Madness is adaptive

Madness can make people unusually successful. That is a reason to believe it was selected for.

I recently read a book called Educated by Tara Westover. Apparently the book was hyped in 2018 when it came out. But I'm a bit off so I didn't notice. The book is a memoir focusing on the author's childhood. She grew up in Idaho with 6 older siblings and strongly religious parents who were against formal education and medicine.

Many books about crazy religious fundamentalists are about culture. Not this one. Tara's parents did not obey any culture: They created one themselves. Their mental illness was of the kind that creates new ways of living.

The father, Gene, is the center of everything. As an adult, Tara diagnoses him with bipolar disease. He is hit by both bouts of depression and megalomania. But most of all, he knows everything. He knows that man's knowledge is inferior to God's. He knows that doctors are evil and kill people. He knows that the government persecutes him through agents. 

His sidekick is his wife, Faye. Faye has one guiding principle in life: Whatever Gene says is right. Faye is intelligent, but immensely flexible. Whatever Gene says, can always be rationalized one way or another. 

Gene not only holds delusional beliefs. He is also very prone to taking risks. Not only for himself, but also for his family. He orders car trips during the night in bad weather, causing two serious accidents. At the first of the accidents Faye suffers from head injury. She has severe migraines for years, but never sees a doctor for them. Gene orders his children to work with him sorting scrap metal. He habitually throws pieces of metal around him, forcing nine year old Tara to spend much time flat on the ground to avoid being hit by a piece of flying metal. He designs working methods and machines that are obviously hazardous. His methods cause several severe accidents: A 14 year old son suffers a severe burn. An adult son falls on his head from a pallet several meters up in the air. At last Gene himself suffers severe burns on his face and hands. 

A new start

Paradoxically, those burns turn his luck for real. However strange it sounds, recklessly setting a gas tank on fire and burning his face and hands makes him rich. 

The most notable thing with Gene Westover isn't his madness. It is the success that was eventually brought on by exactly that madness. Throughout Tara's childhood, the family was rather poor. Gene had a simple excuse for his recklessness: That he needed to work fast to earn enough money to support the family. His wife, Faye, was more successful. She worked as a herbalist. When she started that business, she saw herbs just as supplements to ordinary medical care. But after the car accident caused her severe migraines, she came to believe wholeheartedly in the power of alternative, magic-style treatments: With her new health problems, she badly needed them to work. The more she believed in what she was doing, the more people believed in her. Gene had also persuaded her to take up the trade as an unlicensed midwife, serving expectant mothers who didn't want the birth registered or who couldn't afford hospital births. Altogether, Faye slowly and steadily built a reputation as a trustworthy provider of alternative medicine.

When Gene suffered his burns, Faye had her big break. The burns to his face and hands looked horrific. Tara reports that years after the accident, when Gene visited her in urban areas, people on the streets turned around to look at him. But locally, the accident earned the couple a great reputation. Gene described it as a miracle, and people started to treat him and Faye with reverence. The business expanded exponentially. Faye and Gene had to hire numerous employees to keep up with demand. The couple became awash with money, which they used to expand the house and prepare for disaster.

Maddeningly successful

In summary, Gene's very madness leads him to great financial success. First, his delusions caused him to persuade his wife to work with alternative medicine. Then his recklessness makes her brain-damaged. Her brain damage makes her actually believe in what she is doing. Then his recklessness makes him burn his face and hands. This gives his wife a poster case to exhibit her abilities, which makes the couple rich and highly regarded. You can't make this shit up¹.

Tara Westover's book made me think of a Substack debate from last summer: What is mental illness? People like Scott Alexander, Bryan Caplan and Emil Kierkegaard discussed the issue (Emil Kierkegaard collected the links and wrote something of a summary). At the time I didn't think much about it: it is just about definitions, I thought, so why do people care? 

But when I read about Gene Westover, I started to find the question relevant. Gene Westover was not successful in spite of his mental illness. He was successful because of it. Hitherto I have mostly heard the explanation that genes for mental illness are a bit like genes for sickle-cells: Good in certain doses, bad in larger doses.  

I don't think the theory is false. Many psychological properties are good in smaller doses. Autism, for example. Being a little socially blunt can free people to other causes, but being a social idiot is mostly no good at all. 

Still, I question the universality of the dilution theory. Providing Tara Westover is right, Gene Westover is mad. He is probably the node of madness genes, which are then diluted in his children, none of whom is mad the same way. Still, he could be said to be the most successful person of the family. Three of his children earned phDs, one wrote a best-selling book. But Gene is the one who got rich, in both money and status. Not in spite of his madness but because of it. 

Without his madness, Gene couldn't have achieved what he did. Pretending wouldn't have taken him that far. During the days immediately after suffering the burns, he refused pain relief, calling his suffering “the Lord's pain”. He was crazy enough to genuinely believe in his ideas. People believed in him because he believed in himself. 

