Of madness, crisis, and Barack Obama
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
Pscyhologist Nasser Ghaemi is the author of the provocative new book A First-Rate Madness, a treatise that argues that many of history’s greatest leaders have had minor to moderate mental illness, and that their mania did not in fact detract from their leadership capacity but significantly aided it. NPR ran a fascinating interview today with Mr. Ghaemi about his work, and though the subject of current national leadership did not come up, Mr. Ghaemi’s thesis may shed some valuable light on the topic. From the New York Observer’s book review:
“I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1841. According to Mr. Ghaemi, this is a kind of boast; Lincoln’s greatness was nourished by his glumness. “Lincoln’s depression enhanced his political realism,” he writes. Mr. Ghaemi identifies four categories of aptitude in which the compos mentis lag the mad: resilience, creativity, realism and empathy. A panoply of studies supports these claims. The mentally healthy tend to be overconfident, uninspired, thin-skinned and soundproofed from the suffering of others. Writes Mr. Ghaemi, “Depression deepens our natural empathy, and produces someone for whom the inescapable web of interdependence … is a personal reality, not a fanciful wish.” This is the theory of depressive realism. Those who see the glass as half empty may simply have better eyesight. Normality is a form of unreality.
To all this, however, Mr. Ghaemi appends two whopping provisos. The first is that mentally unbalanced leaders can succeed only in times of crisis. “In these hard times,” as William Tecumseh Sherman said in 1861, “it is hard to say who are sane and who are insane.” As the crisis ebbs, and the distinction between sanity and insanity reboots, the latter loses its usefulness. The trajectory of Churchill, who prospered in wartime but floundered in intervals of peace, exemplifies this.
The other proviso is a paradox, which Mr. Ghaemi terms “The Goldilocks Principle.” The Goldilocks Principle states that insanity is beneficial only in moderation. Too much insanity—outright psychosis—is debilitating. Too little does nothing.
Yet insanity is excessive by definition, a lawless swerve from the norm, and anything less is going to be hard to distinguish, as it were, from mere distinction. For instance: “It takes more than a typical amount of self-awareness,” Mr. Ghaemi writes, “to realize that one is wrong and to admit it.” This is true. Yet it seems unlikely that self-awareness must travel to the cusp of psychosis before it can admit to error. Mr. Ghaemi assures us we are drinking moonshine, but it tastes like mostly water. “[F.D.R.] knew only that people were hurting; he knew what it was like to hurt; and his personality would not allow him to sit still.” The attempt to make mild abnormality look insane has the unintended effect of making insanity look banal.
This point is extremely important: during times of crisis and upheaval, it takes leaders of deep empathy, powerful conviction and enormous creativity see their people through. Technocratic bourgeois commonsense, in the context of crisis, is not only overrated, but can be actually harmful, according to Ghaemi:
But Mr. Ghaemi is smarter than this, and his description of the homoclite, or “rule-follower”—his chosen term for the mentally normal—lays bare the thorn that has snared him. Homoclites, we are told, are “very, very middle class,” “middle-of-the-roaders in every way.” They are bland, affable, docile. “[Tony] Blair came from classic homoclitic stock, solidly middle class, soundly religious,” he writes. So did George W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Neville Chamberlain.
Without delving too deeply into pop pscyhology or Barack Obama’s mental state, there is nonetheless an important lesson to draw from this. Barack Obama is, by all accounts personal and political, the epitome of calm. He almost never loses his temper. He doesn’t have ups or downs. He takes the often contradictory advice he is given, and attempts to fashion compromise from its workings, taking what he feels to be the most practical approaches from the right and center-left alike, and then navigates toward the path of what he feels to be the realm of the politically possible. Much to the delight of his still copious supporters, his nickname is No Drama Obama.
Kevin Drum is correct when he argues against Drew Westen that Barack Obama does in fact have a narrative, but not the one progressives might have wished for. Obama’s narrative is of the great uniter, the calm in the face of the storm, the almost Bodhisattva-like figure of the utterly unflappable man who will transcend the politics of left and right to steer the nation gently over tortured seas.
The problem with that narrative is that this sort of figure is precisely Mr. Ghaemi’s archetypical homoclite: the inoffensive, terribly bland, imperturbable man of talk rather than action. The sort of person who measures ten times before cutting once. Ironically, this is precisely the sort of leader who is least effective during times of crisis. Lincoln, Churchill, FDR and Kennedy were manic personalities, constantly on the edge of depression, philanderers and romantics. None of them could come close to being labeled “no drama.”
His neoliberal politics notwithstanding, I have said in the past that Barack Obama might make a good, even great president during times of stasis and normalcy. His approach to problems is precisely the sort that is needed to steer calmly through times of peace, prosperity, and bipartisan sentiments.
But the great complaint with Barack Obama isn’t so much about what he has done, as about the opportunity he has largely squandered. America stands at a precipice, at a time of great crisis. A time when bold, aggressive and determined leadership is called for. It is a time when America needs drama. After the near wrecking of the country by a combination of conservative and neoliberal policies of war, supply-side economics and deregulation, America needs a vision. The New Deal was not rational: in the context of its time, the New Deal was an irrational theory of what society could be, yet untested in the world. When John F. Kennedy told Americans to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country, and told Americans that their country would–for no apparent rational reason–land a human being on the surface of the moon, America was desperately ready to take up the challenge. When Kennedy’s advisers told him to escalate the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy made the seemingly irrational decision to stand down: a decision that may have saved the world from nuclear winter.
After the crash of 2008, America desperately needed something irrational to believe in. America wanted to believe. America wanted to hope, and not for small things or minor advances, but to hope for a great change as yet unproven. It was Obama’s great gift in 2008 to tap into that collective national desire, even when the nature of the change on offer was unclear.
As part of a California Assembly campaign I managed in the fall of last year, I conducted a couple of pro bono focus groups with Democratic-leaning moderates and independents. Prior to delving into my candidate’s own issues, I covered a range of national topics, including perceptions of Barack Obama and other leading figures such as Sarah Palin. In the course of the discussion of Sarah Palin, most respondents thought she was crazy and didn’t agree with her. But astonishingly at the time, a theme kept re-emerging: several voters in each group expressed a variation of the following sentiment, which I repeat here almost verbatim: “I voted for Obama. I think Sarah Palin is crazy, but I’d vote for her over Obama next time, because things need to change. Maybe a little bit of crazy is what we need right now.“
Heaven forbid that these voters get the kind of crazy they’re seeking from the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. But the core of their point is well taken. Mr. Ghaemi and these moderate, independent voters are right: in these times of crisis we could all use a little more manic vision, and little less “no drama.”
