Wagner's Abnormal Mind - Part 1

Wagner was very far from normal. (I’ve already outlined that here to a large degree.) Virtually everyone who met him—friend and foe—noted how unusual he was in a wide variety of ways. Many of his contemporaries felt he suffered from this or that mental illness, and the literature on what pathology he may or may not have suffered from is quite extensive. Clearly, as well, he was an incredibly gifted man. He was also well-aware of his difference from everyone else, and made frequent reference to it. Wagner, who was beset by both mental and stress-related physical problems his entire life, believed—and I will argue he is generally correct on this— that his stark differences from seemingly everyone else were both pathological and the source of his genius. Yet, whether stemming from or just coexisting with that pathology, he was extraordinary productive. His creative drive overrode whatever pathology stood in his path, as well as the multiple physical ailments that plagued him, and he succeeded in creating an incredible body of work, overcoming massive practical impediments along the way.

In the next several posts, I will be exploring all the above. I will be laying out pieces of the puzzle of his brain and, in my last post in the series, assembling all of them to try to create a coherent story. I should note that I have no particular expertise in the field. But I do feel I have a solid lay understanding of the area, as I have spent years studying the brain and mental illnesses and have a lot of practical experience with people who suffer from a wide variety of mental challenges, disorders, differences or illnesses...whatever you want to call it.

I am going to save the issue of the connection between his particular genius and “madness” for the next several posts. In this one, I just want to give an overview of my understanding of the issues, and my assumptions and understanding about the brain, mental illness and creativity, before tackling his specific case. But everything I touch on here will come back in his unique story, so pay attention!

I would like to start by (re)emphasizing my belief that a discussion of anyone’s mind must be put in the context of modern neuroscience’s understanding of the brain; to wit, our free will, if it exists at all, is severely limited. I wrote about the issue of free will here, and if you didn’t read it before, I suggest that as the starting point for this section. But for a quick review, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, who does not believe we have any free will, puts it this way: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.” David Dennett opposes this view in general but agrees that free will doesn’t exist to any appreciable degree if we are not “wired right,” that is have retardation, brain damage, or mental illness.

The Brain

First, we all have unique brains. One of the key findings of modern neurology is the plasticity of the brain. In a nutshell, the brain’s experience alters its structure, therefore each of us has a very singular brain. An interesting article about the human mind from Salon summarizes this point:

Because each life path is uniquely personal, our individual patterns of neuronal connections are likewise uniquely constructed. Far more complex than a fingerprint, the intricate pattern of synapses makes every brain one of a kind, distinguishing even between identical twins, who share the same DNA code. The 1,000,000,000,000,000 or so neuronal connections that compose each brain’s structure form its unique signature, unprecedented and unrepeatable.

These structural changes can be minimal or, in the case of intensive study and work, much more significant:

Some alterations amount to no more than heightened sensitivity of the connections between neurons. A more significant form of adaptation is the formation of new synapses, which supports longer-term knowledge and skill development. The most radical structural change entails rewiring large sections of the cortex. Although we are used to thinking about learning along the timeline of minutes or hours, wholesale brain rewiring can occur over the course of many years. We see manifestations of significant neurological “remodeling” in the neural organizations of professional violinists and taxi drivers. Such remodeling might even include brain enlargement.

I am pretty sure that Wagner “rewired” his brain to be a finely tuned emotional machine. I can’t prove this contention, of course, but one study of professional musicians gives a clue to what I am proposing. These musicians, in contrast to the control group, were shown to have an increased ability to process emotion in sound. The study’s author said: “In essence, musicians more economically and more quickly focus their neural resources on the important -- in this case emotional -- aspect of sound. That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we'd expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings.”¹

Mental Abnormality and Mental Illness

While we are all unique, there are certainly patterns of behavior that people have labeled as “normal or “abnormal.” This whole issue is rather fraught, as more often than not the “abnormal” has been viewed as pathological. However, sometimes things that were once considered pathological have been relabeled as okie-dokie. In my lifetime, for example, my lesbianism went from being considered a mental disorder that was criminalized behavior to being seen as mentally healthy and quite legal!

