Scott Adams on Charlie Sheen

Friday, March 4th, 2011

Charlie Sheen says that he has tiger blood and Adonis DNA. Scott Adams examines the claim:

In my two minutes of interaction with Charlie [a few years ago], I got the strangest vibe from him. There was something extraordinarily deep, or maybe dark, or intense, about him. You often hear it said of celebrities “He’s so normal.” I didn’t get a normal vibe from Charlie. Not even close. It wasn’t a crazy vibe, or a drug vibe. It just wasn’t anything I’ve seen before. It was haunting.

Like many of you, I’ve been watching his crazy-talk interviews and reading about his unusual life choices. I’m not embarrassed to say I’m fascinated by it all. But the thing that interests me the most is the intersection between honesty and insanity. There is some theoretical amount of honesty that is indistinguishable from mental illness. Charlie is blurring the line, or maybe spending some time on both sides of it. It’s clearly intentional. And it might be working, at least in terms of pressuring his show to restart, at which point it would be the most watched show on television.

It might look to you as if he is crazy because he speaks about himself as some sort of walking god with powers beyond what we humans possess. Crazy, right? Maybe. If we allow him some literary license when he says he has tiger blood and Adonis DNA, let’s examine the claim.

I witnessed him do hours of dialog during the taping of his show and he never missed a line. His costars didn’t do nearly as well. I was very impressed.

Charlie has also survived incredible amounts of drugs and still appears totally healthy. He looks better than any 45-year old I know. He has also spoken of his ability to go all night without getting tired. I’m usually done by about 9 PM. Maybe he does have an unusually strong constitution.

How about talent? He’s had dramatic roles in films, and he’s the highest paid actor on television. Is it totally crazy for him to think he’s built different from the rest of us? Successful people often believe they are special. Charlie’s problem is that he’s saying it. He’s also saying anything else that pops into his head.

How about his nerves? Would you have the guts to even attempt to do the sort of work he does in front of a live audience? I get the sense that nothing scares him.

Imagine if you stopped filtering everything you said and did. You’d have to be in Charlie Sheen’s unique position to get away with it, but just try to imagine yourself living without self-censorship. Wouldn’t you sound crazy?

Imagine you are so unafraid of consequences and the opinions of other people that you start sentences before you have a plan for how they will end. Sometimes a sentence turns out well, and sometimes you compare yourself to tigers and mythological gods.

I think Charlie is fascinating because he’s living without fear. That translates into a disturbing degree of honesty. And at the moment it gives him an amazing amount of power over the media, which he is using to his advantage.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Comments

  1. Kalim Kassam says:
    March 6, 2011 at 6:15 am

    Compare Adams’ description of Sheen with frequent-commenter-round-these-here-parts Bruce Charlton’s chapter on mania from his book Psychiatry and the Human Condition:

    Manic people are overactive, rushing around continually without break; talk fast, too much and too loudly, hardly sleep; are short-tempered and often aggressive. Full-blown mania is usually characterized by a wild over-confidence and over-estimation of one’s ability, often combined with a paranoid belief that these abilities are being thwarted by other people who happen to be around.
    [...]
    For over-arousal to tip over into hypomania, the normal sensation of fatigue needs to be suppressed or over-ridden by an analgesic agent. The human body produces its won analgesics, of various kinds. The ‘high’ mood of mania is a secondary consequence of the ability to remain active without fatigue. Such an ability usually this makes people feel good, feel powerful, they are impressed with themselves. The analgesic activity means that there is a loss of perception of many of the negative feelings that accompany normal life, a blunting of the sense of shame, shyness, fear.

    If mania is caused the inappropriate activity of some kind of endogenous analgesic that prevents fatigue, the question arises as to what this analgesic might be. An analgesic drug could be responsible, for example amphetamine which produces a state very similar to mania. However since many patients with manic symptoms are not taking any drugs, this strongly suggests that there is an endogenous or internally-produced analgesic substance which abolishes fatigue in the manic patient.
    …
    We can now suggest a plausible sequence of events leading to hypomania. In the first place, there must be a hyper-aroused, driven state leading to over-activity. Perhaps a young businessman is trying to achieve an almost impossible deadline and stays up night after night on paper work. At first he feels exhausted, but keeps pushing himself and finds that the more he does, the less tired he gets.

    Normally, over activity would be stopped by negative-feedback from fatigue. But if hyper-secretion of endogenous opiates is present, these may have an analgesic effect that removes the negative feedback of fatigue. In the businessman’s body great floods of endorphins lead to immunity form tiredness, and a feeling of invulnerability. The businessman starts to feel that he is breaking though to a new level of ability — after all, he can work twice the number of hours as anyone else, he feels great, his mind is sharp, and the work he produces is great! He has no time for the slow dull plodders (such as his wife) who tell him he needs a break, a rest a sleep: they may need it, but he does not. He is clearly superior. He asks her to run a bath, this seems to take forever, and then when he gets in the water is too cold!

    The businessman turns on his wife, and sees that she and the children are cowering in the corner as if he was some kind of wild beast. Disgusted at their feebleness he storms out of the house slamming the door. Perhaps he should go and find a prostitute instead of his wife — after all a man of his energy cannot expect to be satisfied by just one woman…

    Hyperactivity continues, which provides the ‘stress’ necessary to stimulate further endorphin secretion. Overactivity is accompanied by diminished sleep. If over activity is so severe as to reduce sleep below the minimum necessary for human health (usually about four hours a night) and for several days in a row — then the patient might become delirious due to sleep deprivation. The delirium will then lead to classic ‘psychotic’ symptoms such as hallucinations, bizarre delusions, and jumbled speech (‘thought disorder’) superimposed on top of un-fatiguing hypomanic over activity.

    So the full state of mania might emerge — over activity, lack of fatigue and psychotic symptoms. The businessman leaves his desk, roams the streets trying to enlist people for his new project, telephones colleagues all through the night, takes a plane to the central office (no time to waste!), harangues the chief executive for his failure to allocate resources to the new project and gets kicked out of headquarters. He realizes that the company are all in a conspiracy to hold back these new ideas. He has stopped sleeping, although he isn’t really fully awake — but in a fluctuating twilight state, finding it difficult to concentrate or frame thoughts.”

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