" the belief that the ruling class is mad is a self serving excuse for apathy,"

Strongly disagree. I repeat once again, "Read the book" and I do mean Ellsberg's book. And one of the reasons you should read his book (download it for free online - Ellsberg himself wouldn't mind - if you can't find a source where you can pay to buy it) is that an essential part of Ellsberg's long and thoughtful narrative is examining how it could be that very many individual people, none of which in any way in normal life you'd call a monster or crazy, all together by following what seemed to be best intentions and logic to try to reduce harm nonetheless ended up creating something which, collectively, is sheer insanity at unprecedented levels.

That's part of the problem, that individually sane people can end up doing crazy things when they undertake collective action. If you don't acknowledge that's a huge part of the problem, whatever you do to fix the problem won't work.

It's not about the "dominant" class either. If you look at the actual, prosaic details of how such decisions are reached and how such plans are adopted and implemented, it's not about class warfare. It's about people, often very small numbers of people, being human. It's also about how very small numbers of people can set in motion hugely impactful processes because other people aren't paying attention, sometimes simply because those other people are busy doing other things or simply don't want the headache of dealing with something difficult.

Yes, I get it that it's a heavy lift to read up on the basics of this stuff if you're not familiar with it. There's always the temptation, especially for Marxists who feel no need to learn the hard details of a subject because, after all, everything is explained by Marxist theory so no need to learn anything else (apologies for exaggerating a bit about the zealousness of Marxists...). But the hard core anti-Communist Cold Warriors in the US have the same problem, never bothering to learn anything about reality because all you need to know is that the Commies are always wrong and the Commies are always the source of everything bad, and the Only Good Commie is a Dead Commie. There. Simple as That.

That's one of the biggest problems that Ellsberg had been struggling with for over half a century in his efforts to replace the current suicidal US plan with a sensible plan for security: people have become so incredibly intellectually lazy that instead of learning the basics of a technically difficult, or depressing, matter, they just reach for automatic application of argumentative skills they already have: attack the bearer of bad news in an ad hominin attack, apply Marxist theory, apply MAGA theory, apply LGBT+ theory or whatever, but they don't do the heavy lifting to know for sure down to the marrow of their bones exactly how many thousands of nukes are ready to go on a moment's notice, the hundreds of people who can set them off into total war, and the simple mathematics and physics of what the catastrophic result will be.

I think times now are worse than ever. Back in the 60's at least in the US every schoolchild had regular drills in school to "drop and cover", taking shelter under their desks in the schoolrooms in case of nuclear attack, doing drills to run quickly but smoothly down to shelters in the school basement, and so on. So people were more aware then of the reality of the threat than now. I think that helped people get over the hump of learning more about the matter, and as a result that learning helped power a generation of anti-nuclear war activists who were active in the 70's and 80's. But you don't see that today. On the contrary, the Greens in Germany are the most blood thirsty advocates of war with Russia.

So, you're right when you say that it might not be taken seriously that the dominant class has in fact turned suicidal. But I'd go further and say that the entire society in the west doesn't take it seriously that they've all turned suicidal, not just hanging it on the "dominant class," which these days is just as self-delusional as the average citizen.