GENIUS: DELICATE BALANCE BETWEEN DISCOVERY & DECEPTION!

GENIUS: DELICATE BALANCE BETWEEN DISCOVERY & DECEPTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007

“Genius finds its own road, and carries its own lamp.”

Robert Aris Willmott
Nineteenth century English author

What did Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud have in common?

They all displayed at an early age an intense desire to learn things in their own way. Einstein didn’t talk until he was nearly three, stubbornly waiting until he could express himself in complete sentences. All three enjoyed doing puzzles, inventing their own games. In the case of Einstein, he loved playing with magnets. All three were products of the German school system, which they equally detested with its emphasis on rote learning. None of them suffered fools gladly.

Early on they displayed little evidence of genius, but quite the contrary. Einstein dropped out of high school due to conflicts with a teacher. Fortunately, he was able to enroll in a Swiss university although he was hardly ever a favorite student among his professors. This was par for the course with Marx and Freud as well. Their disinclination to follow rules or to vie for academic trophies marked Einstein as “lazy” and Freud and Marx as moody.

Like most geniuses throughout history, they were essentially autodidactic, preferring self-learning to being taught by others. All three were prodigious readers often reading material well outside the scope of their academic programs, material considered esoteric, weird or beyond the reach of their classmates. They especially devoured books of special interest: Einstein in physics, Freud in psychology and medicine, and Marx in history, psychology, sociology, and what may come as a surprise, religion.

None of these men were conventionally religious, but still very much products of their common culture. They were daydreamers wondering off in thought on fanciful exploits. Einstein’s preference was for imagining riding a moonbeam.

All three men were born in the nineteenth century when their special interests were at a critical juncture. In physics, X rays, atoms, radioactivity, and electrons were just being discovered. In society, the Industrial Revolution was raging. This influenced the thinking of Freud and Marx, as they found themselves caught in the cross hairs between social hysteria (Freud) and rapacious economic change (Marx) .

It took confident rebels with mediocre career prospects to rise above the anti-Semitism that was building but not yet openly displayed. Academic positions were limited to nonexistent. This failed to prevent them from blazing new trails through new territory in the new century, their century, the twentieth century. Their collective genius would shape it to fit their minds and creative vision through speculation and discovery.

Unlike the twenty-first century in which celebrity reigns supreme, they were fearless at challenging the greats of their day, taking a backseat to no one. They had been bold as students and now they were bold pathfinders as mature adults.

All three were loners being more comfortable in their own company than with others. They also displayed an incredible lack of sensitivity to the feelings of others. Marx family practically starved for his total absorption in his work at the Reading Room of the British Museum. Most days he would be there from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m., failing to provide reasonable comfort or sustenance for his family.

Yet contradiction is grand in the life of genius.

Marx hocked his wife’s family silver but also treated her to a seaside resort vacation. He even bought her fancy calling cards, but left the family shivering in a house without heat. He preferred that his children had piano and dancing lessons than comfort.

Freud often took vacations with his wife's sister instead of his wife, who didn’t like to travel. He could be prickly, intolerant, paternalistic, and rigid.

Einstein, whom we like to think was as a cherubic intellectual, had an eye for the women, twice married, and not known to be either a comforting husband or obliging companion. He did, however, break Newton’s six hundred year mechanical grasp of the mind and universe. In the process, he broke through Newton's frame of reference.

Freud unlocked the unconscious and introduced us to ourselves with all our fantasies exposed.

Marx exposed the central flaw in capitalism, which was that it was predicated on consumption rather than contribution.

We have just ended a century in which our “best and brightest” have spent most of their energy mimicking their contributions without adding many new or enlightening discoveries, other than fancier gadgets.

THE CRIPPLED GENIUS OF TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MAN

It was Marx who coined the phrase, "crippled genius,” to describe modern man. Most people only remember his reference to religion as the “opium of the people.” More damaging was the label, “crippled genius.” He touched on the desire of capitalistic man “to have and to use” and therefore the overpowering need to “acquire” nullifying the desire to “accomplish.” The fall out of his insight is everywhere apparent.

Getting good grades in school is not genius; high IQ or SAT scores is not genius; winning a lot of rewards is not genius; making a lot of money is not genius; becoming a marquee name is not genius; becoming a CEO is not genius. Emerson said, “Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.” How many of us know what Faraday contributed to modern society, for that matter to Einstein’s development?

Faraday was totally self-educated, and good that he was, as his contemporary scientists could not see beyond their exalted status much less the wonders of electricity and magneticism that he could.

Neither private property nor profit is man’s mission, exhorted Marx, but the free unfolding of his human powers. Fromm captures this: “Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed and truly human being.”

