Why Has the Figure of the Genius Disappeared from Society?

How has genius transformed from a phenomenon with broad social significance to an individual matter? In an era where the means of production are intelligence machines (like computers and artificial intelligence), and where output is essentially spiritual (like code and media), a new class conflict is emerging, with a new social divide and distribution: the masses against the intelligent and intellectual elite, and the intelligence elite against the masses (which are now deceptively called "the public"). This struggle, entirely foreign to traditional society (such as the ultra-Orthodox society, where the masses' subordination to the genius is clear), has a destructive potential unparalleled for the 21st century, with the gradual transformation of the masses into beings inferior to artificial intelligence, and on the other hand, into supreme sovereigns (thanks to populist democracy). Are today's oppressed, living in false consciousness (see: Facebook consciousness), justly oppressed because they are foolish? And what will happen when the masses subjugate the genius, instead of the other way around? Fools of the world, unite! (What is this if not the definition of Facebook?)

The popular image of the "evil genius" or "mad scientist" as a devaluation of the phenomenon of genius itself in the popular imagination  (Source)

Where have all the geniuses gone? How many names of geniuses living in our time can we mention? Who is the Einstein of our day? Or the Picasso? Who is the Darwin, the Leonardo, the Maimonides, Goethe, Beethoven? What, Steve Jobs? A laughable thought. Why don't we know the equivalents of our time to these geniuses, all of whom were well-known as geniuses during their lifetimes? Shouldn't we know about ten times more geniuses than any other historical period, even if we forget the dramatic rise in global literacy, if only because of the growth in world population? Where are they all?

True, in every historical period many geniuses were not recognized, but not a few of the geniuses known to us today were also recognized during their lifetimes. Einstein gained fame and global headlines, and his views on war and peace and other matters received wide resonance. If we just compare him to the Einstein of our time - Witten - and the resonance of his opinions (he too has a passion for war and peace, particularly regarding our local conflict) the gap is noticeable. The very fact that one might need to explain here who Edward Witten is - that's the problem (look him up on Wikipedia. The Hebrew entry is quite short!).

Until the era of intelligence tests and public schooling, the status of the genius in traditional society - which is familiar to us today only in ultra-Orthodox society - continued to exist even in the society of enlightenment and education. In the medieval world and at the beginning of the modern era, it was clear to every reasonable person that he was an idiot compared to the upper intellectual class in society, and that the gaps were almost unbridgeable. In the religious world, the gap between the greatest of the generation and the average person is not a gap of one and a half times, like the gap between IQ 100 and 150, but a gap of tens, hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of times. The average person is not capable of even beginning to understand the level of considerations in which the genius thinks, and he recognizes his intellectual inferiority. Who on Facebook today recognizes their intellectual inferiority?

The geniuses, of course, have not disappeared, and they live among us. What has disappeared is the social function of the genius. There is no longer a status of genius in society, and in any case this status is in severe decline, and therefore no contemporary person is recognized as such, certainly not universally. At most, a person gains recognition in a limited field of expertise (preferably technical), but the perception that a person's superior intellectual and spiritual abilities grant him a broad interdisciplinary vision, and that this vision extends to a rare ability to foresee the future, and that his opinion carries enormous weight in every field - is becoming extinct. The genius may still live, but "the genius" is an endangered species. And if so, isn't society the loser?

After all, the exceptional influence ability of a genius is not usually a personal ability, but stems from his unique and undisputed prominent position in the social fabric. Additionally, a genius who is not recognized as such - for example, is not nurtured and cultivated as such - will not necessarily develop into a genius in terms of his abilities or achievements - and certainly not his influence (and certainly not in real time). Is it possible that our society is losing its geniuses, and therefore despite rapid progress we are sorely lacking in groundbreaking, creative - and how to say it - ingenious achievements? After all, past societies, where average education and material conditions were incomparably inferior to "Facebook society", reached spiritual and artistic achievements that far surpass it. Is this because there are no geniuses on Facebook?

