Sanewashing the Leader: Power, Normalization, and Loss of Reality Contact

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Sanewashing: treating patently false, incoherent, or obviously harmful ideas or actions as if they were reasonable, sensible, or merely unconventional.

Distortion of the Adaptive Capacity to Suspend Reality

Human beings possess an adaptive capacity to suspend reality. All planning depends on it. In the face of uncertainty, we construct a provisional reality—an imagined scenario in which our actions succeed—so that some action becomes possible.

This suspension is deliberate and bounded. We proceed as if conditions are favorable, while retaining awareness that they may not be. The farmer plants without knowing the weather; the planner envisions success without assuming it is guaranteed. This capacity enables coordinated action despite uncertain conditions.

Sanewashing is a distortion of this same capacity. What is ordinarily a temporary and self-aware suspension of reality becomes unbounded and unacknowledged.

Instead of bracketing uncertainty to act, sanewashing dissolves the boundary between imagination and reality itself. What begins as an adaptive cognitive tool is transformed into a mechanism for misrepresentation.

Sanewashing as Pretension

Pretending involves presenting something as true when it is not.

The planner suspends reality to clarify action, whereas the sanewasher describes the leader’s grossly abnormal or incoherent speech and action as if no break with reality has occurred.

Planning calls for envisioning a perfect outcome as a tool to bring something new into the world. Sanewashing reports on a profoundly distorted reality but pretends that no distortion has occurred.

Sanewashing as Performance

Sanewashing often takes the form of performance. It requires translating incoherence into the language of reasonableness. Like theater, it depends on acting “as if”— but unlike theater, it occurs within domains (such as journalism, the legacy media, and academia) that claim to represent reality.

Sanewashing exploits this dynamic, presenting irrationality in forms that mimic legitimacy. The result is not shared understanding, but collective misrecognition.

Functionality and Instrumental Distortion

Leaders can advance claims detached from evidence or shared reality. Institutions under the leader’s sway may act on these claims.

Those who report on such claims may recognize the irrationality of the leader’s claims and actions yet present them as reasonable for instrumental reasons—career preservation, access, or safety. Hannah Arendt observed that sustained exposure to organized falsehood erodes the capacity to distinguish truth from fiction.

When irrationality is presented as if it is normal, public understanding is degraded, regardless of the reporter’s motive.

Normlessness

Beliefs shape behavior. Societies that function effectively depend on norms that distinguish acceptable behavior from that which is harmful.

When harmful, false, or incoherent ideas are framed as legitimate, those distinctions weaken.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim described a state of normlessness in which shared standards lose their force. His finding that normlessness increases suicide risk—especially during periods of social disruption and weak regulation—has been strongly supported by evidence since Durkheim initially published his studies in 1897.

While Durkheim focused on the central role of normlessness in suicide, normlessness would also be expected to erode the group’s capacity to exercise good decision making and judgment.

Sanewashing accelerates normlessness by rendering the indefensible discussable.

“Winning” as Substitute for Reality

The sanewasher may frame insane statements and actions as if they are “clever”, “smart”, strategic, or sensible in terms of a leader’s attempt to consolidate power. 

This variety of sanewashing confuses by changing the standards by which sanity is assessed. The leader’s speech and actions are no longer construed with respect to the degree to which they correspond to the way things really are (the normal yardstick) but are seen strictly in terms of whether they help the leader achieve his personal objective (i.e., “winning”). Statements and actions, no matter how inaccurate, absurd or harmful, are implicitly regarded as normal and acceptable if they can be understood to facilitate the Leader’s accumulation of power.

This shift replaces standards of truth and coherence with instrumental ones (such as effectiveness or dominance). This conflation of truth with power undermines the creation of consensually validated reality.

The tendency to exalt power (“winning”) over reality-contact may be regarded as a core feature of sanewashing. The group becomes increasingly confused as the standards used to assess sanity and normality shifts from reality contact to power.

When the reference point for assessing behavior exclusively resides in the degree to which it can be seen as enhancing the leaders’ prospects of consolidating power, considerations that relate to the leader’s capacity to make statements consistent with the way things really are – or to behave in a manner commensurate with the duties of his job – are no longer regarded as relevant.

Pathologizing Reality Contact

In more extreme cases, those who accurately describe reality are themselves labeled irrational. Critics of the impaired leader are assigned quasi-clinical labels (e.g., “deranged”) that invert the relationship between observer and observed.

