Why Does the Genius Myth Have a Hold Over Us? (Helen Lewis)

Listen now (64 mins) | "I think that's quite a powerful thing too, because we want our geniuses to be extraordinary. We don't want them to be living quiet little bourgeois lives..."

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Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic who writes about culture and politics. I love her work so much. And I loved her new book, The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea.

Today we talk about who really deserves to be described as a genius, if anyone does. And why genius figures in our culture have such a hold over us.

Helen shares some truly fascinating anecdotes about our perception of the exceptional, and together we explore some of the more pernicious and potentially dangerous genius myths.

We talk about what typically goes into creating or inspiring a genius, why certain moments and places in history have overproduced them, and why being labeled as a genius seems to have a corrupting influence over certain people. We talk about some of the most notable wives of geniuses, and Helen’s take on muses.

Helen reveals that some of our grandest inventions were actually simultaneous inventions, where two people arrived at the same conclusion and created the same thing at the same time. Helen explains the idea of the zone of the adjacent possible, and we talk about whether some inventions are, more or less, inevitable.

We also talk about  the myth of the lone rebel and the iconoclast, and of course, how we might look at the work of geniuses who have behaved badly.

MORE FROM HELEN LEWIS:

The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea

Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

Helen’s Substack

Follow Helen on Instagram

Helen’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I love your work. You always make me laugh, and of course I loved your book. It stands to reason I would love your book as well, so congratulations. Thank you very much. Why this topic?

HELEN:

It's a very good question because I think by the time I was about halfway through it, I thought you've tried to write a book here about everything. This is the kind of entire history of Western thorn and culture going all the way from classical ideas about genius all the way through the Renaissance and then the romantics and then onto Elon Musk, the natural endpoint of all human civilization, Elon Musk. But I think there is some, the more I looked into it, the more it had really deep questions in it. So in some ways we're talking about geniuses as a kind of secular replacement for God after the industrial revolutionary enlightenment, there's this phrase by I think Ralph Waldo Emerson about phoenixes. Once you saw phoenixes, now they're gone. And I think there is something about we all hunger for something that's kind of special and transcendental and a little like fingertip touch with a divine.

But there are also these really profound questions about human worth, and I asked some human beings worth more than others, which is this persistent, it's the dark side drumbeat behind the celebration of some people as being really exceptional. There is the idea that you can rank humanity, which as people who read the book will find out, takes humanity into some pretty dark places. So it's a story that's got everything, and the challenge for me was to try and in some way coherent and I'll let readers be the judge of whether or not I succeeded on that one.

ELISE:

Well, it's full of fascinating stories and insights and of course, where would we be in a conversation about genius if you didn't also get into eugenics and IQ tests and something that it seems impossible to escape culturally. We just, as you said, just keep wanting to go back here to rank the intelligence based on IQ, which is a very specific type of intelligence and compare countries and compare people and compare races and compare genders. We really love to do this. We don't seem to be able to escape it.

HELEN:

Yeah, it's my favorite thing about writing history and studying history is you just think that these arguments never end. The idea that you'll ever settle any of these arguments is really hopeful. My first book was a history of British feminism called Difficult women, and I was writing about the suffragettes in that and I was finding out that the suffragettes were having all of these arguments. They argued about should they be anti prostitution or not, where should they stand on that? Was it work or was it victimization? And I thought, well, this is exactly the same argument that the feminist movement is having now. It was exactly the same one it was having during the second wave in the 1970s. And you're right, exactly eugenics. If you go on to X, formerly known as Twitter, it won't take you very long to find some people who start talking about IQ scores.

In fact, I literally just came across from seeing someone talk about eugenics on Twitter just as I flicked across now to come and do this podcast because these are perpetual niggling questions at the back of the human mind, I think. Yeah, so I think that's the best thing about studying history is it's actually often usefully a way to work through things that you're worried about in the presence with the benefit of distance and time, and that these arguments don't feel so vivid and so tribal. I'm not invested in the 1920s and the arguments that were going on then at all, everybody involved is dead. I don't have any allegiance to any of them. So it's a way of putting those discussions at a kind of distance and let readers sit with some of this stuff in a way that if you wrote about it now, they would bring all of their political preconceptions and maybe tribalism about how they feel about contemporary figures with them.

ELISE:

So free who are unfamiliar with this whole movement. It's this idea that, and if you look at the span of iq now, certain developing nations don't theoretically score as high, but IQ is a moving mutable measure of intelligence that is definitely impacted by environmental factors like lead and exposure to other toxins. And it's also R IQ has what been, well now I think it's plateaued.

HELEN:

Three points every decade. I was going to say until they invented the smartphone, but actually it's slightly earlier than that. I think it's about the 1990s. So there's a thing called the Flynn Effect, essentially iq, they keep rescoring it a hundred is the average iq, but over the course of the 20th century, that goes up and that's better schooling, better abstract thinking, better childhood nutrition. As you say, children are not being poisoned by being put in industrial jobs in the way that they are. And that's a really wonderful story about the fact that we have had this level of progress, and as you say, we shouldn't talk about IQ as this kind of great God. It is a useful measure. I think you can overstate being anti IQ for political reasons because it does predict lots of stuff, educational attainment health because people who are smarter to take care of themselves better, but it is not this number floating around above your head that says how good a person you are, not even how smart a person you are.

