Perhaps we complicate things for ourselves by trying to see things in linear terms when a rather more messy complex of interacting factors might be a more valid interpretation.

We need something more, perhaps something transcendent and unconfined by  reason to grant some necessary meaning to our lives. That need seems to be something quite fundamentally human, whether or not we are considered mad.

It is not simply to be unafraid of otherness - it is to seek out and attach value to otherness and in this way to extend ourselves and assert our humanity.

It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.

The criteria that determine artistic success are ultimately determined by artists, not critics, and great art itself changes what these criteria are. Stalin attempted to define artistic merit in terms of socialist realism. The Nazis denounced art that was not directly representational as decadent. The attempt to define the quality of artistic endeavour by predetermined rules had the effect— and the intentions— of freezing creative innovation. In consequence, little work of enduring merit emerged.

What is true of art is also true of other areas of human endeavour. What made Henry Ford or Walt Disney or Steve Jobs great businessmen was that they modified the rules by which their success, and the success of others in their industry, were measured. They changed our appreciation of what is good and bad in personal transport, in children’s entertainment and in computing. They sold us products we had not imagined. What we mean today by a good means of personal transport is very different from what we would have meant by the same phrase a hundred and fifty years ago, as a result of people who conceived vehicles so different from those that had already existed. The criteria of achievement are constantly redefined by great achievers.