Obviously, just because something is abnormal doesn’t mean it is a necessarily a pathology; instead, it could be just a part of normal human variation. That said, in the US, the principal direction is clear: more and more behaviors are being identified as pathological. In a speech in 1939, Carl Jung noted with disgust that “we cannot stand abnormal people any more so there are apparently very many more crazy people”²

The blogger Steven Novella sums up the debate within the psychology profession of the issue of so-called “abnormalities”:

The question is essentially how we should think about symptoms of mood, thought, and behavior. At one extreme we night consider all aspects of human mentality as being part of the normal spectrum, with differences being just that – differences. Those who follow the position of Thomas Szasz consider labels on mental differences to be largely politically and culturally motivated forms of repression.

At the other end is the obsessive partitioning of every nuance of human behavior into one or another abnormal category – the medicalization of all human problems. This may be connected to an overly reductionist approach to psychology, seeing all behavior in terms of neurotransmitters and brain function and giving insufficient attention to higher order situational and cultural factors.

Clinically speaking, if a pattern of behavior is harmful to the individual or to others in society, it is generally considered pathological. The more severe the harm to the self or others, the more the person is perceived to be mentally ill. But what if the reason the person is harming themselves—i.e. the person has developed a mental disorder or a drug dependency, for example—is because of a reaction to long-term persecution for their “abnormal” behavior? Who is the person with the real mental illness, the persecutor or the persecuted? Returning to the issue of the historical labeling of homosexuality (and other “queer”³ thoughts and behavior) as a pathology, I believe that there was—and is—a pathology related to the issue. However, it wasn’t queer people who had the mental illness (except as so driven by their persecution.) Instead, to my mind, it was the people who wanted to persecute those who were different who had the true mental illness, as they had a pathological fear or hatred of the “other” (often codified in religious dogma).

I am not arguing that mental illnesses that develop from persecution aren’t real, of course. Many queer people did and do, in fact, have mental problems stemming directly from the societal taboo on their behavior or thoughts. While the relatively broader acceptance of queer behavior has helped to lessen this problem, the taboo still remains fierce in many parts of the country, particularly for those people who cross gender boundaries. The flip side is that those intolerant behaviors that should be seen as pathological are not labeled as such due to a societal cultural paradigm accepting this behavior—such as persecution of those who are different than the general population—as normal and part of “human nature.”

The etiology of mental illness is, of course, complex and well beyond the scope of this blog. But, I do want to highlight one of the important precursors to its development: stress. To be persecuted or to be poor or to have a dysfunctional family environment brings on stress. There is large body of evidence that this can both can trigger the initial onset of mental illness as well as be a factor in the continuation of the illness and relapses into severe episodes. Read here for evidence on the relationship of mental illness and stress.  As well, it is linked to all sorts of physical problems as well, from long-term problems such as heart disease to an increased susceptibility to the common cold.⁴ This is particularly true for chronic stress.

Creativity and Mental Illness

There has long been an academic debate whether “madness” and creativity are linked. The debate is getting tantalizingly close to consensus with both long-term studies and neurological science finding clear links between several mental conditions and creativity, including depression and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, ADHD and autism.  For a good overview of the topic with many references to the scientific research, see here. 

The fact that they are linked doesn’t mean, of course, that the majority of creative people have mental problems.⁵ But what has been repeatedly proven is that the numbers of highly successful creative folks who have had mental problems far exceed any control group.  This is the finding that has fueled the neurological and biochemical search.