When you look at the early eu Genesis, Francis Galton, he had this idea of nobility, not an aristocratic nobility, but a nobility of the intellect, and these were the classes he wanted to separate people into. And I dunno if it's not, I was raised Catholic. There's some lingering bit of that that just says that's a deeply inhuman and icky project. You may possibly be able to do it even technically, but why would you want to? What does it achieve? I'm more for changing schools so that they support different levels of achievement. And that's how the IQs test started to help find the kids who needed more help in school. But this idea that I think that discourse bleeds into so quickly about who is more evolved, who is better than other people in some fundamental moral sense, that's the bit I think now we find squeaky, but which I should say the left in the 1920s did not, which is fascinating to me. I used to work for a magazine called The New Statesman. It was founded by two brilliant left wing thinkers of the early 20th century, and they were both eugenics because it was, the casual belief was that of course, this is how you'd improve people's lives through breeding. And it wasn't until in America, in California, you had sterilization to people who were deemed mentally unfit or in the Nazi regime the same that people suddenly went, oh, okay. We can see where this ends

ELISE:

Up. Yeah, I mean, Margaret Sanger, unfortunately, the founder of Planned Parenthood was eugenicist. It was quite common.

HELEN:

And Mary Stokes, who's the equivalent figure in Britain, but to be clear, sometimes those people had racially inflected eugenics. Sometimes they had class-based inflected eugenics. And also I think the other thing that history does is give you a level of humility about your own moral beliefs to understand why they felt like that. So I wrote about Mary Stokes in my last book, and she was talking to women who I remember. There was a woman who was at the same age as me at the time, she'd been 37, and she wrote to Mary Stokes and she said, I've had nine children and my insides are all exhausted. That was the phrase, she'd obviously had a uterine prolapse and her doctor wouldn't tell her not to get pregnant again.

So for her, you can see how she ended up at Eugenics, the idea that people should be helped to have fewer children, and then you can see the next step, which was some people should be forced to have fewer children, and this is what I mean about putting that distance between you and history is things that just seem outrageous and absurd to us. Now, you can then suddenly fill in all the steps that got people down that path that ended up in that dark place.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, certainly. One of the things that I loved about your book, and I think you don't write about this, but I was reading in Ken Wilber's last book, and he talks about how there are sort of 12 types of intelligence that we now identify, whether it's iq, spatial intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, kinesthetic, musical intelligence, et cetera, which to me makes a lot of sense. But one of the things that is a red thread of your book is the way that IQ, in particular certain types of achievement, you could call it verbal thinking to quote Temple Grandin, that when we see someone like that and we can venerate them as a genius, there is a cultural idea and maybe geniuses feel this way as well, that they have latitude. And this is why of course you open the book with Elon Musk that they have latitude to participate in a wide array of fields, that their genius is transferable for Elon from technical ability or an understanding how to take over a company reignited as a quote, late breaking founder, and then make it do things that seem impossible, and to his credit, he has, but that it gives him no understanding of social dynamics in which to take over a primary media platform for the good of anyone.

So can you talk a bit about that wide latitude that we give to people who we perceive as genius or exceptional?

HELEN:

Yeah, I mean those theories of multiple intelligence are still really hotly debated, but the one thing that I think you can definitely say, so Louis Turman, the great American psychologist, did this huge study called Genetic Studies of Genius, which he then didn't find any baby geniuses, so he had to rename it genetic studies of the gifted, but he only let kids who had an IQ of 135 and then 140 into that study. And he also separately tested a load of kids who were very creative in one way or another, brilliant musicians what it was, and they didn't necessarily have high IQs. So I think that's the thing we have to separate out is there's lots of domains in which you can succeed without these kind of, whatever you want to call them, genius level IQs. And that's again, because exactly what you were saying, our idea is that there is just quantity called genius and you get a sort of lump of it.

And we don't really take into account the fact that some people have domain specific expertise. So I think Elon Musk is a really good example. If you read about his early successes, he was incredibly risk-taking, which as an entrepreneur is something that you have to be. He was incredibly focused about stripping back space production and car production, getting the cheapest parts, the simplest way of working. Why do we have to do it like this? Even though it's been done like this all the time and this level of belief, electric cars will work, reusable rockets will work, but then energized all the people around him to come on that mission with him, which is its own kind of genius and very impressive. But then I don't think anyone, even him given his interview with Michelle Hue for Bloomberg he did recently, which was very testy. I don't think anybody really thinks that Doge, the Department of Governmental efficiency has been a success, right?

He went from promising 2 trillion in savings to now being very huffy and saying, well, you can't see that sort of thing overnight. Actually, do you know what? Actually running a government's actually very difficult indeed. And it's like, yeah, I knew that that's why I wouldn't have charged in with some 21-year-old called Big Balls and announced to everybody that I was going to be able to do it better than them. And I think he's a classic example of somebody I talk in the book about geniuses becoming kind of political arguments. The right wants him this great towering, uber mech figure who comes in and cuts through the sort of sluggish bureaucracy. They want that to work because that's their ideology and the left wants him to have been a fraud from the start. The Miles Broun figure from Glass Onion, the Knives Out film in their early invention was just a con from the start.

