Of Geniuses Without Money

In Balzac's Lost Illusions David Sechard remarked that "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success."

What does the world accept as such "signal success?" Most people, being of conventional mind, and the prevailing schema of values being thoroughly bourgeois, are unlikely to accept anything but the attainment of wealth, as they show through such vulgar and stupid aphorisms as "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?"

As they show, too, in the haste of people of conventional mind to declare anyone with a large sum of money a "genius"--a Ken Lay, a Bernie Madoff, a Jeffrey Epstein, a Sam Bankman-Fried.

This seems to me something to keep in mind when we consider the intellectual who feels aggrieved at being given less than his due by the world. The conventional response is to sneer at them as "self-pitying," "entitled" and worse for thinking they deserve better than the extreme disrespect that is the lot of all those lacking "some signal success" to their credit. Yet the reality is that the intelligent person whose intelligence is unrecognized and unrespected, perhaps ceaselessly insulted, really is being given less than their due in that way, and they do have something to feel badly about--especially if their intelligence is the only trait they have about which they can feel good. And I dare say that the state is not an uncommon one. The reality is that, even if superior intellect may be a comparative rarity in this world, the chances for "signal success" are still very, very few indeed relative to the number of superior intellects that do exist, especially insofar as society equates such success with riches.