The game: How delusions can make people excellent players

Part 1 in an article series on the evolution of madness

Human history can be seen as one big and very complex game. On the one hand, we have individuals competing against each other within groups. On the other hand we have groups competing against other groups. Both extreme selfishness and extreme altruism has a place: When selection pressure is more skewed towards groups against groups, altruism is more important. When selection pressure is more individual against individual, egoism dominates. In a war between groups, altruism within the group can mean the difference between victory and annihilation. But in times of peace, the individuals with a more egoistic leaning will be able to bend the rules in their favor, giving them an advantage over their more altruistic competitors.

This gives rise to an enormously complex situation. As complex as the human race itself. Still, I think that game theorists should be capable of explaining some of it. Given enough time, populations with a winning mix of personalities will win the important wars and take over the entire field. Such a process has formed the baseline for the personality structure of the human race. Groups consisting of only egoists were defeated and annihilated. Groups mostly consisting of strong-willed visionaries were also annihilated, because they couldn't pull in the same direction. Populations totally consisting of conformists also fared badly, because they had no visions and no direction. With time, populations with a mix of different traits spread across the globe.

On the individual level, surprise people

How do individual traits evolve within such a victorious blend of personalities? Individuals are in a complex situation. On the one hand, there are mechanisms designed to prevent them from being egoistic. On the other hand, resources are acutely limited. Before modernity, there was a constant zero-sum game going on. In sparsely populated places the game was mostly over women. In densely populated places it was mostly over arable land. In either case, individuals had to make sure that they were not left without those too-scarce resources.

How can resources that everybody wants be acquired? Either, be unusually useful so people around you reward you out of gratitude. Be smart, be brave, work hard. Or be a great cooperator who teams up with other great cooperators who share the spoils equally, excluding less good cooperators. But with cooperative strategies comes strategies that prey on cooperation. After all, a good cooperator will only get their fair share. A person who resembles a cooperative person, but in fact acts treacherously in unexpected ways, might increase their chances of acquiring more than others. It is a dangerous game, because such a person runs a very high risk of being excluded from cooperation or even killed outright. But what works, works, and getting killed wasn't exactly unusual among perfectly honest cooperators either in less civilized environments.

The ubiquitous chicken race

I think there is a name for such a covertly selfish strategy: A personality disorder. According to Wikipedia, 9 to 11 percent of humans have a personality disorder. That is a bit too much to be an accident. I don't say that all of the cirka ten percent of people with personality disorders are covertly selfish. But I think that a significant proportion of them are.

Personality disorders make people different. That is the very definition of a personality disorder: A personality that is so different from the norm that it makes people difficult to deal with. Those differences can both affect people's sense of morality and their sense of fear.

Among the Yanomamö horticulturalists of the Amazon, fierceness was highly valued. The potential wins of scaring others were enormous, because scaring others meant forcing one's will on others (among other things, one's will to reproduction). The potential losses were also enormous. Scared people are dangerous people. Fear exists for a reason: It keeps people alive.

That equation caused a very tender balance. Being too scared was dangerous, because then people would attack you and take everything you had (most notably, your wife and children) without the risk of retaliation. Being too bold was also dangerous, because then you were almost certain to face retaliation.

That is, unless you seemed so unpredictably dangerous that no one dared to attempt to retaliate. Rule breaking tends to be punished. But it can also be rewarded, if you break rules in a way that people don't dare to punish. It seldom lasts forever. If you are dangerous enough, people will sooner or later get together and join forces against you. But it might take years. Years you can use to impregnate numerous women.