And neither of those entirely true. He did have some really good ideas. He did run businesses very successfully, and he benefited from a whole lot of luck around that. But what it seems to have left him with is not a sense of, oh God, I've been really lucky in life. How can I pay this forward? But oh wow, I'm incredibly good. Everything I touch turns to gold. Why wouldn't I be good at everything? And that's a really, really powerful story about Genius kind of corrupting someone. I talked to Sam Harris about this, the neuroscientist and podcaster. He used to be friends with him. And I said, I think that genius corrupts people. And he nodded because I think that's lots of people who knew Elon Musk 10 years ago. That's their experience of him, that he had this perfect flickering in a flame and somehow he lost it because he lost sight of what it was that he was good at because he believed himself to be a genius.

ELISE:

And I would say a lot of ketamine and other impacts that are extremely yes, it's not really a performance enhancing drug, is it in that sense, right. No, but you also going to Musk for one minute too. I love this part of the book at the beginning where you write about how he is so specifically and particularly suited for this moment in time and you write, would he have been a world-changing figure in 15th century Milan or present day Molly? Or if he had been born among the Inca or Inuits, probably not. You can just as easily imagine him being the kind of advisor who assured the king, his latest military innovation was ready to use when it wasn't and got his head cut off as a result. So yes, and this gets into the Renaissance or these moments of extreme forward progress or artistic progress where there's just this combustion of genius. Can you talk about that? I think that that's so important, right? The context, the tools, the technology and the companionship.

HELEN:

Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit talked about Silicon Valley and self mythologizing from people who've got successful there. But the one thinker that I do really admire, and I've always find him really interesting is Paul Graham, who's one of the founders of Y Combinator, which was the startup incubator. And the premise explicitly of Y Combinator was we are going to give you bootcamp and also introduce you to all the other people who are running startups, and the network effects of that will be really good. And so there's an essay that Paul Graham has, which is about what he calls the Milanese, Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the fact that all the artists you've heard of in the Renaissance, almost all of them were from Florence in Italy. And why was that? Why Florence, why not Milan, which is a couple of hundred miles away, had the same system of government that broadly the same demographics, all of the things the same.

And he said to mate, Leonard, Leonard da Vinci, you don't just need his talent, you need Florence. And his conclusion from that is that if you're a young person today and you're looking to make your mark on the world, go and find the place that is where the most interesting things are happening and move to it if you possibly can. And that was the story of early Silicon Valley, that California didn't have such tough non-compete clause for engineers. It was close to Stanford University, it was close to a lot of the defense department, which was funding scientific research. It had a great that people wanted to live, and that became a kind of force multiplier of the fact that Stanford University physics department was a great place to be if you were a complete physics nerd. And there were loads of places. Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was another really obvious example, or Liverpool in the 1960s or cern, the large Hadron Collider.

Now if you want to do particle physics, there's people from 20 nationalities there. And it's one of the things I think is really sad about the way that zoning rules in America and blue States' inability to develop has stopped there being nice cheap housing where cool artists can live together. When you read about Picasso, spent the 19 hundreds living in a horrible little windy apartment in some scummy bit of Paris with this group of people who scraped together the kind of fu on team they needed to go to have a glass of wine at lunchtime, and then they would talk until 3:00 AM in the morning, and that doesn't exist anymore. That drafty apartment that Cassie lived in is presumably now some gorgeous million dollar flat that is occupied by people who were lucky to buy it when it was much cheaper. And so I think there are real implications if you accept this idea that we are stronger in networks.

You can't really just think of people as rugged individuals, even ones who are supremely talented themselves need those kind of connections around them about how we organize society, how do we build cities that are, I was in Austin and Texas last year and that struck me as a really interesting place. It's built a lot of housing. It's a blue city in a red state, and people are moving there, but the house prices aren't going up because it's actually building enough housing to meet demand and people are moving there from California. So it's got a really cool music scene, which has had for a long time, but that's now had an influx of new people. It's got a really great standup scene. It's a place where you can still live a decent middle class life around interesting creative people, and less and less of America feels like that It's either bar sprawling suburbs that you have to traverse by car or it's cities that are crowded and only really work for the rich. That's an implication of thinking about genius, really. This is what I mean about the book is about everything.

ELISE:

I don't know if you've read Abundance yet by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, but they do a really good job of explicating the impact of housing and blue states and homelessness and the causation there. And it's true. I mean, I live in Los Angeles and it's insane when I think about the house that I live in, which is beautiful and it's 1700 square feet and it's a fortune comparatively. And often my husband and I are like, what are we doing? Why are we here? What are we doing here? We need to get out.

HELEN:

And that does have all kinds of implications for your career choices. It makes it much harder for you to take a career risk if the consequences for that are so deadly. And here's the other study that I really love that a guy came across. They did a survey of all the patent applications in different counties and they looked at them through prohibition. So when alcohol was banned in some counties and not others, and they found that places that had prohibition had fewer patent applications, and you could track that happening. And that was because people were talking to each other in bars about ideas that they had and that was encouraging them to start businesses. And that's another thing that I think is sad about spending so much time online, but also not having those third spaces in our culture is that innovation is stifled because of that. Because what you need, if you've got a great idea, you need other people to help you make it happen. That is harder now, I think, than it was.

ELISE:

And you need not only that exposure to the Florence of it all, the mentorship, but it is also building out of what's already present. Like you write about Tim Burners Lee, who I don't even know, he is not even known to me, and yet he invented the worldwide web, but he's not a self mythologize, and that's a big part of your book there to tell the story of what you've achieved and to keep your legacy alive. So it's a huge factor, right, from Shakespeare to Musk.