In a culture where actions that would normally be regarded as abnormal and obviously harmful are instead framed as if they are reasonable, those who speak out against the normless leader can reasonably worry that they will be regarded as abnormal and even sick if they persist in their objections. Sanity is recoded as deviance, and deviance as sanity.

Such pathologizing constitutes sanewashing in its purest form, as it not only normalizes sanity but turns sanity into its opposite. Systematic efforts may be pursued that not only normalize the insane but “abnormalize” the normal.

The presence of concerted efforts to project insanity onto those who retain reality contact epitomizes the degree to which sanewashing undermines the group’s capacity to make sense of the way things really are.

Guardians of Sanity Recast as “Political Enemies”

The sanewasher recasts those who seek to limit harm as the insane leader’s “political enemies”, and in so doing, normalizes the leader’s attempts to persecute them. Because rivalry is normal and expectable, referring to the leaders persecution of those who seek to uphold laws and foundational norms as his prosecution of “political enemies” seems “normal” (even if indecent or illegal). This framing obscures the distinction between protection of the group and rivalry between individuals. 

Sane leaders have opponents. Casting those who accurately describe the way things really are – or those who seek to protect foundational norms and laws – as “political enemies” confuses attempts to contain the impact of the leader’s impairment with “politics as usual”.

Sanewashing renders profound dysfunction less visible by embedding it within familiar political narratives.

The Risks of Reality Contact

Acknowledging irrationality can be costly. Individuals may risk status, employment, or safety by refusing to participate in distortion. It is often safer to reinterpret dysfunction as strategy, eccentricity, or even genius.

Institutional norms—particularly in legacy media and academia—may reinforce this tendency by presuming rational intent behind even the most incoherent actions.

When Illness Strikes the Parent

The leader is experienced as the group’s parent and is relied upon to protect the group from harm. It is extraordinarily frightening to recognize delusion, extreme foolishness, or irrationality in individuals upon whom one depends.

Reframing a leader’s actions as reasonable – or even genius – protects followers from the fear and anxiety that would flow from recognizing the leader’s impairment. 

A group that gives itself over to an insane leader is itself dysfunctional. To acknowledge the group’s dysfunction is to confront the need to respond.  It is not easy to assume responsibility.

Pretending that the leader’s actions are sensible (or even wise) not only allows the group to evade the uncomfortable prospect of recognizing that it has been badly mistaken in its followership, it also spares the group from expending the effort that would be necessary to bring about a more satisfactory situation.

Ideology and Misattribution of Cause

Even the leader’s critics participate in sanewashing when they attribute irrational behavior solely to ideology or partisanship.

The ideologue who criticizes the insane leader may or may not discern the leader’s impairment, but by framing the leader’s actions in terms of ideology, faction, or party rather than dysfunction, the sanewasher obscures awareness of the impairment. Criticism is easily interpreted as an expectable response from the political opposition, thus further obscuring the impairment driving the leader’s dysfunctional action.

Under normal conditions, ideological frameworks often explain policy differences. When the leader is sane and operating in a manner that conforms to the tenets of an ideology, harmful actions or policies can be attributable to rigid adherence to an ideology.

But if a leader’s speech and action is persistently detached from reality, ideological explanations miss the point. When statements or actions that are patently false, incoherent or obviously harmful are attributed to the leader’s “conservative” or “progressive” way of thinking, for example, the leader’s behavior is normalized by framing it in terms of normal sources of intellectual divergence rather than impairment.

By treating incoherence and the production of harm as merely partisan or ideological in origin, observers normalize what would otherwise be recognized as a problem with reality contact.

Committing to Reality Contact

Sanewashing is not passive misinterpretation, but an active process that disrupts the capacity to apprehend the way things really are.

Sanewashing begins with treating the implausible as arguable and the incoherent as debatable. When unchecked, it culminates in a culture in which the accuracy of speech is rendered irrelevant, because speech’s import comes to reside not in clarity of communication but in the degree to which it consolidates power.

Under normal circumstances, ideological divergence can conduce to optimal group functioning. In a society awash in sanewashing, however, compromise arising from constructive synthesis of health-promoting values embedded in opposing ideologies cannot occur. Patently false, incoherent, foolish or obviously harmful ideas or actions are not recognized – and easily dismissed – but are rather attributed to partisan or ideological difference.

In a society awash in sanewashing, even the most concrete and plainly visible facts become contestable.

In such an environment, preservation of reality contact can no longer be assumed. It may require active, and sometimes costly, commitment.

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Notes:

David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2001).

Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker (1967).

Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897).