One of the scientists who is unconvinced that there is a casual connection between creativity and mental illness is Johns Hopkins researcher Albert Rothenberg.⁶ In Creativity and Madness, he argues that madness and creativity are functionality incompatible: “Although creative people may be psychotic at various periods of their lives, or even at various times during a day or week, they cannot be psychotic at the time they are engaged in the creative process, or it will not be successful.”⁷ He then acknowledges that creative thinking “involves a great deal of mental and emotional strain,” which could lead to mental problems.⁸ 

The problem is that he is arguing against no one. Researchers who believe that creativity and mental illness are often linked are not arguing that people create during psychotic episodes, but that mental illnesses can emotionally inform those artists about the human condition through their own suffering or, for that matter, euphoria.  The idea is that they then channel into their emotional revelations into their art during periods of relative or complete sanity.

Rothenberg did show through his research that there is one universal factor for creative success: extraordinarily high motivation, that is, a strong creative drive.⁹ The poet Carol Ann Beeman argues in her compelling book Just This Side of Madness that it is this drive itself which is can tip over to mental illness unless it is able to be satisfied:

The drive to create is explored through an increased affectivity and sensitivity to emotional stimulation into a total, unique, and individual expression of his or her experience of life. The artist just like the rest of us becomes burdened with the affective build-up associated with any biological or psychological drive state. Creative self-expression is the only constructive means through which artist can reduce the tensions inherent in the drive state to any effective degree. Without a suitable outlet to ensure the constructive channeling of the emotional content collected from his or her reactions of the world, the artist will inevitably break-down.¹⁰

However, the strains of the “constructive” act of artistic creation itself can lead breakdown. For instance, Leonard Woolf reports about his wife Virginia: “It was mental and physical strain which endangered her mental stability....Thus the connection between her madness and her writing was close and complicated, and it is significant that, whenever she finished a book, she was in a state of mental exhaustion and for weeks in danger of a breakdown.”¹¹

While the link between creativity and “madness” has been all but proven, the main thing to reemphasize is that the act of creation generally requires sanity and detailed control, certainly for works that require skilled craft such as creative writing, composing, etc. (I mean, there could be exceptions: Jackson Pollack’s work looks nuts to me, and I can imagine it could have been done in a psychotic state without any problem.) As Salvador Dali said, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know that I am mad.”

Note on the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM)

Before I continue with this line of argument, I just want to interject that the whole concept of disorders as we understand them—the DSM being the standard reference for classification of mental disorders—is suspect, and there is now a large push-back to the symptom-based view of mental illness that it is not grounded in science. The recent release of the DMV-V has crystallized this debate. The new edition, though greatly criticized for some of its tweaks, doesn’t really change much from DSM-IV. The National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) has publicly criticized its approach, not because of a radical break with the past, but because it hasn’t done so, which they believe in the modern era is essential. The organization's central argument is that the new techniques of brain science—still in their infancy— are the best way forward, and the DSM way of categorizing is, essentially, without scientific underpinning and therefore a dead-end. The director of the NIMH, in this open letter writes:

The weakness [of the DSM] is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.

He goes on to indicate his bottom-line: “But it is critical to realize that we cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the ‘gold standard.’ The diagnostic system has to be based on the emerging research data, not on the current symptom-based categories.”

Since all brains are completely unique, that too argues against any sort of reductionist model in which people suffering from a variety of mental—and often physical—symptoms can easily be slotted into this or that disorder. That said, it is hard to even discuss the subject without referring to the dominant model—the DSM—that exists in our culture now. I am hoping to avoid reductionism, as I absolutely believe that is impossible with Wagner, but I will of necessity refer to DSM disorders when I turn to Wagner.

Creativity and the Bipolar Disorder Spectrum

The strongest evidence showing a link to creativity consists of disorders on the bipolar spectrum. These disorders are characterized by cyclical mood changes between manic and depressive states. The changes can be extremely rapid or a person can be stuck in a “manic” or “depressive” episode for long periods. Sometimes both symptoms co-exist. On the mild end of the spectrum, it is called Cylothymia disorder, with the less-severe manic episodes termed hypomania. There are various subtypes, but the most severe is Bipolar I and the relatively more moderate is Bipolar II.