HELEN:

Yeah, a healthy level of narcissism is useful because you want acolytes and then when you die, you want them to become your kind of priests and your executors. And yeah, Picasso absolutely had that. Einstein had that Shakespeare took a hundred years to build that up, but eventually became the kind of Warwick Sha tourist board. And I think it's harder for people who don't blow their own trumpet really. And Tim Burnley is my classic example. Yeah, he invented really the platform that we built all of the modern internet on, and my kind of killer line about this is the fact that if he's got a knighthood, he's had lots of honors, but he lives a pretty normal life and his kids are called, I think Alice and Ben, and you compare that with Elon Musk constantly just demanding our attention. He wants to play a genius in public. And so many of the people that I write about in the book, Picasso being another very obvious example, they love playing the genius in public, and it's very easy to confuse that for actual talent or achievement, I think.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, certainly that desire for glory is a very different adventure I think, than actually creating things of beauty or high utility. And then there's also this idea, and this is where the mythologizing I think becomes even more extreme in some ways. We're at the very beginning of understanding our world and even ourselves, and yet so much of this sort of low hanging fruit has been picked. The days of a single scientist getting a million patents is done. Science is largely done in teams and it's not as glorious, which I think makes these sort of geniuses or self-appointed geniuses. I mean, Kanye would be another example of a self-appointed genius, more toxic, I don't know if that's the right word, but let's just say it's giving genius a bad name.

HELEN:

I think we could all be safe in saying that Kanye is not a great advert for declaring yourself to be a great genius and what that does to your self-perception, but you are right. It's a kind of bugbear among the kind of Nobel prize community that you can only get a lot of the science Nobels, the maximum award is three people, because often as you say, it's big teams or in the case of something like the COVID vaccines, you're talking about a group of Chinese scientists sequence the genome of the virus, and then two independent companies are working on mRNA vaccines. So trying to pass out the credit is really difficult for those kind of things. It's not really how science particularly works in a lot of ways. That said, there are still some great scientists who have, I think it was Robert k Merton said, have a vocalizing effect.

They are just such big people in the field that they make the field itself more exciting and they make younger people want to work in it. So he talks about, I think Freud as an example of that. So again, it's always double-edged. I know what you mean by giving it a bad name, and I think we are in a time of quite a big backlash to the idea of genius. I think particularly maybe post Me Too and the kind of racial reckoning. I think there is a feeling that it's quite a reactionary idea. It's a canon of dead white men, and does that really entirely accurately map onto the history of human achievement? No. I mean there are lots of dead white men who had great achievements, but there are also a lot of other people who'd been written out. I was stunned. I dunno, had you heard about George Washington Carver, for example, who was the great agricultural scientist?

He was born the son of a slave and did incredible work in chemistry but was not allowed to go to school. He was African-American, not allowed to attend university. So the fact that he came from this huge 10 pound penalty to do the things that he did is incredibly impressive. I was thinking about including a Russian scientist who's very brilliant, who sold fur mats last theorem, but he had to fight really hard in Soviet Russia to go to university. He was Jewish and there was a hard quota on the number of Jewish people allowed as there was in the Ivy League in the first part of the 20th century. And I think that it's always really good to remember the invisible and visible barriers that there have been when you are trying to get a slightly more accurate assessment of who really does deserve to be described as a genius if anyone else does.

ELISE:

Right? And you think about the fact that in order to attain an education or be literate, women needed to be cloistered until what, 1500 or something might not have been quite that late, but a decided head start to men of privilege and power in terms of even being in conversation with each other.

I loved the chapter of course on the wives of geniuses as well. Would we all have a wonderful wife supporting us as we go about our work and proofreading our books and editing our copy and standing off stage and giving us notes. Was it NCA's wife and

HELEN:

It's wife and OV who seems to have been the perfect literary wife in that she didn't want any credit for herself. She was sort essentially his bodyguard after Lolita came out and everybody kind said it was a pedophile monstrosity. But yeah, apart from anything else, I think when people think about wives, they think of the obvious domestic support, how nice it is essentially to have a housekeeper, but there's something else too, which is having somebody who is deeply invested and cares and loves your work and wants the best for you, and that's the bit that came through about lots and lots of these wives of particularly writers. I focused on that just having someone who's that deeply invested in your career but doesn't feel any jealousy towards it and is prepared to be perpetual second in command. That's certainly experience that very few women throughout history have had.

Very few men have had it, but some men have had it, and it is just the biggest possible assist that you could possibly have to your career just having somebody who runs your life really smoothly so you don't have to worry about that side, but also so deeply invested in caring about the work that you produce and someone who you love and you want to impress, right? I think the idea of mu gets a pretty bad name now, but making work because you want to connect with somebody that you really love is actually slightly wonderful thing. I think that's really lovely. It doesn't necessarily have to be exploited tip, which is I think how it's now often framed.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and then there are the people who are sort of not even rival artists, but you write about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and sort of everything that she had to put on hold in order to enable his career until he accidentally killed himself, and then the slow reappraisal of her work in light of her own immense talent, which was subjugated to his

HELEN:

Right. My editor said to me about that. She said, do you think that Lee Krasner now benefits from her own kind of mythmaking, which I think is a fair point, which is that actually the feminist movement really since the sixties and seventies has been on a big mission to rediscover lost artists, lost writers who are women. But this is the thing is that now we have a slightly more sophisticated discussion, which is how do you write and talk about Lee Krasner and celebrate her art without putting her into the kind of suffering wife who emerged from Jackson Pollock's shadow? Whether you mention it or not, deliberately to make a point, she will always be Mrs. Jackson Pollock to some extent, certainly shaped her reputation during her lifetime. As you say, she completely shaped her life. They moved out to a house in the countryside out of New York and had this big barn in which he did his huge drip paintings.