GENIUS IS SIMPLICITY PERSONIFIED

Freud was first and foremost a consummate writer. Were he not to have had the ability to express himself with such clarity it is doubtful his ideas would have survived. Like artists of old, he could make connection with people. He was the first to observe that our feelings about the fights of our parents when we are growing up, even if we do not consciously remember them, are more than likely to have shaped all that followed.

It was no accident that Freud was a great student of classic writers such as Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. The playwright and novelist dealt with unconscious themes that no doubt influenced metaphoric system of the ego, id and superego.

Freud could see, as we all can now, how we construct intricate webs of defense to prevent our unconscious from surfacing. I’ve written a book titled “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” (AuthorHouse 2007) to show these defenses have become as sophisticated as Star Wars leading to monumental self-deception. We hide from ourselves and keep repeating the same chronic problems, which have haunted us consistently since World War Two.

More than eighty years ago, Freud gave us the “ego." It stands for reason and good sense. The “id” stands for untamed passion. The “superego” stands for the moderating voice of the parent, taboo, and guilt.

The ego not only has to tame the id and superego, but also must mediate their activity with the outside world.

The beauty of this system is that it attempts to explain the working of the mind with no investment in correlating this with regions or workings of the brain. This system has been widely criticized, but unfortunately with no one producing a better system to describe the war between the conscious and unconscious mind.

The most accurate criticism of Freud is his treatment of women. He was deeply wrong about women. He had a profound misunderstanding of the female mind as well as female sexuality. This does not excuse him but points out that genius seldom escapes the biases of its time. It was the age of paternalistic abuse of power, and Freud's authoritarian personality blinded him to the fact that psychoanalysis failed to lend itself to scientific study. This has sullied his reputation.

It might be said that Einstein came along at the right time, and in the right place. Physics was ripe for revolution. He admitted that his intellectual development was retarded because he was lazy and it simmered under the surface until he was an adult. Then time and space became of interest, gradually accepting time-space as a fourth dimension.

The problem for Einstein from the beginning was attitude, not aptitude. He didn’t like to conform, and in a long and productive life, he never did. On the other hand, he fully accepted that it was an accident that in 1905, when he was twenty-six, everything seem to come together. He wrote: “Humanity needs a few romantic idols as spots of light in the drab field of earthly existence. The particular choice of person is unimportant.”

Like a dormant plant that suddenly flowers, he burst forth with a series of papers any one of which was worthy of the Nobel Prize for Physics. Inspired by the new quantum mechanics, he first proposed that light consists of discrete particles, what he came to call “photons (Nobel Prize winner). He explained the jittery dance of microscopic particles (Brownian motion) as the buffets of surrounding atoms. This discovery convinced the scientific community that atoms truly existed. And lastly, he revealed his special theory of relativity (rejected as a doctoral thesis as being too speculative).

These works would define a new period of physics and break free of Newton’s six hundred year hold. Once energy was shown to be the same as mass times the square of speed of light, the Atomic Age was born with all its attending delights and consequences.

Einstein couldn’t have dreamed that formulations of quantum theory would lead to Pentium processors in PCs and disk-reading lasers in a CD players. They are both based on light composed of energy packets that can be absorbed or emitted only as whole units, which was one of his speculations.

It is possible to mention Freud or Einstein without strong polarization. This is not true of Marx. He was an historian, economist, and psychologist, but his ideas were charged with politics, and therefore power, and consequently divisive. Ideas need to be evaluated, whatever the source, before they are rejected. That was not to be the case with Marx.

I grew up during the “Red Scare,” the “McCarthy Hearings,” the “Un-American Activity Commission,” and the shame and sins of my Roman Catholic Church that stood by submissively as Fascism rampaged across the European continent preferring it to “godless” Communism. Writers, academics, journalists and students suffered a kind of career holocaust because of this scare. It could ruin the career of a civil servant or a breadwinner in any industry if he or she was known to have sympathy for the ideas of Marx. Yet, Marx’s ideas permeate every society and every system of government.

Marx correctly described companies of today against his Victorian Age lens, when nothing even close to them existed. He said for businesses to prosper in capitalism they must be obsessed with new technology, constantly innovating, inventing, and experimenting, never allowing the comfort of the status quo to slow the maddening commitment to progress no matter how many lives were sacrificed to its purpose. At the time he made this supposition, bigness was rare.

