Civilization was built on madness

Delusions created religion. Religion created civilization.

Part 2 of a series on the evolution of delusional madness. Part 1 here.

I have a theory of human prehistory that I tend to return to: The main obstacle humans needed to overcome in order to form civilizations was not of technical, but of social nature. I wrote about it in Violent enough to stand still and Why do humans ever develop?

Humans spent the bulk of their history divided into bands roaming rather sparsely populated areas, with males fighting over females. For every male, it made sense to strive for as many females as possible. When everyone thinks like this, conflict is inevitable. On their own, men will never agree on who should have which woman.

Kin selection helps a bit. Brothers and cousins who cooperate against other men will be more successful in acquiring women. But there is a limit when kin selection doesn't apply anymore. People can join forces with rather close relatives. But they are deemed to disagree with other people: All family groups will think that they are the rightful proprietors of the fertile women. And that means that humans will be unable to cooperate on any larger scale.

Humans seem to have spent hundreds of thousands of years in this stage. For civilization to arise, this vicious circle needs to be broken by a series of freak events at the right place at the right time. Freak events that make people cooperate in spite of the eternal struggle over who should have what woman.

Previously I have made some loose suggestions of what such a freak event might consist of. Maybe in a scary leader that people fear enough to keep from fighting among each other. Napoleon Chagnon told about an extremely unpleasant man with a record number of lives on his conscience, who managed to gather an unusual number of followers among the Yanomamö. In areas more suited for large-scale warfare than the rainforest, such unpleasant personalities might have become the first generals.

But I think that apart from unpleasant people, another kind of people were also implicated in the freak events: Freaky people.

Overcoming nature

Let's think ourselves back in time to when all people lived in small bands that made war on their neighbors and kidnapped each other's women whenever they could. What would happen if someone came and proposed that the different bands should join forces and create a many times bigger and more powerful group?

Probably every sane individual would reject the idea as impossible, because people were enemies who had killed each other's relatives. And if they could once overcome their grievances, they would soon be enemies again. Too little held them together and they were all after the same women and material resources. So how could they cooperate?

Civilization is against nature. Once upon a time, it was as impossible for humans to create political units consisting of thousands of individuals as it is for apes, elephants and dolphins to do so today. Like all animals, humans are genetically selfish. This natural selfishness is a very real obstacle to human cooperation. Before people had seen millions of humans coordinate themselves in cities, every sane person most probably knew that it was impossible for humans to do so. If they didn't know it theoretically, they at least knew it from experience.

But what if your shaman got possessed by spirits and panickingly explained that you must find a very regular supply of enemies to sacrifice, otherwise the sun will die? If you came up with the rational argument that the sun has never died so that was probably not a big risk, you risked looking like a coward - a big risk in itself. So you would accept the idea that not catching enemies was the most dangerous thing to do and join the new, upscaled military expeditions. And the more enemies you caught, the more your social position rose. That way, believing what your delusional priest said became a no-brainer.

The people caught by those expeditions were unaware that the sun had made a severe threat against all humans. They just went about their lives as usual, with their usual priorities. And that put them at a disadvantage compared to the people who were more afraid of the sun than of fellow humans.

I don't know if the Aztecs got their idea that the sun was in danger from a person suffering from delusional mental illness. But it sounds rather much like something a paranoid person could come up with, maybe under the influence of drugs. By the time, the area in central Mexico to which the Aztecs migrated was already densely settled and comparatively socially complex. Still, a specific collection of sane and crazy ideas allowed a small group from northern Mexico to create an empire only a century or two after they arrived at what is now Mexico City.

To go against nature, you need to be crazy

History has been a battle between groups held together by ideas. Most of those ideas have been crazy, unrealistic ideas; so called religions. As atheists like to point out: Religions are in general based on beliefs that would have been considered mad delusions if a single individual made them up.

As we all know, on the individual level, being mostly realistic is very useful. Not only most humans, but also more or less all animals we know of, seem to perceive the world in line with the laws of nature. (It is difficult to know about animals, but they aren't widely suspected of hallucinating).

In spite of the obvious advantages of being realistic about immediate experiences, delusional mental illness is rather common among humans. About four percent of humans are affected by schizotypal personality disorder, which is characterized by magical thinking, paranoia and social withdrawal. Schizophrenia affects about half a percent of Western populations and seems to be one of few psychiatric conditions that exists all over the world, although under different names.

In many ways, delusional people are at a great disadvantage compared to realistic people. They are watching out for dangers that are not there. They are grappling for opportunities that do not exist. How can these kinds of mental states have evolved and how can they persist until present times?