Kay Redfield Jamison, the author of Touched with Fire about creativity and bipolar or depressive disorders, writes in her book, “Mania is characterized by an exalted or irritable mood, more and faster speech, rapid thought, brisker physical and mental activity levels, quickened and more finely tuned senses, suspiciousness, a marked tendency to seek out other people and impulsiveness.”¹² As for the depressive cycle, it “affects not only mood but the nature and content of thought as well. Thinking processes almost always slow down, and decisiveness is replaced with indecision and rumination. The ability to concentrate is usually greatly impaired and willful action and thought become difficult if not impossible.”¹³

The paradox of the disease is that many people who have it like aspects of it, and don't want to lose those parts of the disease. In this small study of people diagnosed with bipolar illness most viewed it “as a gift.”  The actor Stephen Fry, who has been diagnosed with the disorder, created a film to explore this conundrum.¹⁴  (Watch it here.)  He asked everyone he interviewed who had been diagnosed with the disorder if they would push a button to make it disappear. Only one would have done so. The three folks pictured below—Fry, Richard Dreyfuss and Carrie Fisher—all said that they preferred to “keep” their disease.  

At the time of the film, Fry had never even treated the disorder because he actually liked his manic self, believed it was essential for his creativity, and didn’t want that to go away.  However, the depression that accompanies the disorder has led him to make repeated suicide attempts (and according to this article about a recent suicide attempt, he seems to be treating the syndrome now).

There are a number of explanations and theories from neuroscience and psychiatric literature exploring this connection between bipolar and creativity. I can only provide a small smattering of them, and I am leaving out the scientific grounding as it would require many more pages. However, please follow the links below in the footnotes to get started on the biochemical and neuroscientific literature.¹⁵

The most obvious connection is that during the hypomanic state the artist has both the drive, stamina and confidence to express their emotional insights, often gained at the depressive trough. In this article by the psychiatrist Neel Burton, he highlights a study by Jamison of artists diagnosed on the bipolar spectrum, in which the majority self-reported that the hypomanic state led to “‘increases in enthusiasm, energy, self-confidence, speed of mental association, fluency of thoughts and elevated mood, and a strong sense of well-being.’ Participants also reported a noticeably decreased need for sleep and feelings of elation, excitement, and anticipation.” That such feelings and thoughts would potentially aid the creative process seems clear.

An article on the subject in Wired puts it this way: “The extravagant high descends into a profound low. While this volatility is horribly painful, it can also enable creativity, since the exuberant ideas of the manic period are refined during the depression.”

A New York Times article on the same subject suggests, “One idea is that since there is a genetic basis for affective disorders, the same gene may also produce artists. Geneticists suggest that because the way a manic depressive episode arouses brain activity -- triggering extreme swings of emotion -- the brain may become more adaptive to synthesizing incongruous thoughts. That process -- of reorganizing disparate emotions into a new order -- may be the essence of creativity.” 

Burton cautions in his article: “Thus, whilst there can be little doubt that bipolar disorder and creative genius are associated, evidence of causation and of the direction of causation is still lacking.”  Thus, he postulated that it was possible that the creative drive and the acts of artist expression itself that could trigger the disorder in some individuals and not the other way around as is generally imagined.

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End Notes

1  See here.

2  As quoted in Beeman, Just This Side of Madness, page 32. It is easy to track this trend through the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Each edition has led to an ever greater numbers of identified disorders; some of this is just refining and distinguishing but some of it is, in fact, pathologizing that which was not seen as pathological in the past. The DSM-I, from 1952, listed 106; the DSM-III, from 1980, listed 265, and the current DSM-IV has 297. The chair of the DSM-5 task force, David Kupfer, announced that the total number of disorders in DSM-5 would not increase, but subtypes were added!

