Contemplating the Collective Absurdity Behind the United States' War with Iran

Twelve days have passed since the war with Iran began on February 28, 2026. While President Donald Trump said the Iran war will be over "very soon," the world has been witnessing a spiraling cycle of uncertainty and escalating absurdity without a sight of ending. This raises a deeper question: how could the United States—the most powerful country in the world, equipped with one of the most extensive intelligence networks and a highly sophisticated system of checks and balances designed to prevent major strategic errors—make the decision to strike Iran? It appears to be a profoundly consequential and arguably a huge absurd decision, one that has triggered a chain reaction of uncertainty and further absurdity that now seems increasingly difficult to contain. Perhaps the decision was not the product of a single individual, but rather the outcome of a form of collective absurdity—shared by a majority of people who hold a worldview that glorifies ego as the engine of progress, insists that compromise with society dilutes greatness, and gradually accumulates countless small absurdities under the order-induced blindness until a huge one finally emerges when interacting with reality. In such an environment, collective humility and wisdom gradually erode. This dynamic can be better understood by comparing the contrasting philosophical perspectives of Wild Wise Weird—a book that encourages readers to recognize the absurdities embedded in human thinking—with those of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, works whose ideas have shaped American ideological discourse for more than six decades.