Psychotic as in 'out of touch with reality'.  Why are we so sick and what is the antidote?

Too many 'artists' in the public sphere operate without insight - just replicating, refabricating, impersonating with no social relevance or emotional connection.  The whole point of pop, the reason it worked, was that it connected the now - what was really happening - with the strongest, most vital emotional expressions of the time.  Talent is not enough if you've got no truth.

Our brightest stars are the ones who reveal something real about what we are as well as what they are.  That's the connection.  And at present we're just submerged with exhibitionists trying to impose their own vanity onto us. A real star is someone who ignites the public's imagination - not someone who brainwashes them.

One glimpse at TV, Facebook, the papers, internet blogs and news sites and it's clear we have become so disconnected with the intolerable truth, we cling to false visions, false deities as broken, dull and flawed as we are.  Only now they're idolised!

So there you have society's psychosis. It's not even interesting madness - I could bear it if it was. No wonder the need for anti-depressants is up! It's a psychotic mediocrity to deflect us from the truth.  To prevent us from seizing time, our greatest asset, and our capacity for change.  To stop us from abandoning our total dependence on Google and hard drives and using our own innate search engine on our brain and heart - the most essential hardware.  Simple steps to sanity.

If we don't, we become imprisoned by despair, poverty and the dictates of the fashionable elite. Buoyed up by false hope and this plethora of illusions, we become total consumers: to have and to hold til death us do part. Success is instant as is gratification. The riots of 2011 should have been no surprise.  Whole towns and cities are identified and centred around retail parks, shopping malls.  That's the declaration of Mammon we have all passively absorbed: our reason to live is to buy.  'I shop therefore I am'. If you're not buying, you don't exist. You're a nothing, a nobody. You are what you wear, what you own...til you realise it owns you.  Try finding the town centre of Telford, Manchester, Ipswich or Birmingham. We used to have a soul, an eye, a brain, a heart, a body that lived, moved, exerted, embraced change.  That's what made culture. Not this fossilisation by FTSE.  Now our culture is limited to a screen, a fridge, mouse clicks and thumb flicks and as much intoxication we can get to numb us to the fact we've become chubby scared robots who live life through computers.  Covetousness is termed ambition, hoarding is called 'saving' and greed is defined by industriousness. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy - shoplifters of the world united. We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like. Advertisers set out to make us feel ashamed if we do not wear named brands, have the most up-to-date gadgets or most fashionable pals. Today's heroes are those who go from rags to riches instead of those who give up their riches to become voluntarily poor.  Our journalists and politicians are morally bankrupt and ineffective activators.

Nations have always been controlled by a dream, an idea. It used to be the capitalist dream - the 'American' dream - although wasn't it really everyone's?  To live in a fair world where talent and hard work was rewarded by success, regardless of race, gender or creed?

But this dream has cracked and crumbled with the growing truth of the murder, greed and envy such power and 'happiness' breeds.

And the new dream? We abandoned our imaginations and the truth ages ago, surrendering to information. The best formula people are coming up with is: 'Just pretend it's not happening and it'll go away. We're too busy watching 'X Factor' to think.  Someone else will sort it, someone else is to blame.'

Artists used to be prescient, inventive, truly creative. They put their dreams into action, made them real.  From Leonardo da Vinci to Pink Floyd's 'Waiting for the Worms' (released 1979, two years before the 1981 Brixton riots started), Tupac's apocalyptic vision of the future of inner cities worldwide, M.I.A.'s anthems for refugee survival in the 'democratic developed' - and ignorant - 'world'.

But all this is now too close to the bone, not to the public's palate. We want pure unadulterated crap and escapism in high doses: the fake, the phoney, the vaguely familiar is to the taste of a corrupted generation.

The way out?  Stop worshipping at the altars of consumerism and, ironically, the human race will start moving again.  Start creating.  Start thinking. Start believing.  The truth.

Never was money so old.