Napoleon Chagnon tells about a notorious Yanomamö leader called Möawe. He was, in Chagnon's words, “the nastiest man I have ever met in any culture anywhere”¹. The Yanomamö kept close track of people's killing scores and Möawe had the highest of any person known: He had been implicated in the killing of 22 men². Möawe was the leader of an exceptionally large group of Yanomamö.³ People sought out his protection because they felt safer close to a notorious killer.⁴

Another well-known killer was the second husband of Helena Valero, Akawe. He was mentally ill in the classical sense. He had at least one psychotic episode, in which he hallucinated over beautiful women who had come to take him away. He was shouting and biting so his friends and relatives had to tie him up. He remained that way day and night and refused to eat, until he became thin and weak. The shaman took hallucinatory snuff to scare away the spirits that haunted Akawe and he finally recovered into his ordinary state.⁵

That ordinary state of Akawe was less obviously mad, but still nasty in an irrational way. For example, on several occasions Akawe senselessly tried to kill Helena, the mother of two of his children, delusionally blaming her for his failure to force a younger woman to marry him. He denied Helena and the two sons meat he had caught. Still, he wouldn't let Helena be. When she escaped with the sons to another Yanomamö group, he followed them because he reportedly became very sad when he found their hearth empty.⁶

It seems that Akawe was fearless because he was irrational. He was prepared to cut the chances of survival for his sons through killing their mother, because he felt like it. The same way, he was prepared to cut the chances of survival for himself (and thereby his sons, since sons of killed men were targets themselves) through killing men that other people didn't dare to kill.

The very irrationality of this man made him capable of defying the balance between aggression and vengeance. He was fearless in a way that people weren't used to, so people weren't readily prepared to counter him. For that reason it took them time to join forces against him. Time he could use to impregnate and maltreat women. Eventually he did recognize that people were after him. For that reason he followed Helena out of the rainforest with the white people, and then joined another Yanomamö group, unrelated to his previous killings.

Those who won't be mortified

It is impossible to know what Möawe and Akawe thought: They left no memoirs. But it would be quite natural if their unusual and unexpected actions were based on unusual thoughts and feelings.

A certain passage in a modern book made me think of these men and their successes:

“It’s almost as though I have to do some things rather than want to. I’m even tempted to say that it sometimes feels as though I will die if I don’t follow it through, like I have no other choice.”⁷

The modern book in question is an autobiography called the PDA Paradox by Harry Thompson. Harry, who grew up in the British upper middle class, felt so compelled by his own impulses that they became more important than fear. Unlike most other children, Harry couldn't be scared or shamed into adapting to the will of others. In school, he felt that he always had to set the agenda instead of the teacher. If a classroom was silent, he felt the need to play air guitar loudly. Or to reach for his male classmates’ genitals and make the sound of a turkey. If he hung out with other children, he felt a compelling need to put himself in the center of attention, for example through kissing another boy.

“I acted like this because I felt there wasn’t really much else I could offer apart from publicly making a complete nincompoop out of myself. The only other option would be to remain on the periphery and to not say a single word, because to be caught in the middle, as the one doing the laughing rather than the one doing the funnies, would be unheard of in my world. It didn’t only seem like a dull and unappealing role in a social context but the very thought of me assuming such a role made me feel ill. My inner Loki would always intervene if ever the limelight happened to move away from me. I’d be plagued and harassed by these urges to act antisocially and/or absurdly. ‘Go on. Just do it. What’s the worst that could happen? If you don’t do it I’m going to make your life miserable!’ the Loki would say.”⁸

Harry's compulsion to follow his impulses continued into his teens. At 14 he broke into a conversation between a teacher assistant and some other teenage boys on some mundane topic, with the words:

‘Well, maybe it’s because your mum fucks dead people!’,

directed at the teacher assistant. He still can't explain why he felt the sudden need to say that. He just did, so he said it.

If Harry had lived in a rough environment like the one of the Yanomamö, he would most probably either be dead or a leader. In such an environment, that tends to be the effect of compulsively putting oneself in the center of social life and reflexively insulting people the worst way possible. Such insults would either have made him notorious for his bravery or dead because of it.

