The curse of genius: Geniuses Don’t Rule the World!

GUEST COLUMN: Dr N Prabhudev

IQ of 140 plus

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

BENGALURU, July 29: God is a genius. He made this world but forgot to rule! Natural disasters are often termed “acts of God” while no “credit” is given to God for years, decades, or even centuries of peaceful life. Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? Our earth is not immune to disasters. So how does God fit in? Intuitively, people know God is in charge. When tragedy strikes, people call out to Him.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of Madness! Best part of being a famous genius is, nobody cares about the infamous things you do in your personal life.
Sigmund Freud broke new grounds in Neurosciences. Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein epitomize genius. They did not hold any public office. . Sir CV Raman, the Nobel Laureate was knighted in 1929 never held any public office. Michelangelo for his masterful touch, Marie Curie for her scientific acuity stand out as geniuses. Scientific breakthroughs like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection would be impossible without creativity. None of them held any public office!
Gandhi is a Mahatma and a genius of non-Violence movement. He never held any public office! Pundit Nehru was the Prime Minister but to be fair to him, was no Genius!

Voters and people tend to rise to their “level of incompetence”. Mediocrity is no mere character flaw, but a deep tendency of the universe, to be ceaselessly fought, with no hope of victory. How do so many incompetent men become leaders?
Geniuses have become captives of their own genius, locked into a relationship with their brains. We see the opposite with filmy stars. Their interactions with other humans are not predicated on their intelligence but rather their looks. Geniuses can be beautiful and beautiful people can be geniuses. But we rarely see the two come together and the societies don’t like it when one person has it all.

Somewhere between our seventh birthday and entering college or starting to work, most of us would have figured out that we’re not particularly brilliant at anything. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.
Why is there not a super race of high IQ people running the world? If we could squeeze just 5 percent more from our brain, we would be unstoppable. We might fry our brains in the process. A lot of our conceptions about the brain are incorrect, that we only use one third of our brains. In fact, we use all of our brains, just not all the time. This “fact” has been skewed.
We blame our brains for being lazy when in fact they are being clever. Like a smart energy grid, they turn down the parts that are less useful so they don’t require more energy. If we ran at 100 percent capacity all the time, we would be fatigued, hungry, and cranky.

The top Artificial Intelligence folks are brilliant and are working on Weapons, Surveillance and automation eliminating jobs. Instead of solving world hunger or cleaning up the ocean or curing cancer, they’re working on killing people and getting people to buy crap they don’t really want or need. But the more I’ve thought about Artificial intelligence the more I realized the problem isn’t the machines: It’s us.
A logical and binary assumption would be that the smarter you are, the higher you rise. Money, fame, and power should all belong to the big-brained. Yet, we can clearly see that in politics, media, culture, and so many other aspects of society, brain often comes last. It turns out that many at the top are not geniuses and certainly not Elon Musks, Steve Jobs or Bill gates.

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