Eccentricity is socially useful

Weirdness is a useful social resource during emergencies and periods of rapid change.

Slightly odd people make good leaders. Spiritual visionaries and prophets tend to be divergent.

Indigenous Americans, like the Winnebago, valued eccentricity. They might worry that the gods would eventually punish someone who had invented an entirely new cosmology. But they wouldn't take it on themselves to punish the eccentrics.

(Ethnographer on the Winnebago: Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927))