Geniuses are innovative thinkers who break from conformity, doing things no one has ever dreamed of doing before. Problem is, so are the mad. How to distinguish one from the other? Usually, it’s a matter of money. The rich are eccentric. The poor are crazy. Poor people live day-to-day in crisis mode while rich people live in fashion mode. And the only people who believe money can’t buy happiness are those who have it. FYI: poverty sucks. By the way, money buys happiness if you have the right set of priorities. Is that radical idea genius or madness?
Sometimes the distinction between genius and madness depends upon genitalia. The cry for an innovative social change focuses attention on an unjust situation or on the marginalized messenger. A woman’s legitimate grievance, time and again, has been trivialized, ridiculed or dismissed with a deprecating female hormonal or body part reference.
Yet a madman, especially a rich one, captures the world’s attention with his solutions to social challenges. Is there a Rosetta stone for his illogical mansplanation? Some linguistic strap-on to aid women through penile reasoning? A Dr. Doolittle to translate and transform the gender-biased belittle? Genius or madness?
It all boils down to privilege. And that’s a boil the privileged don’t want lanced. The most precarious of them all are the ones who’ve attained their positions of power not through any merit, but solely through privilege. Oh, they’ll go on and on about the benefits of a merit-based society, of cream rising to the top. Truth is, they secretly acknowledge they are not the cream. Any talk of leveling the playing field or doing away with institutionalized “isms” just sets off their fear, expressed in the form of anger. Angry because the nonprivileged have the sheer audacity, the highfalutin expectation to work hard and obtain the just rewards in life.
Ho, ho, ho, Santa Claus ain’t coming! We the nonprivileged aren’t expected to be good for goodness sake. We are expected not to disrupt the foundations of privilege. We are only rewarded as much as we help maintain the bonds that bind us. Anything else is just madness.
Freedom, equality, innovation…all the lofty ideals for those who can afford to luxuriate in self-actualizing. Everyone else is lower on the pyramid and the lower we are, the more our time is invested in maintaining the pyramid rather than achieving our own personal aspirations. We’re actually shamed for thinking in terms of rising to the top, which would make any incompetent, privileged person tumble.
Don’t you see? Any innovative solution that threatens those who benefit from the status quo isn’t wanted from those who maintain the status quo. Ever wonder why a simple, logical solution isn’t implemented? Because not everyone wants the problem solved. Why it’s madness, I tell you!
Can a free society only exist if there is a class of people who aren’t? They don’t have to be called slaves. They just have to be denied equal access, justified by any pseudoscientific explanation, fear-mongering logic, or hate-based religious belief. Any combination of those can severely hobble some category of nonprivileged people.
Genius, madness, insider, outsider, innovative, disruptive. How much cultural capital can you invest in promoting your own novel ideas?