The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

by John D. Gartner

Depression, he felt, forced one to face the deepest existential truths of sin, suffering, evil, and death, which the more superficial “healthy minded” are able to deny. Depression can transform people into seekers of ultimate truth.

Great entrepreneurs often do not create original ideas—they grasp the significance of an idea, wherever it comes from, and leap on it with everything they have.

The term “Social Darwinism” is discredited today as a self-serving rationalization used by amoral nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalists to justify their exploitation of workers. “With the model of ruthless competition in which only the ‘fittest survived,’ it thus followed logically that the richest entrepreneurs were the fittest.”130 Rich capitalists could both congratulate themselves on their outstanding success and shed no tears for the losers they devoured—no more than a lion would grieve for its prey. Yet Carnegie never thought of himself as a robber baron. He believed himself to be the most enlightened of employers. His mill was run in a fashion that he thought was evolutionarily correct—offering advancement without prejudice for the most able and the cart for the rest. Carnegie took great pride in this. For him, Social Darwinism was an idealistic worldview, not a mere excuse to abuse his fellow men. Carnegie’s idiosyncratic interpretation of evolution was wildly utopian. It was nothing less than the path to the advancement of mankind. Like most utopians, Carnegie failed utterly to see the dark side of his philosophy as it was put into practice.