Odd Ramblings :: Usefulness and Potential
A while ago, a friend of mine and I got into a discussion about what professions really "add" something to the value of humanity--he took the stance that fiction writers were pretty lame people, while scientists were people to be praised. The reasoning? Scientists could help better the plight of man (diseases, poverty, etc.), while fiction writers (novelists, movie directors, etc) don't do anything of the sort--as he says, they're quite literally there to make money and to think nothing better of the human race.
The second issue that came up before us in that discussion of ours was the definition of "genius". Of course, they're people who are obviously smart, but what makes them smart and why? My friend argued that there are people that are innately inborn with talent, and those that didn't happen to win the luck of the draw can't advance their talents past these people.
Absolute bollocks, I say, to the both of these propositions.
When it comes down to fiction, one has to remember what the novelist/creator/writer is actually doing: they're creating a nice alternate world for people to escape to. There's a lot of benefit in that, especially for the hard-line scientist types--I can attest to this. Through the world of someone's imaginations, you can numb down the pain of the real world quite a bit (and oh how does reality scorch the mind). Frankly, without fiction, it'd be pretty easy to go insane.
Hmm? Humans have been able to survive without movies beforehand? True, but oral stories have been around forever--even the cave men made up stories as to how the world around them works. Tales of the constellations, tales of huge buffalo hunts, and surely tales of their ancestors preceding them filled their minds and allowed even them to escape the everyday humdrum of life.
Would people really go insane without stories? Here's what I think: the brain is like an engine, requiring fuel, air, and road to run on. Obviously, the road to run on is life--the brain is probably one of the key parts of getting us from the starting point (birth) to the end (death). The fuel is just the ideas that we take on an everyday basis and transform into reality--inane little things like doing homework, or shuffling papers. Certainly, the reality isn't anything special. Now, though, the air is something entirely different. The air represents the respites that everybody takes--without some sort of dilutant for the fuel, our brain would collapse pretty instantly. In other words, the air represents when we slack off, sleep, just relax, take vacations-- it's what happens when we really aren't thinking at all. It's in these moments that fiction and needless stories insert themselves so nicely; they assauge our brains and make sure that we aren't overloaded from just work.
It'd be pretty horrible to only have your job on your mind 100% of the time. And thus, without fiction writers, or even writers in general, scientists (and everybody else) would go insane.
Imagination is the bedrock of our culture.
By that, I mean that whatever one can imagine these days--nearly anything, anyway--can really come true. We live in an age distinctly separated from the ancient, where exotic items would need to be specially processed on demand, paid for in ridiculous amounts of money, and then sent to the recipient. While this hasn't changed today (custom items still lurk around the corner in many places), the sending part certainly has. If nobody near you can do something, you can travel to them--or even better, just talk to them over the telephone--and get what you need, and it'll arive in a nice little brown box within not too long.
That also applies to ideas. Initially, back in the ye olden days (think 15th or 16th century), you'd be hardpressed to learn anything outside of your field. If you were a farmer, you'd stay that way unless you were lucky enough to know a merchant and serve under them as an apprentice from an early age. One simply didn't go learning the knowledge of another craft freely---one didn't have time, nor the money, nor (most likely) the person around them who would listen.
Hence, most people stayed pretty close to where they came from without diverging much, except if you were lucky enough to be able to read and get books. This is where most of the Renaissance people bloomed from--they belonged to a society, or some place where information could be freely traded.
Imagine, if you will, a global society where information can and is freely traded--where blacksmiths can talk to chip fab experts and viceversa, and your average Joe could talk to a laser specialist. That's the sort of world we live in, what with the introduction of the Internet. (Of course, one might say that it's very hard to get to those advanced-high-rank people, but if you search in the right places, they're actually pretty easy to find.)
Ideas have never been more plentiful than now, and we quite literally live in a sea of them.
Now what does this have to do at all with geniuses?
Most people view a genius as someone who's ridiculously smart--someone who's got a firm grasp over lots of information, usually at an early age.
Take into account that we're nearly drowning in an information sea, and the fact that babies learn really quickly, and you'll find that kids these days know as much as what would be considered genius-level-prowess back in the 17th century. Most, if not all, the limiting factors to learning and absorbing information have been struck down by the progress of technology in the first world--one can get laser blueprints on the net for free. The only limiting factor, now, is how hard a person is willing to work in order to become a "genius".
I've been called a "genius" on several independent instances, each one unwarranted. Say, if I do better in math than someone who's "really smart", that makes me a "genius" because I was able to beat him out. And similarly, if I do something that most people consider impossible--nuclear fusion, for starters--that makes me even smarter.
What are these people on, crack?
The only reason that I'm doing stuff out of the ordinary is because I work hard at it--damn hard, I might add. As I've mentioned before, in my little rant about my schedule, quite literally 70% of my day is dedicated to cramming information into my brain which I might as well pay attention to. If everybody else happened to pay the same amount of attention, I'm sure we'd all be on even grounds.
So, in the end, the only difference between me, you, and Albert Einstein is our work ethic and how we manage our time--if you're obsessed with physics but people call you an asshole of an idiot, it's extremely likely that if you work hard enough you'll just be fine. You've got all the information, all the tools, in front of you; there are no differences between you and a Nobel laureate except for a lot of time and hard work.