Why we hunt monsters and failed startups

The Anatomy of Monomania: Why We Soul-Settle and Suffer for Our “White Whales”

Mon, July 27 2026 /Mpelembe Media/ — This analysis explores the intersection of biography, media criticism, and the material culture of corporate failure. One primary text provides an in-depth review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, focusing on the physicist’s unique creative process and the tragic history of his son’s mental illness. Another review critiques the unconventional documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which examines the formulaic nature of the true-crime genre through the lens of a failed film production. Complementing these are accounts of bird watching as a psychological pursuit and a discussion among collectors of “fucked company” swag. This latter community values authentic artifacts from collapsed or fraudulent entities like Theranos and Enron as tangible reminders of human hubris and historical mismanagement. Together, these sources highlight how society documents and remembers extraordinary lives, notorious crimes, and industrial catastrophes.

The sources explore the “White Whale” archetype—an intense, monomaniacal obsession with an elusive or impossible goal—across literature, history, science, and modern corporate culture.

The Literary Anchor: Ahab and the Infinite Quest

At the heart of this exploration is Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, whose relentless hunt for the albino sperm whale that took his leg represents the ultimate symbol of destructive obsession. This literary monomania is mirrored in other classic narratives, such as G.K. Chesterton’s exploration of local patriotism and imperialist hubris in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and the psychological weight of historical tragedies like Sir John Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition. Franklin’s demise has been heavily fictionalized in contemporary literature to contrast human arrogance with the indifferent, frozen sublime.

Science, Exploration, and the Pursuit of the Invisible

In scientific and exploratory history, the “White Whale” manifests as an obsessive drive to prove the existence of the unprovable or retrieve the lost.

The “Holy Grail” of Birding: Obsessive birdwatchers and scientists routinely trudge through snake-infested swamps seeking the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a species declared extinct in 2021 but kept alive in public imagination by collective belief and disputed sightings.

The Biochemist Turned “Monstrologist”: Tenured University of Chicago biochemist Roy Mackal sacrificed his academic prestige to chase real-world legends, mounting hazardous expeditions to seek the Loch Ness Monster and the Congolese dinosaur Mokele-mbembe.

The Corporate “Pequod” and Hubris Branding

In modern business and technology, the archetype has been digitized and re-engineered.

The Theranos Delusion: Elizabeth Holmes’ fraudulent healthcare startup Theranos is analyzed as a modern corporate Pequod. Diagnostics experts noted that her attempt to run hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood was a “white-whale type of approach”. When the technology failed, Holmes weaponized her charisma, dismissed internal checks, and sailed her compliant board into systemic delusion and spectacular collapse.

The “Fucked Company” Swag Market: This corporate hubris has generated a bizarre secondary market where collectors actively hunt for authentic memorabilia from spectacularly failed companies. Collectors pay high premiums for authentic Theranos fleece jackets, Enron mugs, CNN+ PopSockets, and Lehman Brothers risk-management cubes as reminders of the high cost of unbridled ambition.

Myth vs. Reality in Collective Memory

Finally, the sources trace how powerful fictionalized narratives actively overwrite factual history in public memory.

The Scopes Trial vs. Inherit the Wind: Over half of analyzed websites treat the play/movie Inherit the Wind as a historically accurate representation of the 1925 Scopes Trial, despite its heavy fictionalization and caricature of historical figures like William Jennings Bryan.

The Lost Cause and The Birth of a Nation: Writer Thomas Dixon and filmmaker D.W. Griffith crafted a distorted, racially charged narrative of the Reconstruction-era American South that presented the Ku Klux Klan as knightly saviors, rewriting history to codify white supremacy and fuel a real-world KKK revival.

From Cryptozoology to Corporate Collapse: 5 Lessons from the World’s Greatest Obsessives

There is a particular kind of madness reserved for those who chase the “White Whale.” We see it in the frozen histories of Heard Island, where explorer Warwick Deacock—a man his crew swore was Shackleton reincarnated—narrowly escaped death five times while attempting to summit the “great white whale” of a volcano known as Big Ben. Whether it is a climber on a sub-Antarctic peak or a modern-day software developer hunting for a rare Theranos water bottle on eBay, the motif of the impossible quest remains a defining human trait.We are perpetually drawn to these “zoological romances,” from biochemist Roy Mackal, who traded the tenure of the laboratory for the heat of the Congolese swamp, to filmmaker Charles Shackleton, who turned a collapsed project into a meta-exploration of failure itself. We measure success by the destination—the discovery made, the company built, the film released. However, the records of these obsessives suggest that “success” is often the least interesting part of the story.When the quest becomes the goal, failure transforms into a new, specialized kind of expertise. Here are five surprising takeaways from those who refused to let go of their impossible dreams, and what they teach us about the value of the search.

1. Sometimes the Movie  About  the Failure is Better Than the Hit

In the creative economy, losing the rights to your subject is usually a professional death knell. For director Charles Shackleton, however, it provided the friction necessary to create something that “transcends and transgresses true crime’s boundaries.” His film,  Zodiac Killer Project , is a meta-masterpiece about the act of  not  making a movie.After losing the rights to the non-fiction book that was to be his source material, Shackleton didn’t pivot; he dissected. In a brisk 92 minutes, he uses a “pleasantly soporific” tone to narrate exactly where he would have filmed, which B-roll he would have utilized, and how his reenactments would have unfolded. By exposing the “easy-to-follow recipe” and narrow borders of the true-crime genre, Shackleton created something far more inventive than another entry in the algorithmic rabbit hole of streaming services. He proved that analyzing the wreckage of an obsession can be more illuminating than the obsession itself.”Zodiac Killer Project transcends and transgresses true crime’s boundaries with both affection and intelligence.”