3  I understand that some people aren’t comfortable with the use of the word “queer” to define the gamut of folks who are gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual and otherwise outside the norm of heterosexual and gender conformity. Oh well, get used to it. It’s a great term and so darned economical for writing!

4  See for instance this or this.

5  Though in the case of famous poets it is close to a majority, as a number of studies have shown the incidence of psychopathology to be around 50% for them; musicians and prose writers tend to follow with about 35-30% rates. See page 62 of Jamison, Touched by Fire and the whole of chapter 3.

6  Rothenburg, Creativity and Madness; this book came out in 1990, which in the world of brain science is in the relative dark ages.  I don't know if he has moderated his position with the changing evidence.

7  Ibid, 36 (emphasis in the original)

8  Ibid, 161

9  Ibid, 9
10  Beeman, Just This Side of Madness, 73

11  Ibid, 141

12  Jamison, Touched with Fire, 27. Jamison is both a professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins (though a trained psychologist) and has suffered from the disease herself since early adulthood.

13   Ibid, 21

14   Fry obviously likes to tackle conundrums, in that he did the previously-linked documentary exploring his love for Wagner in the context of his Jewish heritage, too.

15  For some of the scientific underpinnings of the links between creativity and madness, see here and here on dopamine and the mesolimbic and mesocortical pathways; see here where you can either read or watch a Glenn Wilson lecture covering creativity and psychoticism, schizotype, apophenia; see here for the connection of a lower latent inhibition (LI) threshold to creativity and mental illness.

Wagner's Anti-Semitism, Part 3: Issues of the mind

This post will focus on the sorts of psychobiological factors that created Wagner’s narrative construction of the Jews as enemies of his cultural and revolutionary program. I am not going to discuss his program or his anti-Semitism in general in this one; this post is foundational for that. Instead, I am just going to focus on brain science in general, and his paranoia and how that fueled his anti-Semitism, in specific. To some readers, you might consider this discussion far afield, but I think in evaluating any person’s character, particularly one who was thought to have mental problems as was the case with Wagner, you need some understanding of brain science. Plus, I believe it is always good to pull back to a bigger and wider picture so that biographical understanding isn’t unnecessarily constricted.

Those who are up on neuroscience know that there is a wide amount of compelling evidence that free will as normally understood doesn’t exist. The neuroscientist Sam Harris, a proponent of this theory, says, “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.” Sam makes his case in this talk here. 

In the talk, Sam details the moral issue by way of analogy. Dan Haggard summarizes it in this review: “When we get attacked by an alligator we tend not to get angry at the alligator, but instead we just try to run away. We don’t resent the animal because it’s just an alligator. However, if we are punched by a fellow human being we tend to resent that human. This difference in feeling Harris attributes to the notion of free will that guides us. We think that the animal can’t help do what it does, but we do think the person attacking us can. So, according to Harris, we resent things that we believe to have free will.”

Another neuroscientist David Engleman, doesn’t completely rule out free will, but in this podcast says:

The more we understand about human behavior, the more we understand how people's brains came to be the way they are from a very complicated intertwining of genetic and environment. It turns out if free will exists, it's really a bit player in what is going on in the brain. And the reason is your genes which you don’t choose, and your environment, including your in-utero environment and all your childhood experiences, we don’t choose that. These are the things that come together and make your brain the way it is and define a lot of your trajectory in life. And if you have free will, it can only modulate a lot of momentum and a particular direction.

If you prefer reading, this article by the same author in The Atlantic covers the same ground.

Why this is relevant is that if we accept the proposition that there is no free will, it changes our views of morality and culpability.

To give a taste of the issue—I’m lazily stealing from Mark Linsenmayer’s summary of a Eagleman’s views here—“Eagleman’s point here is that the criminal justice system assumes a model of free will that is unsustainable given what we know about neurology, and he gives examples like a normal guy with no apparent deviant impulses suddenly starts exhibiting child molester behavior. He’s subsequently diagnosed with a giant brain tumor, which is then removed, and his behavior (and self-reported desires) return to normal… but then they return, and what do you know? The tumor’s back.”

