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“Immigrants are unusual people,” wrote James Jaspers in Restless Nation. Only one out of a hundred people emigrate, and they tend to be imbued “with special drive, ambition and talent.
When asked, “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?” 91 percent of Americans said yes, as compared to 28 percent of British and 8 percent of Japanese respondents.
a subsequent poll taken in 2002 found that 59 percent of American college students believed that they were on their way to becoming millionaires.
“What’s unique about the top countries is that all three have been created by people moving into them,
They were not “well adjusted” by ordinary standards but instead forced the world to adjust to them.
Thirty-nine percent of manic patients report religious revelations similar to those described by Columbus.
The protagonist of each salvation narrative began in a state of severe depression, which was relieved by an exhilarating revelatory illumination, achieving heights of ecstasy “equal in amplitude” to their previous depths of depression.
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.
Psychiatrists call this passive suicidal ideation: you wish you were dead, even though you have no active plan to kill yourself.
despair, followed by joyful illumination and dedication to a mission from God.
The settlers were venture capitalists of a sort, but instead of risking their money they were risking their lives. “Human capital” was the only thing of value many had to risk or borrow against.
Religious zeal and entrepreneurial zeal may have different objects but they require the same type of personality.
The kind of fanatics who were attracted to such extreme sects were, much like Luther himself, “a distinct species of men,
He sailed in an “exuberant mood” and never lost it.
He “could follow a belief to its conclusion with a passionate literalness that bordered on the ridiculous,
John Cotton, the most popular preacher in Massachusetts, compared Williams’s mind to a windmill whirling so fast that it set itself on fire.
“a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgment.
Williams seemed oblivious of the potentially dire consequences his letter could produce both for himself and the colony. The Massachusetts Bay Company held
The standard hypomanic response to opposition is to speed up, escalate, crank up the volume.
He is destined to change the world, and those who oppose him are, like the Pharisees, wicked, blind, and on the wrong side of history.
Ideas pour out of hypomanics, a mix of the ridiculous and the brilliant.
Williams, who defined himself as a “seeker,” was safeguarding not the content of religious truth, as other religious leaders had done, but the process whereby each individual could seek God in his or her own way.
Fox suffered a series of depressive breakdowns throughout his life, punctuated by experiences of religious elation.
“Up and down, up and down, up and down marked the course of his emotional life,
they became the basis for a philosophy that formally raised the authority of personal revelation over institutional authority.
“He destroyed faith in authority by restoring the authority of faith.
The Quakers were “well dressed, they ate magnificently, and they had money jingling in their pockets.
vision of the future, be it religious, economic, or whatever a human being can imagine.
Erik Erickson diagnosed him as suffering from a “severe manic depressive state,
Luther experienced periods of “deep, psychotic, occasionally suicidal melancholy
I would argue that it is precisely people of such temperament who produce historical movements like the Reformation.
to a mental health professional there is no doubt that Hamilton was a bipolar type II—someone whose hypomania alternated with major depression.
he had suffered from recurrent and sometimes severe depressions—making Hamilton a bipolar type II by definition.
I hope not only to show that Hamilton was bipolar, but more important, that if he hadn’t been, he couldn’t have led the charge to launch a nation.
When Alexander was nine, his father got onto a ship and sailed away.
Rachael appears to have been hypersexual and ill advised in some of her sexual liaisons,
maintain good credit kept her family alive
I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.
Every hypomanic child or young adult has a larger-than-life historic figure with whom he identifies, who becomes the raw material for a secret grandiose identity.
Saint Croix was too small for a teenager dreaming of glory and empires.
Historians have noted that the poem’s religious theme was very out of character for Hamilton.
using writing to impress powerful older men and advance his career would prove to be very much part of Hamilton’s modus operandi.
As Hamilton predicted, he completed the course of college study in two and a half years.
“New York’s style—intense, commercial, gogetting—reflected his vision of America.
It was almost as if his thoughts exploded with such force that they demanded motoric expression.
he began writing revolutionary tracts for New York newspapers, pumping out sixty thousand words in two weeks.
Hamilton “produced the maximum number of words a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.
“with as much unconcern as if the vessel were not there,
Hamilton had nerve.
He wasn’t so much brave as unafraid. As with most hypomanics, the meaning of risk simply failed to r...
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