Harry is diagnosed with Pathological Demand Avoidance. That means that he is allergic to other people's interests, if he can not be convinced that those interests are his interests. In other words, he is a natural born tyrant: A person in authority who systematically avoids wishes and demands from others is the very definition of a tyrant. As an upper middle class person in modern Western society, Harry never reached a position of authority. He couldn't study or hold down a job, because all jobs demanded that he would pretend to be someone that he was not. He came to make a living from making YouTube clips telling about how it is like being him, which became popular with parents of children with Pathological Demand Avoidance. Except from that modest level success, the only area in which Harry reports straight success is the seduction of women:

“Seducing girls for the purpose of, say, a kiss, a one-night stand, or some other casual tryst, has always been an area where I demonstrate considerable proficiency”, he writes.⁹

Why would girls be unusually attracted to Harry Thompson? Because Pathological Demand Avoidance is the same thing as dominance. And women highly appreciate dominance in short-term liaisons. The man who was unable to hold a job, earned little money and once couldn't stop himself from pissing in his friend's food package got the chicks (take that, incels!). Women's instinctual attraction to his personality type gives a hint that once upon a time, pathologically selfish men who managed to stay alive were important men.

In the shadow of Donald Trump

Harry Thompson is most of all successful at being unsuccessful. But other former kids with demand avoidance syndrome are doing much better. I recently read psychologist Mary Trump's first book about her uncle Donald Trump. From his early years, Donald is described as a bully. He teased his younger brother and stole his toys. He was extremely sloppy and threw trash around him, no matter how much his mother threatened him. In school he bullied children too young to fight back and got into physical fights. Due to his behavioral problems, his parents sent him to a military academy from age 13.¹⁰ He did rather well in military school, but he returned to his habit of throwing paper when that became possible again: In the early 1990s, Mary was invited into Donald's private jet. She writes:

“As soon as we reached cruising altitude and we could unbuckle our seat belts, one of his bodyguards handed him a huge stack of mail after setting a glass of Diet Coke next to him. I watched as he opened one envelope after another, then, after examining the contents for a few seconds, threw them and the envelope onto the floor. When a large pile accumulated, the same guy would reappear, pick up the wastepaper, and throw it into the garbage. That happened over and over again. I moved to another seat so I didn’t have to watch.”¹¹

Mary Trump makes the case that Donald Trump suffers from grandiose delusions and that those delusions were shaped early-on by a dysfunctional family environment. Mary blames her grandfather, who favorized Donald and taught him that he was more important than others.

I felt skeptical while I read it. Not because I doubt Mary Trump's account of the family in which her father grew up, but because for intensely personal reasons, I no longer believe that any special environmental influences are needed in order to develop a delusional personality disorder. I have six children, aged 1 to 18. Four of them, (including a three-year-old, I can't tell about the one-year old), behave clearly prosocially. One, a 16-year-old we can call Alma, suffers from grandiose delusions bafflingly similar to those of Donald Trump. She seems steadfastly convinced that following her impulses, whichever they happen to be at the moment, will lead to great success. I tried to explain to her that this is not the case. This led her to the conclusion that I'm psychologically abusive: Since she knows that she is doing fine (in spite of spending her days at home cooking inedible food for herself instead of going to school), then I must be an abusive person who tries to gaslight her. Alma's accusations moved her to a foster home last summer. After a few months she discovered that her foster parents were psychologically abusive too, because they also say mean things to her that she knows aren't true.

“You're fired!” she once told her foster father, apparently in earnest. “How are you going to solve this?” is another recurring comment to her foster parents, for example when she has crashed her bike for the nth time and left it along the road and now needs to get to school somehow. And, just like the young Donald Trump, she throws trash everywhere around her in a manner that disturbs people's social sensitivities.

The whole thing has shaken my entire picture of madness and sanity. Before I thought that people were either mostly realistic or completely psychotic. Now I have seen myself that there is a vast middle ground in between. I can say for sure that I didn't teach my daughter that she was the center of the universe. I was indeed very happy to have a precocious and talented child. In retrospect, maybe a bit too happy. But excessive praise during early childhood is the most normal child raising practice of the Western middle class - it can't possibly cause grandiose delusions of that severity. Because of my own experiences I'm skeptical of Mary Trump's environmentalist explanation. It doesn't have to be that Donald Trump developed grandiose delusions because his father was a bully who believed in his son's delusions (although I see no reason to doubt Mary Trump's assertions that he was). Some people just seem to be wired that way.

Donald Trump always, delusionally, thought he was something special. In a series of strikes of luck, it took him to the most prestigious post in the world. Not because everyone believed him. But enough people found his grandiosity to serve their own purposes.

