Customer Reviews

Prophets, Cults and Madness

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I have read many books on genius and madness and this is one of the best ones I have come across. The authors take an evolutionary approach to the mysterious condition of Schizophrenia and come to some fascinating conclusions. Basically they argue that the great prophets and spiritual gurus of the past and present are in fact borderline (sometimes even full blown) Schizophrenics who could for other reasons have a charisma that would convince "followers" of their bizarre and revelatory insights. The authors speak of a concept called a mazeway resynthesis that both the prophet and the Schizophrenic have the capacity for and experience, where they create a revolutionary vision of a world to come. The prophet who typically for whatever reason has high self esteem or status convinces followers of his/her vision whereas the Schizophrenic often with low self esteem or status doesn't and with no "followers" too edit their thoughts they further break off from reality into their own imaginary world filled with imaginary followers, etc. Of course that's a simplistic explanation of the theory the authors propose and I couldn't do it justice in this short review. I found the book too be a fascinating exploratory journey into the mysterious origins of both the prophet and the Schizophrenic in evolutionary terms and left much to think about. The authors appear to be very knowledgable about the subject at hand. I did not nitpick the book for 'factual errors' such as those suggested by the previous reviewer. Instead I saw their views as generally well argued differences of opinion that are currently being debated by scholars in various fields with regards to these controversial issues at hand. The book also gives interesting suggestions for treatment of Schizophrenics based on their theory.

This is a MUST-READ book covering all the obvious cults and leaders and less obvious ones like Jesus. Interesting details about John Nash (A Beautiful Mind---Russell Crowe) Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Hitler and every other cult leader and an explanation of how and why they were. The man who walked around London in the 1660s with a fire-filled brasier on his head warning Londoners of the Great Fire and the Plague to come.

Don't miss the interesting suggestion of providing schizophrenic patients with their own virtual reality world filled with cult followers all courtesy of the Internet.

I really wish there was a half-star rating on Amazon.com, because this is really more like two-and-a-half stars. Stevens's idea of prophets and messianic figures springing from the same root cause as schizophrenia and serving an evolutionary function in causing group fission is interesting (and may receive incidental support from Jane Goodall's work with the chimps at Gombe, who fissioned and essentially went to war with one another, resulting in the destruction of the smaller group by the larger). However, he is way too wedded to his biological paradigm and doesn't seem to understand the flaws in such an approach--one of the main problems with evolutionary psychology is that it works from a post-hoc ergo propter-hoc format, e.g. "We see this is serving this function so therefore it must have evolved to serve this function."

Stevens also displays only a superficial understanding of the ethnographic examples he picks out to illustrate his ideas, in particular those of Handsome Lake and other Native American examples, and to top it all off, his analysis of gender leaves a great deal to be desired. He states on page 122, "Males are orientated toward political issues of group leadership and group allegiances whereas females are primarily committed to motherhood and childrearing," and goes on to assert that this distinction is found in all cultures except our own of the last twenty years. The assertion that females are concerned primarily with house and home and not with political matters is patently false, and arises from a profound historical male bias in ethnographical fieldwork, as anthropologists anywhere will tell you; the world over, females practice power strategies as assiduously as males do, but tend to employ more subtle strategies as spreading rumors about opponents, attempting to manipulate others into doing their bidding, and so on. Here is where a greater understanding of his data might have come in handy, as well as an understanding of the conditions under which some of these ethnographic examples were collected.