As I work frantically on an essay due in an hour and twenty minutes, I take the luxury of pausing to highlight a phrase that caught my attention that seems pertinent to any frustrated bloggers out there in need of a good laugh:
"...but who believed that fire, not water or air, is the chief stuff of the world. In that view, his style was seen as an incidental idiosyncracy, to be explained by a pathological mental condition or (more plausibly) by his contemptuous desire to make it very difficult for stupid humanity to understand him."
-- Merrill Ring on the philosopher Heraclitus
-- Merrill Ring on the philosopher Heraclitus
7 comments:
Thats a good quote Jo. It makes me wonder why geniuses end up always going insane. Is it because their thought processes are so advanced that the human mind can't handle them? Or is it because all the stupid people around them drive them over the edge?
Or is it because they insist on wedging the chasm between themselves and the "stupid people" so as not to be (God forbid!) confused with them? Maybe genius is elitism in disguise.
The reigning theory on genius is that it is born of ignorance, I believe. We see it manifested in innocents like Einstein who knew little of the stuff that many people bicker over in an effort to assert their own intelligence...but, of course, Einstein wasn't one of the geniuses who went insane.
He was merely colorful!
I would concede the floor to you, Mama, but alas, the word "genius" has been ballied around so much that it has almost lost all meaning. I have a friend who has been labeled a genius by many of our peers who loves to playfully trump that with some very self-deprecating mannerisms, including referring to himself as an elitist and a snob.
Yet he is humble and honest and his attunement with humanity and all that ails us is unique; so, for some people, the word still holds a better meaning, I guess.
If you want to know how far the word "genius" has fallen, I spent all of my grade-school and some high school career in gifted classes because that was the label they hung on me. I was always told that I needed to live up to my "potential" but all I wanted to be was normal, so i made sure to underachieve. "Genius" is fluid and exists only in moments of clarity. There are no geniuses, just people to whom great ideas come easily and regularly.
I think geniuses end up going insane because of the loneliness that is forced upon those with a higher IQ.
Perhaps some are snobs, but I would argue that many of them have no choice to be.
Look at how our society treats intelligent people. They are often labeled nerds, they are ridiculed because they have an appreciation of things like literature and art. They don't 'fit in' growing up because they get good grades, but don't do well in gym class. They have no chance of being popular.
This inabilty to fit in with their peers, and the scorn and loneliness that is forced upon them, often makes people with higher intelligence shy and in some extreme cases even resentful of humanity. After being treated in this way, who wouldn't be?
To quote Lisa Simpson: "As intelligence goes up, happiness often goes down. Look I made a graph... I make a lot of graphs."
Ha! That's a great quote!
But, seriously, do people still put stock in IQ tests? I thought we were all more or less agreed that those tests are skewed to look for certain things and certain things only (and more generally skewed toward white males...) ??
I like both of those quotes! :)
I don't really agree that it is elitism in disguise, but rather loneliness and the lack of the ablility to associate well with other people.
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