But Lee Krasner didn't have that kind of studio space, and it's only after Pollock's death that she starts doing really big canvases. So you can see in the material conditions of her art, the different levels investment that they had as a couple saying that made me think about that research about the pandemic when couples who both had to work from home did. So they found out, and this will I'm sure shock you, that men seemed to end up getting all the kind of spare rooms and women were working on the kitchen table or packing their stuff away at the end of the day because, and for probably in many cases, sensible economic reasons, when you have straight couples, they tend to prioritize the male wage because it tends to be better and more reliable. But that has afflicted creative couples and literary couples as well. It's like why run uphill to make a woman a success when one half of your partnership is much more marketable and that's the male

ELISE:

Half? But it's interesting in the context of these wives, Lee Krasner included in the way, and certainly Vera ov, and the way that she not only was there to love and tend and keep him alive, but she was his agent, his lawyer, she structured his whole life and in many ways, he would not have probably the fame if it hadn't been for her playing that role of ensuring that his work met its audience.

HELEN:

And when I read it, do you have the same reaction, which was, oh, that sounds so unbelievably relaxing. What must, I just didn't know whether or not I could even live like that. You know what I mean? I dunno if I ever, I'm quite a control freak, so maybe I really couldn't live throughout, but imagine if you were with somebody who just ran your whole life for you. I think to most people, that's such an alien thought that it's kind of mind blowing.

ELISE:

Yeah, well, this will probably make your eyes cross, but if you think about an archetypal masculine and then Carl Jungian sense, an archetypal masculine and archetypal feminine and the feminine being the creative output and the masculine being the structure in order, you also have these women, the structure and order so that you can go and create. And that is a huge gift because the structuring and the ordering is I think more work. Even when I think about that in the context of my own work as a writer, the structuring, the ordering, the outlining, what am I doing here is so much harder than just sitting down and writing. In my experience, I don't know if you have the same experience, but to outsource that would be amazing.

HELEN:

Every writer has that. Yeah, I remember I interviewed Chris Hadfield who was an astronaut, and I just remember he had this brilliant thing where, but we had to go from the pace Rehears having an event to the hotel where I was doing the interview and he just sort of powered down. I remember just watching him and I remember thinking, well, that's really interesting. Somebody who's been their whole life in the military and they've just got to the stage where I go, where I'm told I do what I'm told someone runs my life for me, and when I'm not needed, I kind of just gently robot power down. And I remember thinking surrendering to that must be, I dunno if I would find it difficult in some ways, but if you did, imagine if you surrendered yourself to someone really competent and they just ran things for you.

ELISE:

Yes, yes. No, it's an amazing, I've had that in my life at various points in my career and just being bossed around. I think this is why during the summer I go to this ranch with my kids and you're on a schedule and there's no choice at dinner. It is what you go through a buffet line, you eat what you eat, you get what you get, and you don't get upset and you don't have any choice, Helen, besides at the cocktail hour at your cabin, what cheese are you going to put out on your plate? It is so relaxing. No, I had thing I had

HELEN:

That we went on safari the year before last we went to Kenya to the Mara. It was that exactly. It was like you get up at 6:00 AM and then you get in the car and we drive you around for a bit and then we give you lunch and the lunch is this and tell us if you've got any allergies. It was like being in this very posh boarding school, but it was kind of amazing. And I just realized that I make so many decisions in my life and it's really nice not to have to make any decisions. And I think that the other thing, we've got more recent research about how draining it is to make decisions. So I think that's the thing. If you're a woman and you're trying to do four hours of childcare and then you are writing, even if you're a man trying to do that, that's just a lot of your kind of juice has been used up by that point, I think.

ELISE:

Yeah. So I think the idea of a partner who is carrying a huge amount of this cognitive load for you cannot be understated in terms of someone's ability to produce. And I think also while you get these geniuses, I've used that in quotations or people who do genius acts, I like what you do. People are not geniuses, but they have these moments of genius or they do these things of genius are lone sharks out there untethered and unbound to life or plugged into a company or a system or a structure that can do rest of that for them.

HELEN:

And we have this kind of idea as well of that's what universities really were set up to do. Let's be brutal. They were set up to make slightly weird, middle-aged men have secretaries and research assistants and they had rooms in college in which they could live. All of that kind of stuff was just taking away stuff to give the kind of great man a chance to do his real work as uninterrupted as possible. Yeah, I like that metaphor about kind of the lone sharks because you're right, a lot of these guys when I was writing about them did have that fail to them, these kind of apex predators that swim around and are kind of gorgeous and flashy in their own ways, but you can't have too many of them because they need all of the add-ons around them.

ELISE:

Let's talk about this paper that was written in 1922, and you write about it as one of the most arresting research paper that you've ever read. And this was fascinating. It goes to this idea of the collective unconscious or that these are ideas that are having their moment or all of the factors that are needed to build this next evolution in the way that we see the world are present. Can you tell us a bit about this paper?

HELEN:

Yeah. I know the author's names are William and Dorothy,

ELISE:

William f Augburn and Dorothy Thomas more than a century ago, two people arriving at the same conclusion.