Mary Trump reports from the Trump office in the early 1990s:

“He was usually on a call, which he’d put on speaker as soon as I sat down. The calls, as far as I could tell, were almost never about business. The person on the other end, who had no idea he or she was on speaker, was looking for gossip or for Donald’s opinion about women or a new club that had opened. Sometimes he was being asked for a favor. Often the conversation was about golf. Whenever anything outrageously sycophantic, salacious, or stupid was said, Donald smirked and pointed to the speakerphone as if to say, “What an idiot.”¹²

In a society where murder is the basic way of being, people with grandiose or paranoid delusions can be unusually aggressive in a way that defies people's expectations. In a more peaceful society, people with grandiose delusions can be unusually bold in a way that defies people's expectations. Since people with grandiose delusions are convinced of their own greatness, they don't fear failure the same way as the rest of us do. That can make them more fun, and much braver. Donald Trump's lack of shame simply gave him opportunities that other people lacked. People around him saw different uses in him: For entertainment, for earning money and for their own political purposes. Many people like a jerk, as long as it is their jerk. The enemy of the enemy is a strong force.

Donald Trump's grandiose delusions helped him survive his bankruptcies. Since Donald Trump was shameless enough to put his name on his buildings, the buildings were worth more if he was still in business. “The cost of throwing him out, rebranding and changing his name everywhere would be very high,” a person involved in Donald Trump's casino bankruptcies of the early 1990s reported.¹³ In other words, also the banks were in the position where it benefited them to support Donald Trump's delusion of being a successful businessman, although he wasn't.

Delusional player in action. Wikimedia Commons.

Through such a series of lucky strikes, Donald Trump climbed his way to the presidency of the United States. Countless people with the same kind of grandiose delusion instead become homeless and miserable. Grandiose delusions are a mental state with a great distribution: A few delusional individuals probably get so successful from believing that they are successful that they perpetuate the genes that predispose people for grandiose delusions.

I believe my daughter is part of the collateral damage here. For an unconnected and not at all brave young girl, grandiose delusions are likely to lead to ruin. Grandiose delusions continue wreaking havoc with people's lives, because once in a while, they actually make people powerful and evolutionarily successful.

The princess delusion

I have hitherto focused solely on the male side. That is easier because reproductive variability is higher on the male side, which makes it disproportionately responsible for evolution. As I stated in The Tomboy Manifesto: Female personalities should skew more male than the reverse. Since evolution took place more on the male side, males should be better adapted to their roles than females.

Nonetheless, there has been evolution on the female side too. Including, probably, of delusional mental illness.

One glaring example was Opal Whiteley, born in 1897, as the daughter of a lumberjack and a postmistress in Oregon. Opal was very intelligent and precocious and held a deep interest in nature. In her early 20s she approached a Boston publisher with a manuscript. The publisher was not impressed by the manuscript, but he was impressed by Opal’s account of her extraordinary childhood. He asked her if she in any way had recorded this and she said that she had saved diaries in a shoebox in Los Angeles from when she was 6 to 7 years old, which a jealous sister had torn into pieces. She sent after the shoeboxes and pieced the torn pages together. In the introduction she explained that she was not the child of Mr and Mrs Whiteley, but had been brought in to replace a child they had lost. She was really the daughter of Henri d’Orleans, a descendant of Louis Philippe, the last king of France, and her true name was Princesse Françoise d’Orleans.¹⁴

Opal Whiteley working on her specimen, circa 1920, Wikimedia Commons.

The diary does not seem to be the authentic work of a child. It contains repetitive grammar errors, although children's grammar tends to be very good. It contains references to famous historical people, French Catholic rituals, French geography and other things that Opal couldn't have known about at the age of seven.¹⁵

The diaries became very famous at the time. Opal acquired patrons from among the nobility of England, in particular Viscount Grey of Fallodon, who supported her until his death in 1933. She was also entertained as HRH Mlle Françoise de Bourbon-Orleans by the Maharana of Udaipur. Her charms made people in various places support her, but she was also socially tactless and made no close, lasting relationships. The latter is an obvious reason why she had no children, although she expressed her longing for children in her writings.

