"There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep"

Claud Cockburn distills a paradox of fear: the most unnerving threats are those that don’t fit our usual categories of danger. A sheep signifies docility, predictability, the soft rhythm of the pastoral. To imagine it mad is to feel the ground shift under ordinary assumptions. Terror arises not from sheer power but from unpredictability where we expected calm, from a benign shape that suddenly refuses to follow its appointed script.

Sheep also carry a social meaning: conformity, herd instinct, the comfort of following. Madness in such a creature suggests a rupture inside the mechanisms of order. One deranged animal can spook the flock, turning quiet fields into chaos. Transposed into human affairs, the image warns how a single irrational actor can disrupt systems designed for consensus, an office, a newsroom, a political party, even a nation. The terror lies in contagion: norm-breaking draws attention, amplifies itself, and pulls others into its slipstream.

There is comedy in the formulation, but the comedy sharpens the edge. We hesitate before the ridiculous; hesitation gives the absurd real leverage. People are prepared to confront wolves; they are not prepared to wrestle a sheep, morally or practically. To act forcefully seems disproportionate, yet to do nothing invites escalation. Institutions similarly miscalibrate, having built defenses against obvious threats while leaving themselves exposed to the small, irrational ones that jam the gears.

The line also gestures at a subtler dread: the madness of everyday systems, petty authorities, bureaucratic whims, crowds moved by rumor. When what is meant to be harmless turns capricious, life becomes unworkable in a thousand trivial but inescapable ways. Hence the terror: vulnerability created by misplaced trust.

It is a counsel against complacency and a plea for attentiveness. Fearthe unreason that wears a familiar face, because that is the unreason most likely to pass checkpoints, enter the pasture, and scatter the flock.