HELEN:

And it's the idea about our inventions inevitable and they go through what they call multiples, which are great inventions that two people came up with at the same time. So the classic example is the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell and Alicia Gray both had the idea for pretty much exactly the same time evolution by natural selection is Darwin and a guy called Alfred Russell Wallace at pretty much the same time. And this just happens again and again and again and again. I mean, I write in my chapter in Edison, people came up with the idea of the light bulb just over and over again, a vacuum surrounded by glass with a burning filament in it. That was a really common idea and just loads of people had a go at making it work. And the thing that was holding it back by the end was the materials not being good enough.

So examples of human evolution in the sense of two animals in nature might end up with answers to the same evolutionary problem that might look the same. And that's kind of what happens with human inventions to some extent too, which is a profoundly challenging idea that instead of just being this person who just has insights that no one else was ever going to have, actually you were the recipient of the lightning strike that was just bound to happen. So Steven Johnson in his book calls this. He says that there's a zone of the adjacent possible, which I think is this really lovely word for it. And he says, you couldn't have invented YouTube before the time it was invented because you needed people to be able to film enough videos and people be able to upload enough videos on fast enough internet connections, and also a site that could host that many videos.

But once all of those conditions are in place, people have got a phone to film something, there's the broadband hosting costs and not so high. When all of that happens, someone will invent YouTube. I think that's probably true, and it's not to take anything away from the people who really did invent YouTube. That's still very good. That's still a great achievement, but it does radically reset your idea of the uniqueness and specialness of inventors in that sense that it is a much more dynamic and social process. He also writes about the printing press, which is based on a wine press basically. And when you get all those pieces in place, somebody is going to invent the printing press, and that's no disc to Gutenberg, but it does mean it's kind of to some extent, inevitable. And I think they make in that paper, I think they have so many examples that they make a really compelling case, and this is something that Malcolm Gladwell picks up in outliers. The idea about why was that generation of great computer pioneers that included Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, they were born at the right time that they had. They were the first generation of cool young tinkerers who had access to sufficient computing power recreationally that they could play around with it. That's a really powerful thing. You need to have your great idea, but you also need to have it at the right moment

ELISE:

Time. Yeah,

HELEN:

And I think about it in journalism journalism 10 years, I had this big idea of we're going to pivot to video. And so loads of people staffed up these big video teams they were going to distribute on Facebook, and then they just couldn't, the revenue just was not there for it. And then they, a lot them disbanded. And guess what? Now it really has pivoted to video, right? Everybody has now got a phone that can play videos. God knows being on public transport, you find this out. But also the streaming four and 5G are fast enough that you can play videos wherever you are. You don't have to download them at home and take them out with you. And so lots of people had brilliant ideas during the initial pivot to video, but they were just too early to it. And that now the time has actually come for it. And again, I just think that's a humbling thought that I think we still kind of keep with us. Yeah.

ELISE:

Let's talk about this other genius myth because it's so pernicious, particularly at this moment of time, particularly here in America. I'm not sure if you know what's going on over here, Helen, but let me tell you. Yeah. So you write one of the most seductive myths of genius out there, the myth of the lone rebel, the iconoclast, the heroic dissenter against the orthodoxy. So this speaks to MAHA and the intellectual dark web, right? This idea that you're the only one who sees what's wrong with all of science as a body or all of vaccines as a body. So can you talk a bit about this? It is certainly pervasive and really not only frustrating, but it's very difficult to argue. Well, it's hard to argue with conspiracy theorists, but it's also hard to argue with people who are so who take any opposition or any pushback or any, you're wrong, bud. Look at all of the reams and reams of evidence, and they take that and arm themselves with You're threatened by the truth.

HELEN:

I see they've got to you

Who's got to make, I've read some studies and I think also put you in vaccines being a very good example, put you in an impossible position of saying there is no such thing as a vaccine injury, which is not true. We all know that vaccines have side effects. It's just that if you look at the cold statistical analysis, fewer people are going to be injured by this far, far, far fewer than will be injured by the disease. And I think that is born of complacency, right? We have eradicated polio, as far as I know in the continental United States until recently, measles was almost unknown. And I mean, the polio vaccine first came in and people did not have to worry about their kid being in an iron lung for the entirety of their life. People fell upon that vaccine.

ELISE:

It was a countrywide celebration. Everyone stopped and hugged each other.

HELEN:

Roald Dahl wrote the most beautiful thing about his daughter. Olivia died of measles she had and encephalitis after it. And just about watching how quickly that happened for the generation that lived through that, this was an extraordinary, you didn't have to worry about your child dying of these preventable diseases anymore. What an incredible gift from science. But you move a generation on, and I don't think I know anybody who's had measles, maybe one person actually as an adult, because everybody I know was we have quite high vaccination rates in England. Everybody I know was vaccinated as a kid. And so it becomes very easy to say, well, what was it that big a deal anyway? Really? Was it? And also that kind of crunchiness that you get where people think, well, I'm really healthy. They don't want to admit that they could get sick.

And it's quite weird and humbling to them. And I think you saw that a lot during COVID. People are like, well, I don't need the COVID shot because I'm really healthy. And of course, unfortunately, that's not how infectious diseases work, but it became a kind of personal point of pride with people I think too, that they weren't afraid of COVID like other people were. But all of this undergirding, all of this is this myth of the kind of iconoclast, the lone rebel, the only person who's seen the truth. I mean, if you talk to social scientists, they always say when you hear hoof beats, pink horses, not zebras. So most things are quite common. Lots of established narratives are established because they are true, but we are so compelled by the stories where it's not true, or by the story of one person standing up to the crowd and being vilified, but then being vindicated at the end.