He envisioned small businesses being absorbed by bigger ones, and they still by bigger ones, ad infinitum. He was the first to see business cycles or periods of boom and bust as a function of competition and rising wages that in turn curbed profits and forced layoffs, including the replacement of workers permanently with machines. He had a glimpse of globalization, calling it “the universal interdependence of nations,” and he even envisioned how economic power would shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Marx identified grim working conditions, as did Dickens in his novels. He was of the opinion that work should not be a torment but a means of personal fulfillment, and asked the fundamental question: “The worker who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, does he do these things as a manifestation of his life, as life?” On the contrary, he answers, “Life begins for him when this activity ceases.”

His biggest miscalculation was that under capitalism workers would make less. In the second half of the nineteenth century, European laborers found their incomes doubling. Where he was right, however, is that less than ten percent would control the wealth of ninety percent of a nation’s domestic product whatever the political system.

Marxism has never materialized as he envisioned, a society in which people lived in harmony with little or no government. He never clearly understood what Adam Smith understood so clearly: self-interest is a basic motivator and people desire to improve their situation.

Moreover, while being right about the abuses of religion, and the cavalier way organized religion has manipulated fear and guilt to its purposes, he failed to see that self-deception was more powerful a drive than self-discovery. Freud attempted to fight through this barrier, while Marx through caution to the wind: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature," he asserts, "the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Faith and religion have their place. I have a mother-in-law who is a believer and I’ve known her for twenty-two years, and during that time the only thing that seemed to keep her alive, at time, was her faith and love of God, as she has been at Death’s Door many times. God drives her proselytizing spirit to the chagrin of many. Her faith has a great healing capacity that cannot be easily explained or comphehended.

GENIUS LIVES IN THE LAND BETWEEN UTOPIA AND NIGHTMARE

It is one of the paradoxes of genius is that it defies definition.

Seldom do those that we tab as “genius” display anything remotely related to it, as they are too busy doing and being.

Artists once had the veneer of genius but gave it up for celebrity. There isn’t a writer in my lifetime that I would designate as genius other than James Joyce, and I was barely here when he died.

Genius has an obsession with something to the near exclusion of everything else. It is probably why genius is child-like. Genius moves to utopian ideas without appreciating the clash of change and the resistance of life forces. We often suffer for this.

Freudianism led to the nightmare of an amoral world of today.

Einstein’s special theory or relativity led to the nightmare of the Nuclear Age.

Marxism has led to a form of totalitarianism that is more repressive than any capitalistic system, mainly because capitalism only thrives in a relatively free society.

The paradox is that they often saw more clearly into competitive systems than into their own. Take Marx. He saw clearly money as the universal self-constituted value of all things in capitalism with the attendant horrors to that disposition. He concluded that it has robbed the world of its proper value. And what is that value? Personal freedom. Few could argue that there is no cage quite like the money cage.

Genius often leads to nightmares because genius is often somewhat vague on details. Marx was; Freud didn't think he was, but he was; and Einstein failed to finish his symphony.

Marx believed worship would naturally fade, and religion with it, when workers were liberated. He gave no credence to the spirituality of man, failing to see the power of Christianity in its worship of children, promotion of family solidarity, and love of the divine.

Einstein was not enamored of the laboratory, but preferred to dream on paper. He was not a sophisticated mathematician and often had to acquire assistance to translate his ideas into such language. He was better at conceiving than perceiving.

Marx didn’t have the comprehension of the real world of slums and factories that Dickens had, mainly, because he didn't visit them. He preferred to ponder class struggle in library-bound books of statistics.

Freud, who wrote like a novelist, may have used this inclination with “Wolf man” and other studies with somewhat of a novelist’s flare, causing their validity to be questioned. He desperately wanted to make a science of the talking cures, when he may instead have invented a new religion.


Utopia means "nowhere" in Greek, and there is something of Utopia in all the works of genius. Utopian ideals and nightmarish misgivings make genius human, and like us, but unlike us in that genius has an uncommon daring.

Genius is like that scout that goes ahead in enemy territory endangering life and limb to report back what he sees over the horizon. Einstein gave us permission to puzzle with God about our universe; Freud gave us permission to examine the God within and puzzle about it; and Marx attempted to tame both Gods by reducing the problem to class struggle with money the culprit. He wrote: “Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.”

It would seem they have all contributed to what and who we are today, and we wait for other geniuses to change our minds and ways.

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PS My initial reason for writing this was my twelve-year-old grandson who is very lazy but also very bright and moves to his own drummer and complains often of being bored to death. School has never been a challenge even now with him in an expensive private school. His passion is for electronic games, mythological beings, dinosaurs (a passion like that of the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who confessed his started at three and never waned) with absolutely no need to impress or compete for kudos. It put me in mind of this company, and so I wrote this little piece.