7 Objective-ish Reasons so Many People Are Afraid of Geniuses

What we can learn from our fears

“Where there is a lot of intelligence there is also a lot of stupidity”. This was one of my grandmother`s mantras (“Unde e multă minte e și multă prostie” in Romanian).

As a teenager, I took it personally and I saw it as their way to put me down. But she loved me deeply, way more than I was able to understand back then and she was one of the people that had a lighthouse effect on me. So no, she was not trying to bully me. She was simply shocked by all my incredibly creative ways I was dismissing any advice and screwing so many opportunities.

Like this childish “experiment” I did when I was 8 or 9:

I mean… a less imaginative child might break into his best friend’s house to take a toy he craves and that might be easier to understand for the adults around him. But in my case? Who would have believed me that I didn’t want to steal anything? Certainly not my parents, I was already the black sheep in the family.

Murphy’s Eleventh Law: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

It is even more impossible to make something ingenious-foolproof because in order to do that we have to have the capacity to imagine all the creative ways they can miss the target. And if they are smarter than us… Mission Impossible music theme playing…

So here are 7 of the reasons so many people are afraid of geniuses:

1. We (usually) perceive them as Alpha`s

We, humans, are social animals. We are highly wired to constantly size each other. Consciously or unconsciously we place ourselves in different hierarchies. We do this with everybody, every time we meet someone new we quickly assess them trying to see where we can place them “on the map”.

So when we meet someone who proves to have a visible higher IQ than us, we know that our place is lower in any value system based on intelligence. We might be OK with that, so we will not have to fight strong feelings of jealousy, insecurities, and inferiority complex. Nevertheless, we know that if we will arrive at one point when we have to count on them we need to understand what makes them tick in order to create trust-based connections.

Knowing that we are not equipped to imagine what they think, we rely on two strategies:

First: emotional safety. Do we feel safe around them? Is there anything off? Sometimes we meet someone and we have the mutual feeling that we know each other since the beginning of time. When this happens, we connect with ease and we form trusting and durable relationships.

Many times we feel uneasy. When this happens, if we are not careful, we can easily fall into the trap of judgments. Instead of trying to understand where this uneasiness is coming from, we label them as “jerks” and we avoid them even at a cost of our wellbeing.

Second: we watch them. Is there congruency between what they do and what they say? How are they treating people who are lower than them in the social hierarchy? How are they treating people who are higher than them on the social hierarchy?

With some careful and nonjudgmental observations, we can draw some helpful conclusions. If, for example, they are mean with the janitor and overpolite with the director board we can correctly decide we do not trust them and we do not want them on our team.

2. We do not know what are they into

When our best friend says “I have an idea” we usually are eager to hear it. It might be exciting.

“Let us go and buy that awesome Oculus we googled yesterday” it might let us with nothing other than frozen food for one week until the next paycheck but sure can be a lot of fun and it is just for a week. And nobody will suffer from the lack of salads but us.

“Let us start a colony on Mars” is an entirely different level and many people will need to do a lot of research just to figure out what the heck that weird guy is talking about, let alone what are the implications of the project or how to respond to that.

It is like being around “The absent-minded professor”: it might be fun to watch, but it is not so fun to try to keep pace with him.

“What if something is going wrong? What can I do?” — those are legitimate questions and usually, we can address them by writing down everything we can think about. But with so much unknown we have no idea where to start.

Stepping out of our comfort zone might be a chance to grow, but with guys like them we do not step out, we are launching ourselves out of the solar system of our comfort zone.

The more conservator we are, the more uncomfortable. Being around innovative geniuses is like being near a portal to chaos.

3. Most of us know what an obsession is

Nikola Tesla : Mr. Angier, have you considered the cost of such a machine? Robert Angier : Price is not an object. Nikola Tesla : Perhaps not, but have you considered the *cost*? Robert Angier : I’m not sure I follow. Nikola Tesla : Go home. Forget this thing. I can recognize an obsession, no good will come of it. Robert Angier : Why, haven’t good come of your obsessions? Nikola Tesla : Well, at first. But I followed them too long. I’m their slave… and one day they’ll choose to destroy me. Robert Angier : If you understand an obsession, then you know you won’t change my mind. (The Prestige 2006 — source: Ficquotes)

Luckily, most of us have smaller obsessions. But whether we found ourselves obsessing about a crush that rejected us, some unfair treatment we received, or simply a problem that seems unsolvable, we know how little control we have over us when we are in the grip of an obsession.

Ideally, our obsessions do not last long and we are the only ones who pay the cost for them. But those guys?

They change the world! Literally. Each one of them is a potential apocalypse.

And I meant it in both ways: The spiritual one — a disclosure or revelation of great knowledge, that discloses something very important that was previously unknown. The disastrous one — the end of the world, something so bad and harmful that can destroy the world itself.