One theory is that delusions are good for exactly what they are: Being delusional. For both individuals and groups of people, pursuing opportunities that do not exist is highly hazardous. But in particular for groups, the upside is huge. A collective idea, also if it is completely based on delusion, is the same thing as collective power.

How do these collective delusions arise in the first place? There are a few documented cases. One of the most famous is the story of Joan of Arc.

In it for the others

Joan was an ordinary illiterate peasant girl. Nothing was outwardly unusual with her, except her level of religious devotion. At 13, she started to receive visions of saints surrounded by angels. At 16, those visions told her that she needed to advise the crown prince and lead the French army to victory. Until she was executed at 19, she held steadfast to those ideas.

Marc Twain summarized Joan's situation at 16 as such:

“In Joan of Arc at the age of sixteen there was no promise of a romance. She lived in a dull little village on the frontiers of civilization; she had been nowhere and had seen nothing; she knew none but simple shepherd folk; she had never seen a person of note; she hardly knew what a soldier looked like; she had never ridden a horse, nor had a warlike weapon in her hand; she could neither read nor write: she could spin and sew; she knew her catechism and her prayers and the fabulous histories of the saints, and this was all her learning. That was Joan at sixteen.”¹

Joan knew another thing too: A legend that a virgin would save France was circulating in the French countryside. Joan got the idea that she was that virgin. To me that looks like a poster case of a grandiose delusion: Some delusional people think they are Napoleon. Some think they are sent to decode secret messages from aliens in order to save the human race (like mathematician John Nash). And some think they are the virgin that will save France. The only obvious difference is that the latter actually did succeed, more or less.

In theory, Joan of Arc might have been a great patriot who coldly calculated that she could save France through fooling everyone that she was the savior virgin. The main argument against this idea is that such a feat is almost impossible to pull off for everyone and even more so for an uneducated 16-year-old. Teenagers with grandiose delusions are simply much more common than teenagers with superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy.

I have searched for speculations on what mental illness Joan of Arc had and found surprisingly little. There are even outright denials that she had a mental illness on the ground that she was both coherent and highly intelligent². But there are indeed people today who are both coherent and intelligent and still strongly delusional. {³} There is even a name for the condition when a person has steadfast delusions but no other symptoms of schizophrenia: Delusional disorder. If an ordinary young girl today got the idea that she was sent to save the world by a higher power and insisted on advising the president, she would probably be considered to suffer from delusional disorder, grandiose type.⁴

If we conceive of successful people who see and hear strange things differently than unsuccessful people who see and hear strange things, we lose a potential explanation to why delusions exist: That they sometimes made people successful. Joan of Arc did not have any children: As much as anyone knows, she died a virgin. Her immediate family was burdened with saving her memory from disrepute. But she is widely credited with turning the hundred years war in a favorable direction for the French. Although the war lasted two decades after her death, those two decades were very successful for France. Her legend survives to this day: Joan of Arc is still a patron saint of France.

Painting of Joan of Arc, undated, Wikimedia Commons

The significance of this for the wider genetic cluster to which Joan belonged might be of enormous proportions. Genetic-cultural clusters with delusional individuals probably did better than genetic-cultural clusters without delusional individuals. Because although most of the delusions that were produced were useless or worse, some were extremely useful to make people act in synchrony, on and off the battlefield.

Breaking free from delusion

I don't mean to say that delusions were, or are, the only reason why humans cooperate on a larger scale. When humans see that cooperation works, they tend to join in. Delusions are only needed in order to overcome the initial collective action problem.

This process has been finely illustrated by a businessman called Mark Andrew Ritchie, who stayed for a time in a Yanomamö village as a part of his spiritual searchings. His book titled Spirit of the Rainforest (1996) tells the story of Jungleman, a then-old Yanomamö shaman. In the old, pagan times, Jungleman were better than most Yanomamö at communicating with the spirits. His inner house, as he put it, was filled to the limit with spirits with different personalities. The spokesperson for them was an extremely beautiful woman called Charming. Jungleman complained that his own son was only in contact with one spirit, the nervous deer spirit, which made the son do cowardly things like running into the forest when strangers arrived.

Jungleman has no reason to doubt the existence of the spirits - he sees them and talks to them very regularly. And still, towards the end of his life, he decides to throw them out. Over the decades, Jungleman observes a neighboring village going Christian. Its denizens has abandoned the old lifestyle of killing men and raping women. That village is led by Jungleman's former student Shoefoot, who has abandoned his spirits in favor of the Big Spirit that the missionaries told about. After a number of years, Jungleman concludes that the Christian village is much more successful than the villages that remained pagan. That conclusion leads him to expel his spirits, even though he is afraid they will kill him for doing so. Charming becomes extremely angry when Jungleman expels her and the other spirits from his heart. But he succeeded in getting them out and embraces the great spirit who tells people to keep peace and forgive.