Who is the upper intellectual class of our time? The process of decline in the status of the genius began with the rise of the intellectual class - that is, people who manage to influence the "discourse", and perhaps even shape it, for example in journalism. An intellectual is someone who appears in the media and succeeds in his appearances - something that almost all the geniuses of the past would have failed miserably at - and this would have even been interpreted to their credit, and often as proof that their thinking was superior and not understood (!). Moses' stuttering helped in recognizing him as a genius - and not the opposite. In a second stage, an even higher intellectual class began to rise, namely the class of bestselling authors or charismatic lecturers, whose proof of "genius" is the number of copies and views, and perhaps also the rare ability to simplify complex and deep ideas (or simplistic ones), and heaven forbid not the even rarer ability to conceive complex and deep ideas (or groundbreaking ones).

What other geniuses do we have? Maybe professors, meaning those who received their stamp of genius from an institution alienated from society's focal points, unlike intellectuals who received their status from "writing in the newspaper" or "appearing on television", that is, from their integration into popular discourse, and bestselling authors who received their status from their very popularity (which is expressed, of course, in popularization). Society will indeed appreciate the minds of professors, but will never listen to them, and the status of their words is in constant decline. This is because professors will be perceived as geniuses in a certain profession only, and popular wisdom will love to recite anecdotes about their idiocy in every other field, even in areas where the simple person succeeds (like finding his glasses on his nose). This will be expressed most of all in society's attempt to control the degenerate academics who don't know what to research for the benefit of society through the destructive and emasculating mechanism of grants. Would anyone have dared to waste the time of any historical genius on writing grants? This is an almost inconceivable idea in the era of geniuses (which has passed from the world). The status of science and scientists is at a low point in society, in stark contrast to their achievements. The genius has perished from the land.

Perhaps the last domain that still preserves the status of the genius is literature. Sometimes it still seems to popular culture and the viewer at home - and especially in Israel, with the viewer of the house of Israel - that there is still value in the words of writers, but this too seems less and less. The idea of a Renaissance man, who should be listened to and admired, has lost its appeal in an era that sanctifies self-admiration, and even more so - self-listening. When the era of individualism was replaced by the era of arrogance, there is no longer a need for an authoritative, level-headed, knowledgeable, and worst of all - wise father figure. The emasculation (of the father) is complete. One can only mourn the disappearance of the class of sages and geniuses that was the foundation (and purpose) of Jewish culture for two thousand years, something that was truly responsible for the unreasonably high concentration of sages and geniuses that emerged from this culture - but apparently no more.

The idea of the sage, which took over Jewish culture following Hellenistic influences and late biblical wisdom literature, and later in the Pharisaic sage status that developed into the modest and exemplary figure of the Torah scholar, and reached its extreme in ideas like "the genius" and "the prodigy" - has disappeared from today's secular world. There will never be an outcry over the failures in gifted education (unlike special education), despite the fact that these failures are cutting off the branch on which the state sits, as a technological leader, and on which Jewish culture sits, as a culture with a special and leading position in world culture. Eastern cultures indeed bring their own models of excellence, but they are foreign to us, and seem to us more than anything like the figure of the "nerd". American culture and Silicon Valley still nurture the figure of the "geek", but this cultural hero is already far removed from the broad, deep, and lofty figure that the genius once was.

Those who believed that Jewish genius was a genetic matter received a knockout blow with the success of Zionism - and the destruction of the exilic-scholarly culture. The people in Israel are no less (and no more) stupid than any "normal people in their land". Geniuses (like Witten) are mainly found in American Jewry. As ultra-Orthodox thinkers warned, the State of Israel turned out to be a cultural holocaust (they might have called it "spiritual") for the Jewish people, complementing the physical one. Even the wealthy and materialistic American Jewry is not what it once was. The people who once knew how to cherish, exalt, and take pride in every individual genius that emerged from among them (genius from the word "pride"), now focus on empty abstract national pride (but one that includes every member of the club, even the biggest idiot) on its right side, and empty abstract national shame, on its leftist side. The result is the loss of the incubator for an upper class of sages and geniuses that characterized the Jewish people. To raise a genius, unlike raising a Jew, a Jewish mother is not enough - you also need Jewish culture and society. Can there be a class of "sages" in the ultra-Orthodox sense in the secular world? Can geniuses still grow in Facebook society?