Dare to be “Mad”… new lessons from John F. Nash

Today, I realized I had been wrong. John Nash didn’t beat his illness when he learned to distinguish delusion from reality, he came ahead when he was able to accept his delusions as contributors to who he was, and although he wouldn’t say this, as contributors to his greatness.

When I first saw “A Beautiful Mind”, about 8 years ago (I was a social worker at the time), I concluded John Nash overcame his illness through reason. I was convinced (or so the movie persuaded me) that he was able to rationally distinguish delusion from reality and thus he was able to impress a certain resemblence of normalcy on his daily activities.

Yes, at the time I was a Social Worker, working with people with multiple-diagnoses, primarily homeless folk with a dual diagnosis of mental illness and substance abuse. Despite being an advocate of the harm reduction approach I didn’t realize that maybe subconsciously I wished illness could be erradicated. I probably didn’t realized that with that may come an erradication of what makes one special, and great.

Now I know. I learned from the real John Nash (not John Nash the movie character):

Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

 

So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his “madness” Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.

 

Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future.

Autobiography, Nobelprize.org

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