The sorcerer gene 

Gene Westover is just one case. I know another rather similar case too: Anders and I once wrote a book about a couple not very unlike Gene and Faye: The wife was much like Gene: She knew everything and suffered from irrational paranoia. Her husband was much like Faye and provided unconditional support. Even so they were surprisingly successful. They made decent money from the strange hobby of selling glass artifacts and they were evolutionarily successful too with five children.  

I wonder if delusion, in itself, could actually be an advantage in the competition between humans. Humans are highly adapted to understand and predict each other. Crazy people evade those mechanisms. Being crazy is, more or less by definition, being unpredictable. That should give crazy people an advantage in some situations. Under the right circumstances, it gives crazy people opportunities to game the system. Sometimes without even understanding it themselves. 

Ordinary people have two modes of perception: What is empirically real and what is socially suitable. Delusional people have a third: Their own wild imagination. With some luck, this third mode of perception can make them seem both interesting and impressive in the eyes of others. They have the ability to see things that others can’t see which is a good starting point if one aspires to leadership positions. 

It is a high risk strategy. But high-risk strategies can pay off too. Especially on the male side, successful reproduction has sometimes been a freak occurrence. Whatever psychological properties Gengis Khan had, they (probably) made him extremely reproductively successful. No matter if those properties are disadvantageous in most cases: One freak occurrence spread those genes to hundreds of individuals in important places, who spread them further.

A fierce person

Gene was the most bombastically crazy person of the Westover family. But not the only one. His son Shawn was a reputed bully. He was regularly in fights and had a reputation for fierceness. Some people said Shawn was provoked just because he had a reputation of being invincible and insensitive to pain.

Shawn also sought out soft targets: He bullied and abused his sisters and girlfriends. When Tara was a teenager and Shawn was more than 20 years old, he moved back home to his family in order to help Gene with his construction business. 

At first, Shawn was nice to Tara. She joined him on a trucking mission lasting several days and he was only friendly to her. But he wasn't nice to his girlfriend. He played games with her and asked her to bring him x, and when she came with x, he claimed to have asked her for y. Later, he came to play such games with Tara too, and to use his martial skills against her: He dragged her by her hair and threatened to break her limbs. Once he actually broke her ankle. After such incidents, he apologized. 

Gene and Shawn were mad in two different ways. Gene deliberately exposed his loved ones to danger, but he wasn't a sadist. Shawn protested against Gene's recklessness. Numerous times he defended Tara against their father's unsafe practices  on the construction site. Instead, Shawn had a taste for domination and intimidation. He didn't want people to actually get hurt. He just used their vulnerability to dominate them. While Gene's recklessness caused grave injuries, Shawn was most of all a master of intimidation. He defended his loved ones against injury, until he could use the risk of injury against them to assert his domination. 

The portrait of Shawn made me think of Napoleon Chagnon's accounts of the Yanomamö. Shawn was much like Chagnon's description of the ideal Yanomamö man. He wasn't afraid of fighting other men. He used intimidation to dominate. He also showed his fierceness through strategically targeting physically weaker individuals: His wife, his sisters and ultimately his dog, which he butchered with a knife in rage when Tara tried (and failed) to turn their parents against him. 

Shawn is just a sidekick in the book. He is too ordinary to write a book about in his own right: Just another violent male. We have heard of his type so many times: From feminists, from anthropologists, from evolutionary psychology. And that makes him all the more interesting. Tara Westover's portrait of her brother is an unusual close-up of a much talked-about phenomenon: The typical controlling violent man.

I have never seen such a nuanced portrait of a bully. Also, Tara's depiction of her own role as a victim appears very honest. She genuinely loves her brother, just like he shows genuine affection towards her in his better moments. When Shawn falls from a motorcycle and gets a hole in his head where his brain is visible, Tara takes him to a hospital, although that means her father will never forgive her. This she is doing for a man who regularly pins her to the floor and presses on her windpipe, saying: “When you act like a child, you force me to treat you like one.”

Shawn is never close to his father's levels of success. His choice of a weak wife who won't stand up for herself gives him a premature child. At age 28, Shawn marries a teenager called Emily. Emily has a complicated pregnancy. Since conventional medicine is forbidden in the family, she receives no prenatal care and takes no particular precautions. Her child, a boy, is born at home at 26 weeks. He survives, but with permanently damaged lungs. At her next home birth Emily almost bleeds to death.

In a peaceful and monogamous society, Shawn isn't doing very well. However, in warlike and polygynous societies, people like Shawn have much better chances. What is an abhorred personality disorder in modern Western society, is a risky but potentially very success-bringing disposition in some rougher environments. 

What is crazy in one environment is sometimes outstanding in another. And evolution selects for the outstanding. 

Emile Wauters, The painter Hugo van der Goes in the Rouge-Cloître Abbey, 1872, Wikimedia Commons 

1. Unless Tara Westover did. But hopefully not. Her family members dispute surprisingly few concrete details of her account.