What’s in it for me? Go beyond the hype to take a closer look at the history of genius, and discover why now might be the perfect time to ditch the idea entirely.
While today’s idea of ‘genius’ is often linked to IQ scores, early talent, or the uncanny ability to invent the right thing at the right time, those labeled as geniuses throughout history have been as varied as the cultures that celebrated them.
From Renaissance polymaths to tubercular, tortured Romantics to twenty-first-century tech moguls, the traits once seen as marks of genius have shifted dramatically.
Yet one thing has remained remarkably consistent: the underlying reasons that elevate certain individuals while leaving others languishing in obscurity.
These forces shape our world every day – sometimes in strange and unsettling ways.
Take, for example, Elon Musk’s headline-making appearance at the 2025 CPAC convention, where he roamed the stage wielding a chainsaw.
As absurd as it seemed, this spectacle was driven by the same cultural impulse to single out certain individuals as exceptional, even superior.
And the consequences of that impulse are still unfolding.
This Blink delves into the history of how certain men – and it is almost always men – have been elevated above the rest.
It examines not only the myths surrounding their supposed brilliance, but also the often-overlooked roles of luck, privilege, support, and timing.
Along the way, it uncovers the revisionist histories, shaky science, and collective enabling that continue to sustain the myth of the “great man,” even when his flaws are clearly visible.
Because the mythology of genius is exactly that – a myth.
And it has often done more harm than good, flattening complex lives and circumstances into convenient narratives of destined greatness.
But the challenges we face today – political polarization, climate crisis, shifting global power structures – demand more than easy stories.
By examining and challenging the myth of genius, we can move the conversation away from the exceptionalism that drives bad behavior in the name of art or innovation, and back toward a more nuanced understanding of human intelligence.
The making of a myth
The word genius comes into English straight from Latin, but in the days of ancient Rome it meant something quite different.
Back then it referred to a deity, or guardian spirit of an extended family or place.
It gave a group or a region a sense of continuity and character.
If a person had sudden insight or inspiration, they would be said to have possessed a genius, meaning they were inspired by this spirit in a particular endeavor or situation.
It wasn’t until the Renaissance that individuals came to be called a genius, meaning someone vastly superior in intelligence, talent, or creativity.
It was the artist Georgio Vasari who is credited with coining the term Renaissance, though he used the Italian rinascita to describe the rebirth of the classical tradition he witnessed in Florence in the first half of the sixteenth century.
He also wrote some of the first and most enduring narratives around genius that still influence culture today.
Like superheroes, the concept of individual geniuses didn’t emerge without an origin story.
Giorgio Vasari published The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in two volumes, in 1550 and 1568, featuring names that may now seem synonymous with genius, like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Categorizing geniuses as secular saints is no exaggeration: the book was based on the earlier Greek tradition of hagiography, or writings on the lives of the saints.
Vasari chose to write the book in the common language, a Tuscan dialect, and not Latin.
He further broke from tradition by writing about the lives of artists instead of aristocrats or nobles, even though artists and architects were considered lowly manual laborers.
He crafted their stories carefully – he turned Michelangelo into a kind of artistic monk, for instance.
One so dedicated to art that he had little care for food or wine, often slept in his clothes, and wore the same boots for so long that when he finally removed them, the skin of his feet came off as well.
Such an intertwining of suffering and art has become so commonplace that calling someone a “tortured artist” is cliche.
In his accounts of the life of Leonardo da Vinci, we encounter even more genius stereotypes.
Leonardo’s story is the archetype of the absent-minded polymath, a person so talented in so many areas that he rarely completed anything beyond sketches.
In his youth, we are told, Leonardo showed such advanced abilities that he quickly surpassed his teachers – a prodigy archetype echoed in figures from Mozart to Bill Gates.
Finally, by dying relatively young and leaving so much unfinished, Da Vinci is an early example of the “genius gone too soon.
” Dying young leaves society forever wondering what else a genius might have accomplished had they lived longer, and adds the implication that genius itself exerts a high price.
From Keats to Curt Cobain, this dark side has endured for centuries, too.
Genius and eugenics
Vasari’s book was incredibly popular for centuries, and helped pave the way for the rise of the Romantic movement, which pushed back on the increasing rationality of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Poets like Byron became towering cultural icons in this period – and cultivated a cult of genius despite being, in the words of one of his lovers Caroline Lamb, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
” In fact, for many in the Romantic period, genius excused a host of bad behaviors.
Byron’s many affairs with both men and women, and possibly even his own half sister, would be considered scandalous today.
The Romantics cultivated the idea of a genius as a sort of ethereal, other-wordly being, often frail, pale, and delicate.