Before seeing it happen, Jungleman has no idea that people can live together in peace and forgiveness. But when he gets to know that there are people outside the jungle who have better technology and better social organization than his people, he is curious to learn. He strongly prefers the missionaries to the anthropologists, because since white people evidently know a better way to live, he wants them to share what they know. In other words: Although Jungleman couldn't tell what a better way to live would be like, he had no problem imagining that it existed once he saw a few signs that it did.

Also after Jungleman encounters missionaries, and after Shoefoot begins his project to lead a Christian village, he keeps to his old ways and old spirits for a number of years. After all, his spirits are very loud, numerous and strong-willed. But as the years go by, Jungleman sees that the people in the Christian village actually get better lives, while the people in his village do not. Thereby he concludes that their spirit must be better. No matter that he can see and hear his spirits very clearly - at a certain level, the real world is what counts.

I believe that Jungleman's life journey was a very fast version of what the human race as a whole experienced during thousands of years: Before people saw civilization, they had no reason to believe that something like civilization could exist. Then someone got an idea that made people cooperate more closely than they had ever been able to before. When people saw the result of this unusually large cooperative venture, they were impressed.

That way, the history of civilization has been an interplay between collective delusions and people's realistic appreciation of the result of those delusions. Throughout history, the proportion between collective delusions and collective realism have indeed varied. Most notably in ancient Greece and Rome, the proportion of realism was quite high. But for most of history, people have motivated each other through confusing each other with beliefs that muddle the meaning of selfishness and altruism. Christians said that people who act selfishly were not selfish for real, because they would end up in hell and how stupid isn't that? And people acting unselfishly weren't unselfish for real because they were working on going to the best place imaginable. That kind of confusion is very common all over the world: The pre-Christian Yanomamö believed that people who didn't share what they had with others ended up in a pit of fire after death.⁵

In the 18th century a new project was initiated: the Enlightenment - an ambitious attempt to transparently build civilization for the sake of civilization. After thousands of years of civilization, a sufficient number of humans came to believe that their base nature can actually be overcome without magic. Or maybe, rather, humans needed to get far enough from their terrible nature to forget about its existence: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another madman, dreamed together his stories about the Noble Savage right when God started to fade from fashion.

The Enlightenment project brought enormous civilizational progress, but is, to this day, not entirely successful. As things are, humans are capable of peaceful and productive co-existence without supernatural delusions. But on a societal level they haven't yet been proven capable of reproducing above replacement level unless a deity tells them to. Thereby, we surely haven't yet seen the last trace of instrumental collective delusions.

Hyped French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault made a point of the changing attitudes to madness by the time of the Enlightenment. In history, Foucault meant, mad people were expected to serve some kind of function. They were outcasts, but also considered to possess their own kind of wisdom. With enlightenment, madness came to be considered both superfluous and dangerous - a phenomenon to be contained and, if possible, treated.

If people before the Enlightenment thought, or felt, that mad people filled a function, it might have been because they actually did. And if mad people were considered only disturbing and potentially dangerous after the Enlightenment, that might be because sane people finally started to believe that they can rule the world without resorting to delusions.

The shaman disorder

I got to think of all this when I learned about a specific personality type called schizotypal personality disorder, that is believed to affect about four percent of the population. Like the adjacent schizoid personality disorder, schizotypals are socially withdrawn and have trouble interacting with people. But the most characteristic symptom is that schizotypals tend to think in magical terms. Right here, in a society that encourages realism and science above all, they still persist in seeing supernatural patterns of meaning.

The first criterion for schizotypal personality disorder is Ideas of reference. Holding ideas of reference means attributing great importance to coincidences that the average person would call just chance happenings, like the appearance of the same kind of flower twice on the same road. The other criteria are:

• Odd thinking and speech, such as vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate, or stereotyped.

• Suspiciousness or paranoid ideation.

• Inappropriate or constricted affect.

• Behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar.

• Lack of close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives.

• Excessive social anxiety does not diminish with familiarity and tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than negative judgments about self.⁶

Isn't this the Shaman disorder? A person who is not very social, speaks metaphorically and has magical, supernatural experiences. If I were to employ a shaman, I would have written that in the job ad.

In the past, people prone to magical thinking must have been seen as being in closer contact with the spiritual world. For example among the Yanomamö, young men were chosen at least partially on a basis of merit to undergo shaman training. The prospective shaman was isolated in a hut and instructed to sit on a piece of furniture without touching the ground - not unlike the early Christian stylites. He was given very little food and lost weight. In other words, young men with tendencies to experience the supernatural were subjected to isolation and stress, in order to experience the supernatural even more.

