When the world you inhabit is dark, mysterious, indecipherable, dystopian, hostile, menacing, and in short, surrealistic, you would tend to attribute advantages to mental illness. You would tend to say the mentally ill are better suited to apprehend or understand this world and definitely to cope with it and function in it.
If your environment is comprised of aggressive, violent people, you would want a leader who is equally aggressive, violent and unpredictable. You would like a narcissist, or a psychopath.
When the world is enigmatic, massive, incomprehensible, beyond the pale, rich and can of human gloomy, when you fail to see rhyme and reason and order and structure and justice and patterns, you would need them intermediaries such as prophets to explain to you the mind of God.
And of course prophets, the vast majority of them, were mentally ill.
Mental illness, therefore, is not necessarily always a negative adaptation.
In many environments, circumstances, periods in history, societies and cultures, mental illness has been considered an advantage, a positive adaptation, something to aspire to, or at the very least to adulate and admire, albeit from afar.
And so there are three reasons to believe that mental illness is an asset in our current reality in the world we live in.
Number one, no one wants to mess with a crazy person. Mental illness in this sense is protective because it broadcasts and externalizes potential unbridled, uncontrolled and unboundaried impulsive aggression.
And so mental illness has a deterrent value, it's a deterrence and prevents enemies from attacking you, prevents people from breaking norms and laws and rules, prevents others from exploiting you and abusing you and mistreating you because you're crazy and crazy people are best kept at arm's length you don't know what they might do in reaction to your misconduct or misbehavior.
So the overall impact is a reduction in misconduct and misbehavior. An imposition of a normative environment where the crazy person is the pivot and the axis around which everyone revolves as they try to second guess the nut case, to enter the mind of the nutjob, to make sense of the weirdo.
Donald Trump is an excellent example of this.
Now, second advantage.
Mental illness is widely considered as a portal. It affords access to information and insights which people believe are denied to mentally healthy and socially conformant people.
Crazy people don't conform to societal mores and norms. Crazy people have a mind of their own which is very distinct from the minds of healthy people, whatever goes on in this mind is sometimes supposed to be holy or sacred or insightful at any rate adding to the body of knowledge and information accessible to humanity.
And so mentally ill people are often thought to possess the ability to know what's right and to predict the future.
The more primitive, superstitious and prejudicial the society is, the more elevated the role of mental illness, the more pedestalized and idolized it is.
Because the mentally ill seem to have a key to a hidden, seem to possess a key to a hidden kingdom. This hidden kingdom is reality.
The reality we're in is an illusion or perhaps a conspiracy of some kind. Only the mentally ill know the truth. Only they have access to the fabric and fundamentals of the universe.
Mentally ill people are considered to be in the know. They are God's collaborators if you wish or long arms or extensions. There is something in mental illness that is indistinguishable from sainthood or holiness because religion itself is an extreme form of mental illness.
And so this is the second reason.
The third reason, the mentally ill can and do behave in ways denied to others.
The mental ill are disinhibited, they're impulsive, they're inconsistent, they're menacing, they're inexplicable and you don't see them coming in the majority of cases.
People admire these kinds of behaviors. People aspire to defiance and contumaciousness, rejection of authority, and the undermining and sabotaging and abrogation of the social structure and its rigid morality and norms.
In short, the mentally ill are the reification of rebelliousness. They're rebels.
And they are, in this sense, harbingers and messengers and pathfinders and groundbreakers. They show us the way.
Indeed, even in conservative psychology, we believe that there is an affinity between creativity and mental illness. I have a video dedicated to this. Eysenck said, for example, that psychoticism is just another name for creativity, or at least a very important ingredient in it.
So mental illness is a way to reconceive the world so as to yield unexpected new outcomes, some of which may be very favorable.
It is sometimes misperceived as an enhancement of self-efficacy.
So many people aspire to be mentally ill, actually.
Have a look, I mean, consider narcissism, pathological narcissism, which today is a defining, organizing principle and hermeneutic principle of modern society. Narcissism is a severe mental illness, and yet huge numbers of people, hundreds of millions, aspire to narcissism.
The other way, I watched a snippet of an interview with Jordan Peterson, and he was asked about Donald Trump. He has met him briefly, or claimed to have met him briefly.
And all he could say repeatedly, time and again, for well over two minutes, was he's so famous. Everyone knows him. He's so famous. It's amazing how famous he is.
And the envy was clear. The envy was evident. We envy the mentally ill in modern civilization, postmodern civilization. We envy them.
And that's why there are victimhood movements and so on so forth. These are all manifestations of mental illness.
Mental illness has become an aspiration, a goal, a target.
Because of the three reasons I've mentioned.
I'll summarize them for you.
No one wants to mess with a crazy person. Number one.
Number two, mental illness affords access to information and insightsdenied mentally healthy and socially conforming people, including the ability to know what's right and to predict the future.
And number three, the mentally ill can and do behave in ways denied to others. They are disinhibited, impulsive, inconsistent, menacing and inexplicable.
And this gives them an advantage, survival edge, and makes them the target of envy.