prehistory of humanity itself. The story moves back and forth rhythmically, revealing how insanity first took root in early human minds and then spread like a contagious disease into the structures of his own childhood - until, as evidenced today, we accept it as “just the way it is.” The thorny branches that scratched and etched into Mason’s early farm life left scars, shaping his adult years and seeding the insights that ultimately led to this book.

His experiences - being coerced into harming animals, the rigid cruelty of the military, legal work with marginalized communities (alongside feminists), a chance encounter with a bumper sticker that led him to Friends of Animals and Alice Herrington, and his later collaboration with Peter Singer - all aligned in a kind of cosmic choreography. The result? A book with the power to crack through the ice of indifference and denial and illuminate the truth.

A Subtle Change - in Subtitle and Title?

The only thing I might change? Title and subtitle

1) First - the subtitle

Not because I don’t think the climate crisis matters - of course it does - but because it’s not the book’s primary focus. The book isn’t centered on climate collapse, disease, war, or the global class struggle - though these are symptoms of the Madness. Instead, Madness distinguishes itself by exposing the deeply ingrained male conditioning of domination, cruelty, and emotional suppression, as Mason, a young boy, was trained, shamed, and forced into “male work” - inflicting pain, suffering, and death on animals.

From farm boy to fractured man, Mason illustrates how toxic masculinity stunted his emotional growth - how the pressure to "man up," bury emotions, and numb himself to suffering was imprinted on his heart. We feel its palpable effects when his uncle tells him to help castrate the calves or be sent into the house with the women and girls. "I should have gone into the house," Mason laments.

stock photo

Perhaps the subtitle could better reflect this, with something like:

"From Farm Boy to Fractured Man - How It Began in Our Species and Still Manifests in Our World."

2) Lastly - the title:

Most people focus on the cruelty and oppression perpetrated by humans and social systems - a necessary reckoning. But few recognize the power we have to alter reality itself.

People often overlook the magnificence of nature, life and the intelligence that permeates the universe. They take for granted the miracle of our bodies’ self-healing abilities, the neuroplasticity of the brain and our ability to reorganize, regenerate, and transform - even after trauma.

Being both a mystic and a materialist, I believe that our minds are not just tools for analyzing the world's problems - they are also instruments of creation, transforming what is into our vision of what can and must be. If we see and understand reality clearly, we unlock tremendous power.

The universe is movement. Small, slow, imperceptible shifts accumulate, until quantity transforms into quality - a new reality is born. I believe we can harness the intelligence of the cosmos and our own consciousness (our thoughts) and use those to create, transform, and manifest a peaceful, sustainable, egalitarian world - but first, we must reclaim our vision.

If I were to title this book, it might be:

"Madness and Miracles - The Dark Turn in Our Relationship with Nature and the Power to Transform It." Then again - this is Mason’s book and his outlook, so it’s important the title reflects that.

Stepping Back From Personal Story to Larger One - Unveiling When and How Male Chauvinism and Domination First Took Root

The First Rupture - Did the Cold Birth Madness?

For tens of millions of years, humans thrived as foragers, living harmoniously within nature. But something happened only a few thousand years ago - something that broke us from this natural state. Was it environmental necessity? Did the frigid trek out of Africa into the freezing north cause a kind of brain fog, irritability, and irrationality - even madness?

Mason, in An Unnatural Order, explores this rupture - when men, perhaps seeking status and value, sought to imitate the "king of the jungle" rather than remain the gentle, cooperative beings they had always been. Instead of remaining plant-eaters, they turned to hunting, mimicking lions and other predators. They ignored their natural disgust for blood and gore, abandoning their herbivorous anatomy and peaceful existence.

Full body artist's reconstruction of "Sussex Man", by Amédée Forestier in the London Illustrated News, 1912.

Hunting depended on male size and strength. When men returned after weeks of hunting, they were celebrated, feasts ensued, and their newfound dominance over women became culturally embedded. Equality was no longer a given. Hierarchy replaced balance.

Eventually, after slaughtering entire species - aurochs (ancestors of cows), mastodons (relatives of elephants), saber-toothed tigers - some sought an easier way to secure and control their food supply. They turned to herding - and as they followed the herd further south, they used the same violence once reserved for animals against other humans who stood in their way.

Thus, the poisonous weed of dominion took root - and it still infests our modern world.

An Extraordinary Book from an Extraordinary Life

Madness is extraordinary - rare, necessary. Mason’s account of his early life is gripping - not just because of its stark realities, but because so few of us have lived that experience. The bloody pig heads in a basin, the bodies hanging from trees, the relentless farm chores, the shaming tactics used to force a child into cruelty - Mason lived it. And we, as readers, are transported back in time - to an era before factory farming and before the awareness he himself would bring forth in his book Animal Factories.

Final Thoughts

If An Unnatural Order is Mason’s epic masterpiece, Madness is its sharp, accessible companion - a concentrated dose of his most urgent insights, wrapped in memoir and personal storytelling. It blends the personal with the political, the historical with the contemporary, and the scientific with the deeply human.

Jim Mason is not one to promote himself. He’s not a social butterfly, a go-getter or a marketer.

But he doesn’t need to be. His work speaks for itself. And those of us who see its value will ensure it reaches the world.