Hello. Welcome to the genius course. Are you a genius? If you are a genius, please raise your hand. Bar, good for you. As we will come to see, self-confidence is a hallmark of genius. What about me? Craig Wright, am I a genius? Perhaps I am one because I'm teaching a course on genius. I've written a book on genius. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm no genius. When I told my now grown children some 15 years ago, that I was going to teach a course on genius idea, they thought that was the funniest thing that they'd ever heard, and my wife did too. You? You are no genius, you're a plodder. You know what? They were right. But sometimes in life, the people who are hugely good at doing something to whom everything comes so easily. A brilliant pianist or a brilliant scientists are not the best analyst of what makes something work. Geniuses are too busy being geniuses to take time to think about how or why they do it. It takes a non-genius like me, an outside observer, to try to understand and explain in simple terms to the rest of us non-geniuses, how this complex phenomenon of genius works. What is it, and what drives exceptional human accomplishment? Do I have all the answers? No, I'm not entirely sure I have any of the answers. My job in this course, which I think is the job of any teacher, is primarily not to provide answers, not to hand you a nugget of wisdom, as famed writer Virginia Woolf once said. But to stimulate your thinking. My job is to be like the picador in a Spanish ballroom. My job is to provoke you into action. Provoke you into thinking about this important concept that we call genius. This Yale course, The Nature of Genius, is unique. I know no other Ivy League University or indeed any university around the United States, at least that offer a course on genius. How did this happen? Well, I was trained to be a classical pianist, and I'd always had a love of Mozart. While I was teaching at Yale, I started doing serious research on Mozart, which took me to libraries in Berlin, and in Vienna, in Salzburg, and Krakow in Poland, in Paris, and New York. Then I get interested in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Most of them were readily available for all to see in published facsimile editions. Then I started reading about Albert Einstein and on it went. Pretty soon, out of this research came the makings of a course, this course. It became rather popular with Yale undergraduates, and now this course is available for everyone. But back to genius. What is genius? Does it really exist? One would think so, judging from the use of the word everywhere in everyday parlance, we have Apple Genius Bar, for example, genius hamburger toppings, genius vacuum cleaners, genius credit cards, genius lyrics, TV shows called Genius Junior, etc. Kim Kardashian is called a business genius and her maybe now ex-husband, Kanye West is said to be, "Jerk who is also a genius." The swimmer Michael Phelps is called a locomotive genius, and Yo-Yo Ma, a challenge genius. Roger Federer hits genius tennis strokes. On May 23rd, 2019, Donald Trump stood before television cameras at the White House and declared himself to be, "an extremely stable genius." Going one step further, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has dubbed himself the genius of all geniuses. Well, how do we top that one? But the point is this, that genius seems to be everywhere. Given our obsession with the term genius, surely it must exist. But there aren't gainsayers, genius deniers. Marxist historians would say that it's all a capitalist hoax, a way to justify a winner-take-all world. The human psyche, however, seems to have a need for genius and the genius. Is it too far-fetched to call to mind what French philosopher Voltaire said in a related context in Epitre sur les trois imposteurs, "If God did not exist, it will be necessary to invent him." Why? Similarly, why do we want the genius? What's the advantage of having a concept such as genius? Well, two obvious reasons. First, a term like genius makes the complexities of life easier to understand. We say, for example, that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. His invention was an act of genius. But isn't this something of a simplification, what historians call a narrative fallacy? In fact, many people laid the groundwork that led to the light bulb. That nameless bloke millennia ago discovered how to make and shape glasses. Well, maybe he was a genius and eventually glass light bulbs that could be evacuated of air. Well, that's what Ben Franklin was doing and Michael Faraday fashioned a rudimentary generator and electric motor and the little known William Wallace and then Ansonia, Connecticut had already invented an arcing light bulb before Edison. Nevertheless, we say genius Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but it's complicated. Calling Edison a genius just makes things simple. We do the same thing with historical periods such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and even in the United States with hurricanes, we say we have Hurricane Katrina boiling down a mass of atmospheric data into a simple term Hurricane Katrina, that generally conveys an idea. Similarly, we identify a massive complexities with a single word, genius. Calling someone a genius is surely a simplification. But it helps us understand things quickly and in a simple and manageable way. The second reason we want the concept or the notion of genius, believing in genius allows us to believe that things will get better. It holds out hope for a savior, a better life. A savior, a rescuing genius can get us out of our present predicament. Total darkness at night, along comes genius Edison with the light bulb, terrible tuberculosis and other bacterial infections, rescued by Fleming and penicillin. A COVID pandemic, DNA and mRNA and scientists such as Jennifer Doudna and Katalin Kariko come to the rescue. We choose to identify these exceptional and exceptionally helpful figures by a simple term, genius. We need to believe that geniuses are out there so as to give us hope. We love these rescuing geniuses. But not at first, it takes time. Geniuses start out as troublemakers, disruptors, usually because they cause this extra work. We have to change our ways and that takes effort. But gradually we come to accept these rescuers as our friends, our heroes, almost as secular deities. All we are really talking about here is people with the capacity for exceptional accomplishment. Geniuses are the exceptions. Exceptional people. Genius Steve Jobs knew this when he created in 1997 a TV commercial called Think Different for Apple computer. As we watch this commercial, just for fun, see how many of the geniuses on the screen you can identify. Grab a pen to write down their names. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. Ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. Well, that was fun. Let's do it again. This time, I'll identify the geniuses and you can check your list. Albert Einstein. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. Bob Dylan. The rebels, the troublemakers. Martin Luther King Junior. Richard Branson. The ones who see things differently. John Lennon, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison. You can quote them, disagree with them. Mohammed Ali. Glorify or vilify them. Ted Turner. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Hansen, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso. This apple, Think Different clip is available on YouTube. You can watch it as many times as you wish. To sum up with a question. Is the genius, the extraordinary, exceptional individual, a myth, as a Marxist historian might reasonably suggest? Is it a fabrication of a predominantly Western male capitalist society? The notion of genius providing an intellectual justification or a cover for inequality of outcome and thus inequality of riches for some. Or is the notion of genius a reality? Is it real? Is exceptional human accomplishment real? Some people simply contribute. I would submit vastly more than others? The unequal outcome, that results is not only justifiable, but it drives progress. Well, what do you think? That's an issue for each of us to think about and decide, but if it is all a myth or an illusion, then alas, we have no yield Course Hero course and we have no intellectual engagement, we have most important, we have no fun. For the purposes of the next 10 hours, we're going to assume that genius exists and as promised, we're going to have some fun. In that spirit, let's end this lesson, this session, by playing a game. We'll call the game, Go Into the Genius Hall of Fame. On the screen, we see the grand staircase leading up to and into the Genius Hall of Fame, but who's more important? Who deserves to go into the Genius Hall of Fame first and occupy the top number one position. Let's say now that I was very interested in politics, democracy, and human rights, that I was a person of color. Well, I might put Gandhi and King up at the top. Then maybe Frida Kahlo and Einstein and Mozart at the bottom. Gandhi, King Kahlo, Einstein and Mozart. But let's say now that I was born in Europe with a strong interest in music and math. Well, my ranking in the Hall of Fame might look like this, Mozart, Einstein, Kahlo, King, and Gandhi. What have we learned from this little game of Go into? That genius is a human construct. Each among us can define genius, and we'll define genius according to his or her experiences in life, place and culture, and place and time, and likely race and gender as well. It's up to each of us to decide each of us has an equal vote. Thus, as we will repeatedly see in our course, genius is not an absolute value. More on that later, genius is relative to time, place, and culture.