While this was largely due to the widespread impact of tuberculosis on the population, the idea of a genius acting outside of the rules of civilized behavior paved the way for what came next.
Because as the 19th century progressed, the Victorian obsession with classification and taxonomy began to challenge the Romantic notion of genius as ethereal and otherworldly, with a new supposition: genius as genetics.
The first to expound this view is Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, who appears to have inherited the same curiosity about humanity as his famous cousin, but without any of the empathy or moral character Darwin possessed.
Galton was an amateur naturalist who traveled widely through Europe, Africa, and Asia – but his writings are blatantly colonial, and his time abroad seems only to have confirmed his idea that white Europeans were superior to everyone else.
Ten years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, Galton published Hereditary Genius in an attempt to classify greatness as a set of inherited traits.
In Galton’s view, genius wasn’t something otherworldly or ethereal, frail or diseased – it was a set of hereditary traits that marked white European men as superior.
Galton coined the term, eugenics, from the Ancient Greek words for “good” and “birth,” and in doing so opened up one of the darkest chapters in the history of genius – a chapter still being written today.
It was a very short, racist road from selective breeding for genius, to stripping entire populations of their human rights in the name of “preserving bloodlines.
” Galton’s work valorized a lot of other Victorian cruelty as well.
If some were marked for greatness, then others – like the poor, non-whites, or the disabled – were equally marked for ignominy.
The Victorian Great Man could wash his hands of altruism or any responsibility for the conditions of the poor because there was a natural order to things, with them at the very top, and everyone else clustered far below them.
Join the club
There is no clearer indicator of the lasting impact of this notion of genius as inheritable than the founding of the Repository for Germinal Choice in 1980.
Known popularly as the Genius Sperm Bank, it literally sold the idea that one could have superior children by acquiring some genius DNA.
It should surprise no one that one of the more famous recruits to the endeavor, William Shockley, was a successful engineer who had already destroyed his career, and all of his personal relationships, by becoming an amateur geneticist and eugenicist later in life.
Coincidentally, Shockley had been considered in childhood for a long-term, large-group psychological study conducted by Lewis Terman, published as Genetic Studies of Genius in 1925, with follow-up publications over four decades.
Terman was convinced that the recently devised Binet-Simon IQ test could be used to identify intellectually superior children to separate them from the so-called “feeble-minded.
” He traveled widely through the United States administering the test to middle school students to identify participants.
On a somewhat ironic note, while Shockley had been recommended for Termin’s study and tested at 8, he only achieved a score of 129.
but a score of 135 or above was necessary to enter.
He tested again a year later and scored only 125.
So while Shockley was recruited to the genius sperm bank later in life, and made many personal donations, his score wasn’t high enough for the genius study.
Termin was extremely confident in the potential of IQ testing, and found the idea of quantifiable, measurable intelligence to be seductive.
He believed that confirming genius early could prove a clear connection between genius and success in life.
Those studied were nicknamed “Termin’s Termites,” but their lives didn’t prove the hypothesis.
Instead, Termin’s study demonstrated how much external factors impacted the success or failure of intelligent people.
Gender impacted success enormously, as did the outbreak of the Second World War in the middle of the study.
For some, wartime offered unique opportunities.
One of Termin’s Termites, physicist Norris Bradbury, helped produce the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapon research program.
Others were not so lucky, however.
A fellow Termite, psychiatrist Douglas McGlashan Kelley, had been responsible for psychological testing and interviews of 22 Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, declaring them fit to be tried.
While he survived the war and returned home, he committed suicide in 1958, his family reporting that his experiences in the war never left him.
The postwar era also saw the founding of Mensa, an organization open to all those with an IQ above 140.
At a time when few could afford going to University, Mensa promised the opportunity to engage in intellectual discussion for those outside academic or research contexts.
Sadly, they quickly proved that high IQ did not equate to either sociability or accomplishment, becoming infamous for infighting, personal vendettas, and mediocre publications.
Gender and genius
While both boys and girls qualified for Termin’s study, most of the female participants did not achieve equal success to their male counterparts.
While war was the major disruptor for men in the study, for women success was far more linked to their marital status than major world events.
To understand why, consider the women in the lives of Albert Einstein and Leo Tolstoy.
During his student days, Albert Einstein married a fellow student at the Zurich Polytechnic, Mileva Marić.
He was a mediocre student; she had fought hard to study physics.
He enjoyed having an intellectual equal with whom he could discuss math and physics, as well as a domestic servant all rolled into one.
He used her as an intellectual sparring partner while he was formulating his general theory of relativity.
