Kamal Ghorui
I once encountered the claim that “madness is the price of greatness”, and it has stayed with me. It suggests a bargain—inner fracture is redeemed by external brilliance. Pain is treated as a prerequisite for insight, and achievement as justification for instability. The true artist, in this imagination, must first know true anguish in order to portray it.
To romanticise this connection is to transform correlation into necessity. Not every mind that burns will become a star. Some will simply burn. Does greatness explain madness or erase it? And what if madness remains without greatness? If creativity never arrives, or arrives too late, we believe the suffering loses its meaning. But in reality, we are the ones who burden suffering with a purpose it never chose.
Modern science has often revealed a world that seems to be far less orderly than what we once imagined. Many theories that have altered our understanding of reality have shown that time is not absolute, that space bends, and that certainty itself can depend on the observer. Existentialist philosophy suggests that the world offers no inherent meaning, and that any sense of purpose must be created rather than discovered. Still, even as our knowledge becomes more complex, we continue to stick to our simple “cause and effect” way of understanding the world around us rather than submit to the possibility of chaos.
The human mind chooses to find meaning, to search for patterns where none exist. To believe in patterns is easier than to accept randomness, because patterns suggest that what happens to us can be explained, and perhaps even controlled. The idea that madness produces greatness is another attempt to impose meaning on a world that does not promise any. In doing so, we draw not only meaning from this process, but sometimes even identity.
It is, after all, human nature to cope through hope. The caterpillar must endure the cocoon to become a butterfly. Carbon must be crushed to become a diamond. Suffering is thought of as a stage, not a state— something temporary, necessary, and ultimately rewarding. We prefer to imagine that what is broken will become beautiful.
I find myself unsure which instinct speaks louder in us— our attraction to tragedy, or our hope that tragedy will not be the end of the story. We seem drawn to darkness, to stories marked by suffering and ruin, yet we are equally unwilling to let them remain there. Perhaps this belief is born from both impulses at once— from our fascination with darkness, and from our need to believe that it must eventually lead to something brighter. Perhaps normality seems less compelling to us because it offers neither the depth of misery nor the reassurance of a triumphant ending. Ordinary lives start to feel too quiet to us, so we turn suffering into a beginning rather than an ending.
Society has a habit of mythologising the idea of a “tortured genius”. This myth, probably created to offer comfort, ends up doing the opposite. It tempts those who carry the label of being troubled or intense to lean into the role, to start performing madness hoping it will mean something. At the same time, for those whose suffering produces nothing remarkable, the myth is even crueler. It is their pain that is left without explanation or worth. What was meant to give solace becomes another way of separating those who endured for something from those who seem to have endured for nothing.
During the Second World War, analysts studied the planes that returned from combat and planned to reinforce the areas where most bullet holes appeared, until it was pointed out that the planes hit in more critical places never returned at all. While this is a more overt example of survivorship bias, a less obvious unfolding appears in much quieter and more persistent ways in how we think about our own lives. In much the same way, we construct explanations from the few stories that make sense, and ignore the many that do not, failing to realise that the evidence we see is often only the evidence that survived. The beliefs we repeat to ourselves begin to resemble small and necessary fictions— a subtle defence in the form of stories we tell ourselves so that we may live with what we are not fully equipped to understand.
And so, maybe this belief reveals less about art and more about our own discomfort with suffering without consequence. We are less afraid of madness than we are of the possibility that it leads nowhere.
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