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of things, even persistently and purely wrong about them, while still retaining our claim to sanity—just so long as enough other people are wrong about them, too. This point is made by the medical definition of delusion (“a false belief not shared by others”), but not nearly as well as it was made by the Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus in The Praise of Folly. “The reason a person who believes he sees a woman when in reality he is looking at a gourd is called crazy is because this is something beyond usual experience,” he wrote. “However, when a person thinks his wife, who is enjoyed by many, to be an ever-faithful Penelope, he is not called insane at all”—although he is called wrong—“because people know that this is a common thing in marriage.” In other words, error in extremis—extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar—becomes insanity. Madness is radical wrongness.

Like all equations, this one is reversible. If madness is radical wrongness, being wrong is minor madness. Thus Sully, the author of Illusions, conceived of error as a “border-land between perfectly sane and vigorous mental life and dementia.” Something of the same attitude is reflected in the Romance languages, in which being right is rendered as being sane: in French, j’ai raison; in Spanish, tengo razon. Translation: I have reason on my side, I’m in possession of my senses—whereas you, my errant friend, are straying near the borders of crazy. Minor madness can also be an apt description of how being wrong actually feels. We will meet more than one person in this book who characterizes his or her experience of error as scarily similar to insanity.

We already saw that hallucinations and dreams are widely regarded as revealing greater truths. So too with madness. Societies throughout the ages have nurtured the belief that the insane among us illuminate things as they truly are, despite their own ostensibly deranged relationship to reality. That’s why, in literature, it is always the fools (those who never had any sense in the first place) and the madmen (those who lost it) who speak truth to power. (Children—i.e., those who have not yet reached the age of reason—sometimes play this role as well.) This narrative of wrongness as rightness might have achieved its apotheosis in King Lear, a play that features a real madman (Lear, after he loses it), a sane man disguised as a madman (Edgar), a blind man (Gloucester), and a fool (the Fool). I don’t know where else so many characters have been set in orbit around the idea of truth, or where else truth itself has been so set on its head. Here, wisdom is folly (“for wise men are grown foppish,” observes the Fool), and folly is wisdom (“This [Fool] is not altogether fool, my lord,” the king’s courtier dryly notes). Blindness is insight: “I stumbled when I saw,” says Gloucester, who perceives the truth only after he has lost his eyes. And insanity is intellectual and moral clarity: it is only after Lear loses his daughters and his senses that he understands what he has done and can feel both loss and love.

This idea—that from error springs insight—is a hallmark of the optimistic model of wrongness. It holds even for mundane mistakes, which is why proponents of this model (myself included) see erring as vital to any process of invention and creation. The example of altered states simply throws this faith into relief: make the error extreme enough, depart not a little way but all the way from agreed-upon reality, and suddenly the humdrum of human fallibility gives way to an ecstasy of understanding. In place of humiliation and falsehood, we find fulfillment and illumination. We hear this strangely intimate relationship between error and truth in the double meaning of the word “vision,” which conveys both delusion and revelation.

Unfortunately, as proponents of the pessimistic model of wrongness will be quick to point out, the reassuring notion that error yields insight does not always comport with experience. Sometimes, being wrong feels like the death of insight—the moment when a great idea or