But, as Sam Harris argues, “A brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. If we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer’s brain, it would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it” and, therefore, “the whole conception of placing blame on him would erode.”¹

The moral conclusion Harris—a well-know atheist—gives is that the “irony is if you want to be like Jesus and love your enemies, or at least not hate them, one way into that is to view human behavior through the lens of a wider scientific picture of causation.”² 

There are, obviously, people who are well versed in the science on which the view rests, and disagree with this. David Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, rebuts Sam here. But even he believes that the understanding of an absolute free will in which we are morally culpable for our unfettered “free” choices is incoherent. Dennett argues that we have “practical free will” if not “theoretical free will” and are morally culpable if we are “wired right”—that is free of retardation, brain damage, or mental illness—but our choices are indeed greatly limited by genetics, the environment and brain processes nonetheless.

So even a free will supporter like Dennett believes that diminished capacity greatly reduces or negates free will and such people are, therefore, not culpable for what they do. The question becomes for this blog, if you think free will exists as Dennett argues: did Wagner have diminished capacity—that is, was he mentally ill? Many people have argued just that—both in his time, and to this day. If this is true, can he really be responsible for the bad in his character and actions? Or, for that matter, the good in his works?

I am actually going to take up the subject of his unique brain in more detail at a later point, but I wanted to bring up one of his symptoms now: paranoia.  You can consider this post as the first in my exploration of his mental illnesses or, at least, his mental uniqueness, as well as part of my on-going anti-Semitic posts.

I have a theory, not proven as far as I know in the psychological literature, but certainly true in my life-experience: people with high IQs seem to be more susceptible to paranoia than average folks. What IQ particularly tests is pattern recognition. Therefore, my theory is that those who are able to see deeper, more intricate patterns sometimes go amiss, and create rational and often compelling theories that are, in fact, illusion or delusion. This guy has a similar theory, and has taken the time (unlike me who just googled about a bit...) to find scientific literature to support this theory that paranoia has its roots in “a hyperactive pattern matching process, a reinforcement mechanism that rewards high-emotion conclusions, and a hyperactive state of arousal.”  Wagner fits into this theory like a glove.

Now, paranoia in schizophrenics is well-established in the literature, as summarized here: “The especially paranoid version of schizophrenia combines hyperactive pattern recognition, specifically for patterns of conspiracy, with other thought disorders, like bizarre ideation (literally bizarre ideas) and ideas of reference (thinking that everything is personal – people and events are referring specifically to them).”  Paranoia, though, sometimes accompanies a wide variety of mental illnesses including depression, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I have a good friend with schizophrenia—who has a high IQ and two advanced degrees—and what I found is that she is always very rational and very good at narrative construction. Because of this, she managed to convince virtually all of her doctors and friends—including me—of the truth of a particular delusional narrative in spite of the fact that we knew about her disease. Only through a process of fact-checking and communication between everyone were we able to unravel that her narrative was based on paranoid “facts,” and to free ourselves from our participation in her delusion.

Last week's New York Times Magazine had a article called “A Theory of Conspiracy Theories.” The gist: “Perfectly sane minds possess an incredible capacity for developing narratives, and even some of the wildest conspiracy theories can be grounded in rational thinking, which makes them that much more pernicious.”

Before continuing, I do feel it is important to point out that conspiracies do happen. All the time. The tendency to dismiss all conspiracies as paranoia is as irrational as accepting all theories as true. I believe that dismissing all conspiracy theories—as many do out of hand—is wrong and dangerous. If someone raises a serious question as to an event, it deserves a serious answer. I appreciate the work of Skeptic magazine, for example, to do just that (and they adequately debunked the 9/11 truthers theory to me).

