One psychologist's bold claim: a mild mania called hypomania gave America its wild energy, its boldest founders, and its crashes.
Floods of energy and ideas, sky-high confidence, fast talk, little need for sleep. It feels intoxicating and productive, so it gets mistaken for pure talent - but it can tip into mania or crash into depression.
Gartner read ten internet CEOs the textbook traits - restless, driven, grandiose, risk-hungry, irritated by obstacles, certain they are destined to change the world. Every one of them said it described the typical entrepreneur.
Leaving everything familiar to gamble on an unknown continent is itself a hypomanic act. Centuries of that self-selection, he argues, concentrated the genes and habits here - 'the boldest natural experiment ever conducted.'
He pitched his voyage for fifteen years, believed he heard voices, and cast himself as the man who would reclaim the Holy Land. His math was wrong; his certainty never wavered - and the certainty moved history.
Winthrop, Williams, and Penn swung between despair and ecstatic revelation while building colonies as 'cities on a hill.' In Gartner's telling, religious zeal and business drive are one temperament in two costumes.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFWhy is America so rich, restless, and boom-prone? John Gartner, a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins, argues the answer is partly genetic. Hypomania - a mild, inherited form of mania - endows people with surging energy, creativity, enthusiasm, and a propensity for risk. It is a temperament rather than an illness: it feels, in his words, 'highly intoxicating, powerful, productive and desirable,' though it can tip over into mania or sink into depression. Watching the internet bubble, Gartner read ten tech CEOs the clinical trait list for hypomania; every one recognized the profile of the entrepreneur.
His boldest claim is about immigration. To leave home and gamble everything on an unknown continent is itself a hypomanic-style act, so generation after generation America drew the boldest and most restless people from other nations - 'the boldest natural experiment ever conducted.' The classic American traits - cockeyed optimism, messianism, entrepreneurial and religious zeal, arrogance - are, in his framing, the hypomanic profile written at national scale. His evidence is psychobiography: clinical case histories of famous lives, not lab data.