Still in 1936, when she was about 39 years old, an article in the Evening Standard reported that while the French Royal Family considered her an impostor, many members of the British nobility still accepted her story. Most people who met her found her touching and felt unable to dismiss her story, the newspaper reported. But as she aged her behavior got increasingly strange. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a British mental hospital at the age of 48 and spent the rest of her life there until she died in 1992, at the age of 94.¹⁶

Opal Whiteley eventually went mad for real. But before that she spent her reproductive-age years in much nobler company and, at times, with a standard of living surpassing that of her background. It might be that many women throughout history have done versions of what Opal did and created an impression that they were entitled to more resources than reality predicted. Only the most glaring examples of such behavior get famous. It could be that people with lesser versions of delusional entitlement were more successful than the most famous, widely talked-about cases.

The social nature of delusions

When doing research for this article, I looked for literature on the nature of delusional mental illness. I hoped to find a book-length catalogue of what people with delusional mental disorders believe. I didn't find such a book. Only a 2020 scientific article called Derationalizing Delusions by Vaughan Bell, Nichola Raihani, and Sam Wilkinson.¹⁷

The article very credibly claims that the unusual thing with delusional people is not their low level of realism, but their relationship to what other people believe. Most people in most societies hold unrealistic and illogical beliefs to some degree. The unusual thing is to go against the crowd in one's unrealism. Ordinary people have two windows to reality, used in various proportions: What other people say and what they perceive with their own senses. People with delusional mental illnesses have a third window: Things they make up themselves.

There is a very logical reason to why delusions would be mainly on social themes: because it is mainly in the social world that being delusional can pay off: Nature doesn't care what you believe. Other people do. For that reason, delusional beliefs evolved much more around social facts than around the material world. Some common types of delusions are hazardous but potentially very rewarding social strategies that evolved to game the social system.

However, the evolutionary reasons I have mentioned above only constitute one part of the probable reasons for delusional thinking patterns to evolve. In my next post I will outline an entirely different set of reasons.

1. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages, 2013, 50 percent of e-book

2. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages, 2013, 50 percent of e-book

3. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages, 2013, 62 percent of e-book

4. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages, 2013, 28 percent of e-book

5. Ettore Biocca, Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, 1965, 1996, page 294

6. Ettore Biocca, Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, 1965, 1996, page 305-311

7. Harry Thompson, The PDA Paradox: The Highs and Lows of My Life on a Little-Known Part of the Autism Spectrum, 2019, 36 percent of e-book

8. Harry Thompson, The PDA Paradox: The Highs and Lows of My Life on a Little-Known Part of the Autism Spectrum, 2019, 27 percent of e-book

9. Harry Thompson, The PDA Paradox: The Highs and Lows of My Life on a Little-Known Part of the Autism Spectrum, 2019, 92 percent of e-book

10. Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, 2020, 22 and 24 percent of e-book

11. Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, 2020, 66 percent of e-book

12. Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, 2020, 66 percent of e-book

13. Forbes writes: “He’s able to demand a high percentage of reorganization equity based on the value his brand brings to a casino or hotel operation. So says Edward Weisfelner, a partner at New York firm Brown Rudnick who was involved in two of the three casino bankruptcies, first representing bondholders, then as counsel to Carl Icahn’s firm Icahn Partners, who tried to buy most of the debt in Trump Entertainment Resorts. “The leverage he had was that his name was on the side of his casinos,” said Weisfelner. “The cost of throwing him out, rebranding and changing his name everywhere would be very high. ”

Added Joseph Weinert, senior vice president at Atlantic City casino consultancy Spectrum Gaming Group, who has produced research for Trump: “
The stakeholders decided they were better off with Trump’s name than they were without it.”

14. Sula Wolff, Loners - The Life Paths of Unusual Children, 1995, 83 percent of e-book

15. Sula Wolff, Loners - The Life Paths of Unusual Children, 1995, 84 percent of e-book

16. Sula Wolff, Loners - The Life Paths of Unusual Children, 1995, 87-88 percent of e-book, Wikipedia on Opal Whiteley

17. Vaughan Bell, Nichola Raihani, and Sam Wilkinson, Derationalizing Delusions, 2020

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702620951553