Back to the article; it goes on to say that, “more recent scholarship by academics like Mark Fenster, Peter Knight and Robert Goldberg suggests that conspiracy theories do not come from a particular personality type, I.Q. stratum or dispossessed fringe; they erupt wherever unfathomable news collides with unshakable beliefs.” But none of those cited are scientists, and I couldn’t find any support one way or another in their works for relating IQ to conspiracy theories. I don’t think the work has been done.

In any case, even if conspiracy theories come from anyone on the IQ range, my argument is that more compelling theories will come from people with high IQs because of their more highly developed skills in pattern-recognition and the ability to logically detail the pattern that they perceive.

Whether it is real or delusional can be incredibly hard to figure out.

To wit, my friend David Lifton is a very smart guy, who wrote the NY Times bestseller Best Evidence about the John Kennedy assassination. I do believe in this modern conspiracy theory and I think that David has the best narrative about what happened. He is an indefatigable researcher who has come up with a huge body of persuasive evidence. But, I will add, David is exactly the kind of high intellect, pattern-recognition guy who tends towards paranoia. Therefore, I also recognize that his narrative—consistent, fact-based, logical and compelling as it is—may be utterly wrong. Just like my schizophrenic friend did, he may have pulled me into his world of relentless, but ultimately, delusional logic.

David Lifton no doubt pointing out the location of the head shot that killed Kennedy

This guy wrote a review in Amazon, which hits the nail on the head:

They say truth is stranger than fiction. People often ask whether David Lifton is in touch with reality. Or is he intricately locked in a nightmare from which he never awoke? For my part, this is a genuine soul search. Lifton didn't gravitate in blind fury towards conspiracy. He didn't suspect vast numbers of people of deliberately hiding the truth. Whatever you think of his thesis, "Best Evidence" is saturated in analysis and held together by relentless logic. Suppose, if you will, that Oswald was the sole killer of JFK. In that case Lifton is totally wrong and his book is grotesque fiction. But it remains logical. His logic is just based on a false premise (to use his own language). For me the question is: are any of his crucial premises false? Lifton's conclusion is fantastic. But consider the alternative. For Lifton to be wrong, all the Parkland Hospital doctors and nurses, who originally attended Kennedy, collectively misperceived or falsely described what they saw. Or if they didn't, then all the Bethesda autopsy witnesses did. Lifton doesn't pull this testimony out of thin air. It's on the record. Lifton accounts for all of it in a way few other authors have done. Most critics on the subject rely on discrediting witnesses, usually on a large scale. The same problem applies to defenders of the Warren Report. The point about David Lifton is that he doesn't discredit. He explains. His explanation is outrageous, bizarre and even absurd. Logic can be like that at times.

David actually has much in common with Wagner, so I think he will return later in the blog. Let me just say this:  I do believe—because he has proven it to me—his “outrageous, bizarre and even absurd” narrative of the JFK assassination. If you are a fan of Carrie in Homeland, I suggest David’s work to you. He has the same intensity, focus and drive, though isn’t quite as manic as Carrie was here:

The green pen scene above looked nuts, but we learn that there was rational reason for it, and she had developed her elaborate but true narrative via color-coding. Got to love it.

So glad she got her green pen

A few other example of smart but paranoid successes:

Above is Nobel prize winning John Nash, subject of the film A Beautiful Mind.  He saw both real and delusional patterns. 

Then there is chess genius, Bobby Fisher, one of the great pattern-recognizers of all time. He later descended into a state of paranoia, particularly against the Jews. (He was Jewish).  A psychological assessment is here.

Howard Hughes was another very successful and paranoid guy.   Here is an article on his mental illness.

