August 14, 2026

Madness and Motivation

I believe that both a mentally ill person and a mentally healthy person always have a motive for their actions. In the case of the mentally ill person, that motive is entirely irrational; in the case of the mentally healthy person, it possesses a certain degree of rationality, although it must always be judged within its cultural context.

If a girl who was raped at the age of eleven later campaigns against rapists—or even punishes her attacker by killing him—she is acting as a mentally healthy person. If, instead, she starts killing people who have nothing to do with what happened to her, then she is mentally ill.

Whether an action is considered mad must also always be evaluated within its cultural context. If an Aztec in the fourteenth century performed human sacrifices in the belief that they would ensure abundant harvests, he would have been regarded as mentally healthy within his society. But if a person in the twenty-first century were to do the same, that person would be considered mentally ill.