I keep going back to Dostoyevsky:

"Shower upon him every earthly blessing,...give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then...man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish...simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element...simply in order to prove to himself—as though that were so necessary—that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all:...even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse..., simply to gain his point...he will...contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!"

That is "what's the matter with Kansas."