I don't claim that the earlier mentioned Jungleman or Shoefoot or any other known Shaman suffered from schizotypal personality disorder. In particular the latter appeared to be an apt leader rather than a socially withdrawn person. Also, Jungleman was an extremely socially perceptive person, which is not a sign of social withdrawal.

But the existence of schizotypal personality disorder indicates that experiencing the supernatural is not a purely cultural phenomenon. If such people exist in modern society, where their experiences are discouraged by everyone except a few like-minded people, they are likely to have existed throughout history. People who are diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder experience the supernatural although that affects them negatively in practical life. That is a sign that supernatural experiences are not only culturally induced. If they were, people would have stopped getting them in modern times. Instead, people just stopped talking openly about getting them.⁷

The prevalence of schizotypal personality disorder is surprisingly high: about 4 percent. That means about one in 25. And that very roughly makes one shaman per group, given how big groups tend to be in primitive societies. About 5 percent of people with schizotypal personality disorder go on to develop schizophrenia. There are a number of scientific papers that suggest a link between schizophrenia and shamanism. There is also a related theory that some types of schizophrenia were a less debilitating condition in primitive societies. Helena Valero's account of her second husband Akawe supports that theory. Akawe suffered at least one episode of madness that would have sent him to a mental hospital in a place where such institutions existed. His friends had to tie him up for a period because he threatened everyone until he recovered after approximately a month. But on the whole Akawe was not an especially unsuccessful person. Although he found it difficult to retain women because he treated them very poorly, he nonetheless had a few children by at least two women. That is better than many other men (especially the many of them who die before they have children). There is a certain possibility that schizophrenia was both much more useful and somewhat less damaging in societies that blamed spirits instead of the mental constitution of the person involved.

What's next?

I'm not claiming that all delusional mental illness evolved because of group selection pressure. I'm only claiming that delusional mental illness is likely to have played a role in the evolution of religion, which in turn was important for the evolution of civilization. Delusions can be beneficial on the individual level too - I wrote about that in part one of this article series.

In cultural evolution, the best idea always wins. And the best idea is the idea that

1. make people work together and

2. gives them power over the material world.

On point 2, being realistic is superior. On the first point, having both realistic and plain mad ideas to choose between is ideal. For that reason, on a logical plane, societies that contain both realistic and delusional people should produce more socially useful ideas than societies that only contain realistic people.

This is not at all only a feature of the past. 700 years after the time of Joan of Arc, a man called Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States for the second time. Millions of people know more about Donald Trump and are more interested in him than I am. But from the perspective of a casual observer, Donald Trump never appeared to be a sane person. From the moment I first heard about him, I assumed he was a half-crazy person with a dubious grip of reality who people found amusing exactly for that reason. I believed that his candidature for the presidency was some kind of joke. Apparently, many others believed so too: Hillary Clinton was broadly forecasted to win the 2016 presidential election.

We were all wrong. Not about Donald Trump being a crazy-seeming person, but about people wanting such a person as their president. It seems as if Trump's lack of realism is his decisive advantage: If Americans can't agree over anything real, they can agree over something unreal instead.

As our culture has evolved, our dependence on delusional people has decreased. It has in no way disappeared.

1. http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_mark_twain.asp

2. James Phillips, Brian Fallon et al, Undiagnosing St Joan, 2024, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10979324/

3. I have personally met at least one, the woman Anders wrote about in his post Trial by a lying media. Let's call her Maria. Maria is the female part of a couple that lost their children to the Child Protection Services due to a miscarriage of justice. She wasn't at all the abysmal mother that the mass media claimed, but she was indeed strongly delusional in an unusual manner. At first I found it difficult to believe that she made things up entirely, because she was eloquent, clear and seemed to be above average intelligence. The only really troubling thing was her insistence that her father persecuted her and her children and her strange “proofs” that this was the case. Only after I talked to the accused father in question and two relatives of Maria's husband, I accepted that the story of the extremely sadistic father was most probably a complete fiction. The relatives on the husband's side didn't know at all that Maria's father was being accused of terrible things. They had been shunned by Maria since numerous years before, accused of completely unrelated terrible things. Only much later I learned that paranoid people are particularly prone to make family members targets of their paranoia.

4. That is, if she is not Greta Thunberg. Then she can be awarded the role of a mascot for some time before fading into obscurity.

5. That belief is reported about both in Ettore Biocca, Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, 1965, and in Mark Andrew Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman's Story, 1996

6. https://www.verywellmind.com/schizotypal-personality-disorder-4689994

7. The commonness of schizotypal experiences has been investigated in James McClenon, A community survey of psychological symptoms: evaluating evolutionary theories regarding shamanism and schizophrenia, 2011, Sci-hub link: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674676.2011.637913