Madness Makes The World Go Round

I always suspected that great leaders are somewhat crazy, and that madness makes the world go round.

As if to support my cynical suspicions, I stumbled across this quote in an article on the recent re-internment of Theodore Herzl's grandson in Israel.

Psychologists believe that the members of Herzl's family suffered from a disease known as familial depressive illness.

Avi Beker, a political science professor at Georgetown University, ... paid tribute to the way mental illness can be confused with genius and dreams. He told those assembled at the memorial that Herzl and Sigmund Freud had lived on the same street in Vienna, though they had never met.

"Thank God they never met," Beker said. "[Freud] would have put [Herzl] on the couch; maybe that's the end of Zionism."