In this essay, Dalrymple examines how modern reporting and legal reasoning often draw a false line between madness and ideological hatred. Using recent cases from Australia and Europe, he argues that mental illness does not arise in a vacuum:

Although delusions or hallucinations indicate madness, their content derives from the ideas and circumstances that are known to the mad person. This was recognized a long time ago. Thomas De Quincey, in his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” wrote of dreams induced by the consumption of opium, “If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium-eater, the probability is that … he will dream about oxen.”