But when their intellectual and personal relationship broke down, he wrote out a contract for her to keep his laundry done, his meals prepared and delivered to him in his room, and insisting she stop talking to him should he request it.
Ultimately, her intellectual gifts were less valuable to him than her domestic service.
In 1914 he divorced Mileva and left their children.
He went on to marry his first cousin, who was not an intellectual.
Even after his death, the Einstein estate refused permission for his son, Hans Albert, to publish the details of his first family in a book.
Similarly the great author Leo Tolstoy married Sofia knowing she, too, was a writer.
When they exchanged writings early in their engagement, Sofia had completed a novella, while Leo had only diaries to share.
Once they were married, Sofia burned her writings as youthful scribblings, and Leo stole the name of one of her characters, as well as several other story details, and used them in his novel, War and Peace.
Sofia was also his transcriber and his most important reader who would edit his drafts overnight – even from bed as she recovered from childbirth.
Her influence is considerable on Anna Karenina, as Tolstoy was inspired to write this second novel after reading some Pushkin stories that Sofia had given to their son.
When he got bored and abandoned the novel, she begged him to keep going.
When she nearly died giving birth to a stillborn child, Tolstoy found the inspiration to complete the work, having so closely observed his wife’s grief at the loss of a child.
But after finishing this second novel, and being acknowledged as Russia’s most influential writer, he became surrounded by adoring fans who actually competed with Sofia to become his most ardent supporters.
The result was years of increasingly erratic behavior, in which he never repeated the success of his first two novels.
Both Einstein and Tolstoy had ardent fans who kept the supporting role of their wives out of the story even decades after their deaths.
This props up the myth of genius as self-sufficient, instead of reliant on constant support for success.
The problem with genius
Technology and innovation have been intertwined with genius in the modern imagination since the days of Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park in the 1870s.
In fact, Edison did more to shift the notion of genius away from Romantic artists and toward inventors and technologists than any other figure in history.
He hired a team of engineers and tinkerers and retreated to a small town in New Jersey for the cheap rent.
In that humble workshop, modern genius was born.
In 1877, Edison produced his most significant invention there, the phonograph, although its significance failed to make an impression on Edison and his team for months.
In the end, it was introduced to the public after rumors of a French company developing a similar device reached America.
Surprisingly, the public was completely dazzled by the phonograph – who quickly saw its potential for music, recording the speech of loved ones, and making the past audible.
Dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park, Edison became the public face of innovation – despite his laboratory being expertly staffed by other engineers and tinkerers.
Future Edison inventions, like the light bulb, were developed to the point of working prototypes by other inventors.
But Edison leveraged his fame by discussing them early in the press, essentially associating his name with innovations he was only partly responsible for.
He also began the obsessive working culture in Menlo Park that would go on to shape the tech world a century later in Silicon Valley.
Long working hours, competing with colleagues, taking singular credit for group developments – were Edison’s innovations and part of his modern genius stereotype.
It also benefited digital pioneers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be immediately compared to Edison in the press.
But geniuses who believe their own mythology can do great harm to themselves, their families, and even the world.
The exceptionalism afforded to geniuses can blind them to their failings, limitations, or prejudices – like turning noted engineers into reviled eugenicists.
It can make those with expertise in one area believe that they are experts in everything, and give their opinions more weight in the press.
Even worse, it reinforces the pernicious myth that success is individual, and not down to a combination of luck, timing, privilege, a great origin story, and the support systems that nurtured their success.
The costs of genius mythology are compounded in social media culture, which encourages easy narratives about success and can sway entire communities toward dangerous beliefs.
Returning to the idea of genius as something that applies to innovations and not individuals would help erode the facade of exceptionalism that has enabled being intelligent at the expense of being good, or ethical, or moral.
At a moment in human history when collective expertise is needed to find sustainable solutions, ditching the myths about exceptional people in favor of collectivity and mutual support, is an idea whose time has come.
Final summary
The main takeaway of this Blink to The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis is that… Genius began in ancient Rome as a guardian spirit guiding individuals toward moments of great inspiration, but morphed in the Renaissance to mean exceptionally talented, special artists whose origin stories became archetypal narratives.
In the centuries since, the category has grown to include poets, philosophers, inventors, technologists, and scientists, and enabled bad behavior, shoddy science, even eugenics – which unleashed some of the darkest chapters in human history.
Taking a closer look at the lives of geniuses past and present reveals a complex web of privilege, luck, support, timing, storytelling, and circumstance that have enabled their “individual” achievements.
Embracing a more holistic picture success, and reevaluating the role of intelligence alone, keeps the archetypes of genius from overtaking reality.
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