Brad Burton, you are not a genius

As I sip my peppermint tea, my friend tells me about this guy. After I’m home, I duck* the guy’s name. In the second search result, I see a word that disgusts me. A word that makes me decide not to consume anything produced by this man. A word that makes me end my search and close the browser window.

“Genius.”

A few days ago, I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. It was what I call a slow-burner. It took a while to catch alight and inflame my interest, but once it did, the heat was intense. I read the second half in a blur. 

Quicksilver is a historical novel. It features luminaries like Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and a vast array of monarchs, dukes, generals, countesses and common folk. But here, I want to talk briefly about Isaac Newton.

Stephenson paints a picture of Isaac Newton as a member of a different species. Someone who is barely human. Someone who is so fascinated by and absorbed in his work and thought that he needs an assistant just to make sure he feeds himself. Whether that’s what he was actually like, I don’t know. But Stephenson’s portrait of Newton satisfies the expectation we have of a genius’ character and characteristics. 

We generally consider a genius to be, by their very definition, apart from the rest of the humanity. Their mental capacities are so superior and so estranged from what we consider normal that we find it hard to relate. And geniuses are odd. They do things in an irregular (to us) way, for unclear (to us) reasons.

But the label of genius is something that is imposed on these individuals, by history or popular culture. They do not come forth and claim it for themselves. Why? Because genius, by it’s very nature, is incapable of recognising itself. The person who is a genius is so fascinated, so immersed, so absorbed in their work that they have no time for mere labels. In fact, labels to them are irrelevant. Unlike us normal people, they don’t care how they are perceived by others. Their only care is for the object of their fascination. And what fascinates them is never whether others see them in a particular way. Genius transcends such fickle self-consciousness.

So when a friend tells me about this guy called Brad Burton, and I search for him, only to see he has labelled himself a genius, I’m both annoyed and upset. See, in the same way that I don’t trust anyone who calls themselves a thought leader, or a visionary, I don’t trust anyone who proclaims themselves a genius. In some way, I pity them. 

​The individual that calls him or herself a genius is, at best, deluded, and at worst, is trying to manipulate their audience. But in both cases—delusion or attempted manipulation—they are not what they so desire to be.

Brad Burton, I’m sorry, but you are not a fucking genius.

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*Duck, verb. To search for a term using DuckDuckGo, a search engine.