In the 1960s, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing argued that insane individuals were operating according to a hidden rationality, adopting strategies forced upon them by repressive and dishonest families. Society was mad, not them. Psychotic individuals often named uncomfortable truths about their families that others were invested in denying. Laing’s theory is now discredited within psychiatry, but in the symbolic world of politics it still resonates. Only the desequilibrado have the audacity and agency to take on an unhealthy, entrenched status quo.