Those are just so much more appealing that they become outsized with very bad at seeing big numbers, essentially. And so one vivid personal story of the one guy who was right is just has so much more emotional power than the thousand boring stories about how you can go and get a diptheria vaccine and you don't get diptheria anymore. And I just think it's really pernicious. I've written quite a lot about Joe Rogan, who's the biggest podcaster in the world, and he's a funny guy, and he's obviously curious and there's lots to about him, but he has this fundamental worldview that is anti-establishment. As soon as anyone in authority says something, he's instantly suspicious of it. And that applies to aliens or whatever it might be, as much as it applies to COVID. And it's been really funny seeing that the couple of guys go into the Trump administration who had been both big JFK Truthers, Jeffrey Epstein truthers, they had been promoting all of these conspiracy theories.

And in fact, I think there's a clip of a couple of, I think it's Kash Patel of the FBI on Fox. And he's just like, oh, well, I dunno why people are still going on about this. I've actually looked at the file and none of this stuff is true. And you're like, how did you think? You saying it was going to convince people when there were lots of other people saying it previously and they weren't convincing anybody. But it is this kind of delusion that you'll be listened to that these aren't people who've just got a reflexive. And if you become the establishment, guess what? They don't listen to you either Cash Patel.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it's a wild, I mean, it is an intense infection in our culture, and I don't know if it's new or it's very, very old, but has it been platformed in this way or is that relatively new? I'm sure the instinct is old, but

HELEN:

Yeah, I mean, vaccination rates were much higher. And I have criticisms of the left too. I just saw today about the fact that their America is winding back, the advice on vaccinating children, and actually here in Europe, that wasn't done. It was decided that the risk to them from under eighteens from COVID was so low it wasn't worth it. So I think there is a thing when you just doggedly insist on stuff and you don't show you're working, that again, ramps up people's natural suspicions. But really, when you think about how many of our stories, I just think John Proctor and The Crucible is the classic example, the Lone Man standing up to the authorities. These are just so, so compelling that I'm not surprised that they flourished, particularly like you say during COVID, which is a time in which lots of people were panicky and alone and spending too much time with screens.

ELISE:

Yeah, COVID really broke us. It really, really, I don't think we'll quite understand the impact for a while, but man, it seems to really have sent people into a spiral. Not everyone, but some people.

HELEN:

And I think that that's something, again, that's a kind of criticism of the quote establishment, is that we were very good at estimating the death rates and the direct impact of COVID. What we weren't very good at doing was estimating the indirect impact in increased child abuse cases that weren't being picked up because kids weren't in school, increased suicides, people turning to alcohol or drugs. And when the next pandemic comes, I hope we have a better way of estimating the softer social impacts that might not be seen for years. And frankly, everyone would like fewer lockdowns. We can work out a way to deal with that much smartly early on that would save deaths from the disease and also all those much harder to estimate impacts later on. But yeah, I think you're right. I think it will take a long time for us to really understood what happened to society in that period.

ELISE:

I think my main feeling throughout the whole experience was, and I understand people's rage to some extent, but was also like we're trying to figure this out on the fly, and the goal is to prevent harm and to keep as many people safe as possible. And so how do we participate in this together collectively? And rather than, there's some pernicious agenda here that violates my freedom, so it gets into different perceptions of harm, obviously. But yeah, I hope as we go, invariably this will probably unfortunately happen again, and that will have a better understanding. And there were so many amazing things that came out of it too, including the ability to scale up, develop and scale up a vaccine, and ultimately, weeks, months, that was an incredible response, for example,

HELEN:

And that hopefully might save millions if they managed to pivot that to cancer or chronic diseases using that platform. That would be incredible. Unfortunately, I suspect that quite a lot of that funding has just received the chop under the Trump administration. I know, but maybe private donors will move into some of it. Who knows?

ELISE:

Well, you can think about something like the malaria vaccine, for example, and I think that has been almost single handedly funded by the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates. And so yeah, I'm sure we'll see even more philanthropy in those spaces.

I know we're almost at time, but I want you to talk a bit about the way that genius seems to exonerate bad behavior.

HELEN:

It's a nice, easy subject to finish, just not at tall inflammatory or worrying subject Yeah, I think someone once described it as a kind of licensing scheme for bad behavior, and I think there is a bit of that. Some of it is, I think, straightforwardly commercial in that you get people who are invested in the brand. The genius is a human brand and they make everybody around them a lot of money, and that is a powerful disincentive against speaking out. Then I think there's something more subtle that goes on, which is that people don't want to see what's in front of them, or the genius becomes representative of a kind of political argument. I'm thinking about, I have a chapter about a queer theater director who is later outed as being interested in child sex abuse images, and people around him I think didn't want to, and they've said this themselves, didn't want to see the art as being quite concerning because they didn't want it to be used by homophobes, right?

They knew that some people are homophobic and they think that all gay men are sexual predators, and so they couldn't in their mind say, this particular gay man is a sexual predator. And I think there are soft things like that that go on in lots of cases. People don't want to make a political cause look bad by bringing down a kind of really big member of it or whatever it might be. It might be a nationality, it might be a race, it might be one art movement against another. They're invested again in the brand in a way that goes beyond the commercial. And then I think there's this other idea, which is that geniuses are odd and they have to be allowed to be odd that the rules don't apply to them. So this is, George Orwell calls it benefit of clergy, which was this idea that in the middle ages, if you were a priest or a nun, you didn't get hanged for if you committed an offense because you were sacred onto God and you recited a few lines of a Latin, the neck burst as they called it, to get out of the capital punishment.