Like Christopher Columb`s arrival in America — a revelation of great knowledge, the discovery of The New World and the end of the world as it was, especially for the native inhabitants of America whose world was utterly shattered.

4. We are afraid of the imbalance between power and responsibility

As the famous Marvel philosopher Uncle Ben :) says, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”.

Even the less philosophically inclined among us are familiar with horror stories of denied responsibilities and the catastrophic results they had. The legal power that corporations have now is one of the most criticized aspects of the capitalist system. And one of the strongest arguments against capitalism itself.

Is not just the fact that those geniuses have the power to fail in the most unpredictable ways, to make the most dangerous mistakes, but they also have the resources and the connections to cover their mistakes and deny their responsibility if they want to.

5. We are scared of their lack of empathy

I said “Obiectiv-ish”, right? This means the lack of empathy I am speaking about it does need to be real. From the psychological point of view, a perceived lack of empathy is enough to scare us. Remember: we do not understand what are they into, they look obsession-driven, they are smart, powerful and they do not have time for our emotional mumbo-jumbo.

Imagine that I am describing your new boss. If this is not enough to make you anxious (at least) then congratulations: you are a well-balanced person.

For most of us, this is enough to make us sweat. And, in the hypothetical case of our un-empathetical boss, we have at least the option to quit. We can put some distance between us and him.

But we cannot put any distance between us and the changes those guys bring into the world. They are building this world, at least big parts of it.

6. Nobody asked us if we want to live in the world they envision

We hate change. We are habitual creatures. Even our brain is built to avoid changes. In order to save energy, the brain relies on habits. When we learn to drive, we spend a lot of energy.

Then, the brain automates what we have learned and puff! we have a habit. We installed an auto-pilot sub-routine on our system and now we can drive and talk at the same time with minimal energy consumption.

Of course, we want some changes, we want new things, distraction, adventure, and so on but nothing so dramatically that we cannot understand.

Now, things are changing at such a speed that we feel overwhelmed. It is hard. And not so fun anymore. It is like our world-map is a fast-moving jig-saw puzzle.

This affects us emotionally. In the era of connection, we are suffering from disconnection. We are disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from nature. And when we see them thriving, it is hard for us to be at peace with that. We feel like by changing the world they stole something from us.

7. They are very clear about the fact that they do not give a f@#k about others` opinions

They are fact (and obsession) driven. It is a childish thing for us to even presume that they would let the constant pocking of cancel-culture put them down. Nevertheless, we want to have some power over them, so when they make it clear that they cannot care less about GOP (the good opinion of others) this frustrates us even more.

What we can learn from watching those individuals and the way we perceive them?

First, there is value in the novelty those people bring. The world is changing with or without them. They are just the visible ones, the ones we know.

But Life is an Infinite Game.

Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the objective is to keep the game in play, to perpetuate the game. (Simon Sinek: Finite vs infinite game)

As in any infinite game, the danger we know is less dangerous than the danger we do not know. The danger we do not know is the unknown we do not know. Is the chaos itself, the things beyond our power of imagination. Having known geniuses as players among us means that we can extend our collective power of imagination and increase our chance to detect the unknown danger before is too late.

Second, we can dare. We can ask ourselves how to bridge the gap between us and them and the world they are envisioning.

As bold as this might sound there is a lot of space for us to bring our influences in this changing world. For example, Metaverse. I am, like many other people aware of the potentially dangerous consequences virtual reality can pose. Addiction, increasing disconnection, people using it to escape real life. However, there are so many constructive uses for it!

I dream about treatments for addiction combining virtual reality with meditation and ASMR. About national health programs that bring together mental health experts, neurologists, educators, meditators, and programmers for visualization and learning and emotional awareness programs…

Yes, we are wired to react stronger to things we perceive as dangerous but this does mean we cannot change and actively search for and use what is promising.

And last, but not least we can learn to pay attention to our fears and learn to question them

For our ancestors thinking in a crisis situation was a luxury they did not have. They could not wait to be sure if the big frightening shadow they’d seen is a tiger or their imagination. Better run for nothing than wait and be eaten.

In our modern world, the danger is different. Is way more harmful to react without thinking. The best responses we can come up with are usually not our instinctual reactions.

So maybe we can take some advantage of the fact that as much as we dislike some people, geniuses or not, we are not usually pressed to react in the instant. We can pause and ask what happens. Why are we triggered?

“How you handle the people that trigger you, that’s your call. But at least know that you’re the one with the explosive inside you and you gain so much liberation, if you find out what that ammunition is and how you got it and if you can really diffuse it… like they diffuse a bomb, you can actually diffuse that ammunition inside you through getting to know yourself. And that’s where freedom actually lies.” ~ Dr. Gabor Mate

I let you with this incredibly insightful short video of Dr. Gabor Mate and with the idea that anything that triggers us might be an opportunity to grow.

This article is my attempt at a more in-depth answer to the question from Dr. Mehmet Yildiz:

Thank you for reading until the end.

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