I could make a lot longer list, of course. Clearly in some humans, paranoia and high intelligence do go together. Each of these well-known folks were paranoid, but all had different types of mental problems.  Nash had classic paranoid schizophrenia, Hughes was OCD, Fisher seemed to just have Paranoid Personality Disorder, Carrie is bipolar (yes, she is fictional, but paranoia can accompany that disease).  The links between high intelligence and mental illness are not fully delineated, though there is a lot of research on the topic.  For instance, see here and here. But most who study the area have concluded that they can be related.  More later when I get to the direct topic of Wagner's mental state.

Now to Wagner and his paranoia. He was the type of guy who constantly created elaborate narratives, sometimes dramatic and fictional, but often in prose and, to his mind, grounded in history. His dramatic narratives are often an ingenious reworking of his source material to construct a compelling original narrative; he had a talent for this. His prose, though, could be really out there, with flights of fancy in which, for instance, he would write as if the mythical gods were interacting directly with historical characters. An example given by the the Wagner scholar, John Deathridge: “The essay the Wibelungen...describes, among other things, a supposed relationship between a historical figure, Friedrich Barbarossa, and a mythical one, Siegfried.”³

As for Wagner’s paranoia, Bryan Magee writes,

We have much evidence from people who knew him well that he was always inclined to think that something must be going on behind his back, that other people were up to something; and his friends took pains not to aggravate this. For instance, during the period when Nietzsche was close to Wagner he wrote a friend about some step he had decided not to take: “We both know that Wagner’s nature tends to make him suspicious, but I did not think that it would be a good thing to stir up his suspiciousness.⁴ 

All his biographers trace Wagner’s eruption of anti-Semitism to his time in France when he groveled and near-starved in an unsuccessful attempt to launch his operatic career. In Paris, he sought assistance from the the most successful opera composer of his time, Giacomo Meyerbeer, who was Jewish. To Meyerbeer’s credit, he did help Wagner in a number of small ways. The story of Wagner’s relationship with Meyerbeer has been told well elsewhere, so I am going to cut to the chase: he became paranoid about Meyerbeer and concluded that he was scheming against him and, thus, Wagner wanted to both publicly cut himself off from any association with him and get revenge for this, alleged, backbiting. Wagner's Judaism in Music was written with this as his primary motivation, according to most historians. For instance, Katz concludes: “Thus his attack on Judaism appeared as the actual goal of the article and the unnamed Meyerbeer only as an example. In reality, it was the reverse”⁵ 

Though the the piece was published anonymously (in 1850), Wagner didn’t otherwise hide his authorship and he was sure that Meyerbeer and other prominent Jews in the music world knew he was the writer. Wagner then became convinced that any bad press he ever received was the result of Jewish machinations against him because of that article. There is no evidence of this at all. When he republished the essay under his own name in 1869, his reason for republication was to expose this alleged conspiracy. Well, the result was that a segment of the Jewish population did, finally, rise up to criticize him in an organized fashion. After two decades, he finally had got the conspiracy he long imagined!

There is no doubt Wagner truly thought that there was a conspiracy, led by Jewish publishers, writers and composers, against him. Nobody doubts he had this strong belief. But there is no evidence it was true. I would argue that these thoughts, strongly held but seemingly delusional, were beyond his conscious control. It was this paranoia that was the launching-pad of his anti-Semitism expression.

Do I conclude, given what I have said about limitation on free will and his incapacitation by way of paranoid delusions, that Wagner should be fully exonerated from responsibility for any of his behaviors? No, as I have quite a few puzzle pieces to add. But I do think what I have laid out in this post, like the reality of the illiberal society I explored in this post, should be taken into considerations in solving the conundrum of Wagner.  

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End Notes

1 This comes 18 minutes in the talk.  The implications for legal culpability are addressed here.  

2 This quote comes at 53 minutes in.

3 Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, page 12, emphasis in original letter

4 Magee, The Tristan Chord, page 344.

5 Katz, The Darker Side of Genius, page 51.  This book gives a full account of Meyerbeer and Wagner's relationship.  Also, The Tristan Chord does as well in the Anti-Semitism chapter.