And he says that he thinks a similar thing applies to artists where we just say, well, if you want to have these plays or these films or this poetry, then I'm sorry, you have to put up with whatever it might be, the beating up of the wives or the sleeping with the groupies or the plagiarizing, the assistance. And I think that's quite a powerful thing too, because we want our geniuses to be extraordinary. We don't want them to be living quiet little bourgeois lives where they're nice to their partners and dotting on their parents. We think that you should be wild in some way abnormal, but that becomes a licensing scheme for bad behavior becomes, in fact, it's worse than that. It becomes taken as proof that they must be a genius because they aren't normal.

ELISE:

Yeah. Again, there are entire books that are devoted to this, like Claire de Ray's book.

HELEN:

I remember that when I read that essay, her Monsters, which is called What Should We Do with The Art of Monstrous Men in the Paris Review. I remember it was just so mind blown to me. She has this line about would I be making better of art if I was more selfish? And I think that's something that almost anybody who's done any kind of intensive job asks himself, should I sacrifice my life for this project? And would it be better if I did? And I just remember, yeah, that was such a great essay.

ELISE:

Yeah, and you write, I try to separate the art and the artist, but that's impossible when as with Roman Polanski and as with Chris Goode, who's the queer dramatist you mentioned, that's impossible when the art is propaganda for the crime. And that seems to be also another line in the sand of when you are using the abuse of, in their case, minors, children as central to your art, and then you're making everyone else complicit in this crime. But it is a real conundrum.

HELEN:

I think everybody in the last couple of years has been wrestling with that idea that bad people make beautiful things and can you still enjoy them if you don't like the person who made them? And so that's my line. I won't stand for it. When the artist propaganda for the crime, the example that I had written about previously is Picasso and his then partner essentially fostered a preteen girl from a convent, and his partner came home one day to find him drawing this girl semi naked. And I wouldn't want to buy that painting. I wouldn't want to display that painting particularly, or if I did, I'd heavily contextualize it because what is that? It's him saying, but I'm an artist and my sexual urge is it can't be constrained by your bourgeois morality. And I don't really want to sign off on that. And in a similar way, I write in the book about the fact that I walked out of MJ, the Michael Jackson musical, even though I love, love the songs of Michael Jackson, incredibly talented entertainer, brilliant dancer, just everything about him as a performer and also the musical did tell this very moving story about the violence he suffered at the hands of his father, the racism he suffered in the music industry, all of that stuff.

But it had all been written very carefully to airbrush out the allegations against him. And I just felt at that point that I was participating in a kind of reputation laundering exercise for Michael Jackson in order that his estate could continue to make money out of his music. And that was the point where I was like, I don't know. I wasn't going to enjoy it, and I was just feeling weird about it, and I sloped out of the theater at that point.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it's super, super thorny.

HELEN:

As I say, I would still dance to Billie Jean at a wedding. I'm not that kind of a moral puritan about it.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, same.

HELEN:

He wouldn't dance to the Kanye West song at a wedding.

That would be a very bad wedding actually, if they started playing that again, I'd have some questions for the bride and groom about their taste, but I think that's a really interesting, I'm talking about Heil Hitler. That's an interesting example in that it is musically one of the more adept things that he's made recently. And I think it would be much more comfortable if it were bad music as well as morally abominable, but it's not. And I think people want it to be bad because the questions would be simpler. And luckily that one is so outrageously offensive that I think most people find it very easy to think, no, no, I don't think I'll be playing Heil Hitler in my car. Thanks guys. But there are much more edge cases than that.

ELISE:

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. God, we live in weird times.

HELEN:

It's so weird, isn't it? God populated with these kind of strange beasts who had just become so unbelievably extreme. Now, I think that's probably the legacy of social media, the fact that the gatekeeping is completely broken down, so people that would've once disappeared off and you'd never have heard from them again. Now all of those efforts to cancel, people really ultimately failed. Either they were making too much money, in which case they were cancellation resistant, or they were too popular and they just found some new

ELISE:

Space to be in, or they certainly don't care, right? They don't care about popular opinion, and that's not the audience to which they are coordinating their image. And now we have a first row seat to their demise. It's wild. That is the one thing you can say about contemporary society. It is wild.

In The Genius Myth, Helen begins and ends the book with Elon Musk, and I think it's relevant not to give him any more attention or energy, but because of what he represents in the culture. And she writes, “The hardest thing to accept, however, is that the same person can be both. Musk is still the man who drove down the cost of space travel with reusable rockets, and who made buying an electric car seem cool rather than an act of penance. But he is also the man who keeps falling for badly photoshopped news headlines. His detractors can't accept this and neither can he, because they both believe in the genius myth that you're either an all around special person or you're not. How can the same person succeed so brilliantly at SpaceX and Tesla and then go on to slash Twitter's value by three quarters? Simple. Elon Musk is good at some things and not at others. To understand that we need to stop thinking of genius as a transferable skill at its core. SpaceX was a physics problem, right? Ryan Mack and Kate Conger. Tesla was a manufacturing problem, but Twitter was a social and psychological problem.”

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