Helen Lewis on The Genius Myth
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It's just this really human impulse to sort of think that there is something within you that makes you sort of better than other people who've just tried and been mediocre and actually a fear of failure that you don't want to try. Um, I think it's Maslow writes about this, but you know, people have a don't just have a fear of failure, they have a fear of success. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk. There's a topic I'm really torn about.
When I look at the plays of William Shakespeare, when I listen to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and realise how incredibly prolific he was in his short life, it's tempting to think of them as different superior beat of human, as a genius that stands apart from the rest. At the same time, when I think of many of the supremely talented people I've had a chance to meet in my life, it turns out that there's lots of things that they're quite bad at and that the more you know them, the more they seem to be cooking with water. And then of course there is the quote unquote genius that turns out to have unhinged opinions about all kinds of things. in the world.
So how should we think about this phenomenon of special talent, this concept of the quote unquote genius? Well, to help me answer this question, I have back on the podcast Helen Lewis. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic, has been on the podcast in the past to write about her book, Difficult Woman, and she has now written a lovely book called The Genius Myth, a curious history of a dangerous idea. Helen tells us about how the idea of genius has changed from something that is a predicate of a particular work of art, something you do in the world, to a person.
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