2. High-IQ Hubris is the Ultimate “Memento Mori”

We are living in an era where the holy relics of the venture-capitalist graveyard are more culturally significant than the products of success. Collectors like Christina Warren have become anthropologists of the spectacular flameout, hunting for branded swag from companies that flew too close to the sun. To the irony-lover, a CNN+ PopSocket is a digital equivalent of an Ozymandias-esque ruin—a monument to a “streaming giant” that lasted only weeks.However, for the tech community on  Hacker News , these objects carry a weight similar to the “Canadian Iron Ring”—a reminder to engineers of the human cost of professional failure. Displaying a Lehman Brothers mug isn’t just a joke; it’s a way to look down and remember that ethics must outweigh immediate professional gratification. These titans of industry often suffer from a specific adult malady: the trade-off of childlike curiosity for a lethal, unearned adult certainty.The Graveyard of Hubris: 5 Iconic Artifacts of Failure

The CNN+ PopSocket:  A tactile reminder of a billion-dollar pivot that lasted less than a month.

The Purdue Pharma OxyContin Pen:  Featuring a chilling dosage pull-out, a relic of a crisis built on marketing.

The Lehman Brothers Risk Management Cube:  An object of supreme irony featuring the slogan “Responsible Risk Management” from the firm that triggered a global collapse.

The Enron “Values” Booklet:  A pocket-sized guide to “Integrity” and “Excellence” from the 2001 bankruptcy king.

The Theranos Bumper Sticker:  A badge of belonging for a “miracle” that was actually a fraud, often seen near the “dribbles of urine” left by Elizabeth Holmes’ dog in the company’s final days.

3. The “Slow Start” as a Competitive Advantage

If the corporate titans above failed because they lost their sense of wonder, Albert Einstein succeeded because he never quite grew out of his. As Walter Isaacson’s biography notes, Einstein was notoriously slow to develop verbally as a child. He later viewed this “deficit” as a supreme competitive advantage.Because he didn’t grasp the “adult” concepts of space and time as a toddler, he never learned to take them for granted. While the “failed adults” of the corporate world were busy projecting certainty, Einstein approached the universe with the “freshest and original vision” of an older child. His legendary “contempt for authority” allowed him to ignore scientific dogmata, though he wryly noted the cosmic joke of his later years:”To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.”

4. The Professional Cost of the “Impossible Dream”

Not every obsession ends in a Nobel Prize. Some end with your colleagues laughing behind your back. Roy Mackal was a groundbreaking biochemist at the University of Chicago who pioneered methods to grow viruses outside host cells. But in 1970, the “zoological romance” of the unknown took hold of him when he witnessed the water “boil up” at Loch Ness, seeing an animal rise eight feet into the air.That single moment sent his academic credibility “down the tubes.” Mackal transitioned from a serious scientist to a “monstrologist,” mounting expeditions to find the  mokele-mbembe —a rumored living dinosaur in the Congo. He traded the “cute little scientific problems” of the lab for the biopsy harpoon and the swamp, proving that the price of chasing a dream is often the respect of those who stay behind in the safety of the known.Fact File: The Two Lives of Roy Mackal

The Scientist:  PhD from UChicago; first to grow viruses outside living cells; held patents for research rocket recovery systems.

The Monstrologist:  Scientific Director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau; developer of the “biopsy harpoon” for cryptid DNA; author of  A Living Dinosaur?

The Catalyst:  His 1970 sighting of a “roiling, twisting” back rising from Loch Ness that made him “not prepared to accept no for an answer.”

5. Why the “Lazarus Taxon” Keeps Us Searching

Why do we keep looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker or the coelacanth—the “Lazarus Taxon” that returned from the dead in 1938? Writer Jonathan Rosen suggests that bird watching is a “linking of infinity with the commonplace,” driven by the primal thrill that a fairy tale might actually be true.However, evolutionary biologists like Michael Coates offer a necessary counterpoint. Coates argues that the natural world—with its “gorgeous” basking sharks—is already wondrous enough. To him, the desperate search for monsters is almost a “pessimistic statement about the human imagination,” as suggested by Lorraine Daston. We are so blinded by the “White Whale” of the impossible that we fail to see the “Basking Sharks” already in front of us. Yet, as Rosen discovered in the Louisiana swamps, the value remains in the search itself.”It is the journey and not the destination that counts.”

Conclusion: The Beauty of the Unfinished Quest

From Einstein’s elusive unified field theory to Charles Shackleton’s meta-documentary, these figures teach us that our failed projects are never truly dead. They are a “Lazarus Taxon” of the mind—capable of rising again in the form of hard-won wisdom. Shackleton’s movie didn’t need to be a “hit” to be profound; Mackal didn’t need to catch a dinosaur to find wonder.The value of an obsession isn’t found in the “catch.” It is found in the way the search forces us to develop new tools, new perspectives, and a deeper sense of humility.What is your White Whale, and has the chase blinded you to the wonders already swimming in your wake?