A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” With those words, the honored war correspondent Martha Gellhorn summed up her husband, Ernest Hemingway, shortly before their divorce in 1945.1 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He was also a bully, a brawler, an adulterer, and an alcoholic who ultimately destroyed himself. We have a habit of wanting our geniuses to be superheroes, the highest form of the human species. “It is right,” Albert Einstein said in 1934, “that those should be the best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of the human race and human life.”2 Yet geniuses habitually disappoint us, at least on a personal level.
The fault is ours. We forget that the standard for genius is based on accomplishment, not character. We fail to see that accomplishment and morality may operate independently. Judged by character, geniuses seem no better than the common herd. In fact, they often seem worse, obsessed with their personal quest to change the world. Time is on their side, however, for its passage obscures the personal destruction they have caused as it illuminates the societal good they have done. We tend to forget that the money behind Alfred Nobel’s prizes was made largely from dynamite, bombs, and artillery shells; and that Cecil Rhodes, who established the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, built his fortune on forced African labor in what was then Rhodesia. As our memory dims, negative associations fade and twisted personal habits get straightened out. As the writer Edmond de Goncourt said in 1864, “No one loves the genius until he is dead.”3
Are there any geniuses who are/were exemplary human beings? Seen in the rearview mirror of history, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, and Charles Darwin appear to have been honorable people. Alexander Fleming and Jonas Salk worked for the common good. But how much can we really know about anyone’s true moral compass or motivations? Some of today’s geniuses, real or aspiring, profess to have altruistic aims. Oprah Winfrey has said, “I love giving people opportunities where there might not have been one. Because somebody did that for me.”4 We have no reason to doubt her sincerity. Elon Musk professes his goal to be nothing less than the salvation of the human race: “I want to contribute as much as possible to humanity becoming a multi-planet species,” thereby alluding to his goal of putting people on Mars as planet earth becomes impossible for human habitation.5 However, by all reports, closer to home Musk runs roughshod over family, friends, and employees, coming across as rude and intolerant.6 Mark Zuckerberg has said more than once that “Facebook is about connecting and sharing—connecting with your friends, family, and communities, and sharing information with them.”7 But while we have all been connecting and sharing on Facebook, Zuckerberg has been selling our data for profit and, by many accounts, undermining democracies around the world.
Some geniuses are moral and, knowingly or unknowingly (according to the law of unintended consequences), destroy things. Some are immoral or amoral and destroy things. Some destroy institutions as part of the inevitable process of change; others destroy people as a means of generating psychic energy to feed their obsessions. Destroying things doesn’t make a person a genius, but all creative geniuses make a habit of doing it.
In 1995, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lifted a million-dollar Han Dynasty vase over his head and smashed it to the ground. Art lovers around the world were horrified, but Ai wanted to send a message: to create new art requires that old customs, habits, and cultures be destroyed. In 1942, the Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter formulated the concept of “creative destruction” to suggest that no new technology or industry can take hold without the destruction of a preexisting one.8 Alan Greenspan, a former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, expressed the symbiotic relationship this way: “Destruction is more than just an unfortunate side effect of creation. It is part and parcel of the same thing.”9 Among the “unfortunate” victims of recent creative destruction have been bank tellers, grocery clerks, travel agents, librarians, journalists, taxi drivers, and assembly-line workers, to name just a few displaced by the digital revolution. As Ai dramatically suggested, destruction is the price we pay for progress.
STEVE JOBS WAS A TECH-SAVVY VISIONARY WHO PUT SECRETARIES, telephone operators, camera manufacturers, and record companies out of business. His aim was to make our lives better, and surely he intuited that his revolutionary Apple personal computer and iPhone would create more jobs than they eliminated. In 2011, Forbes published an article titled “Steve Jobs: Create. Disrupt. Destroy,” saying in it, “No person has done more to disrupt the existing way of doing things than Mr. Jobs.”10 But was any person more obnoxious? Only in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs do you find a biography of a genius with the following index entry: “Offensive behavior of.”
That Steve Jobs was “an arrogant asshole” was known to all, even himself. “It’s just the way I am,” he said. In a 2008 article in the New York Times, business writer Joe Nocera recalled a telephone call he had received from Jobs: “This is Steve Jobs. You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”11 By Jobs’s standards, he was being gracious. More typical was his greeting to his own Apple employees, as recounted by product manager Debi Coleman. “‘You asshole, you never do anything right.’ It was,” she said, “like an hourly occurrence.”12 In 1981, a phone call with Xerox computer engineer Bob Belleville went this way, Jobs saying “Everything you’ve done in your life is shit, so why don’t you come work for me?”13 As Isaacson wrote, “Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and his impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time and on budget.”14
But the other driver of Jobs’s destructive behavior was a habit of simply being hurtful, with no product gain in sight—to put people down and show he was smarter, simply for the sadistic pleasure it gave him. Stories abound about the way Jobs needlessly humiliated those he encountered, be they waiters or CEOs.15 Members of his immediate family were not exempt from abusive treatment. Although a multimillionaire, he refused to acknowledge his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, denying his paternity until he was taken to court. In her book Small Fry: A Memoir (2018), Brennan-Jobs described how her father, Steve, would frequently use money as a way to confuse or frighten her. “Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute,” she wrote, “walking out of restaurants without paying the bill.”16 Out to dinner one night, Mr. Jobs turned to his daughter’s cousin, Sarah, who had unknowingly offended the vegetarian Jobs by ordering meat. “Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?” Jobs asked Sarah. “Please stop talking in that awful voice. You should really consider what’s wrong with yourself and try to fix it.” Lisa’s mother, Chrisann Brennan, recalled, “He was an enlightened being who was cruel. That’s a strange combination.”17 Why the cruelty?
Steve Jobs believed that the golden rule of human behavior did not apply to him. He felt he was special, a chosen one, “an enlightened being,” and “above the law.” He refused to put a license plate on his car and parked it in the company handicapped spot. Said software engineer Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs on the original Macintosh team, “He thinks there are a few people who are special—like Einstein and Gandhi, and the gurus he met in India, and he’s one of them.”18 Sometimes Jobs knew that the moment was right to destroy his own product (the iPod, for example) by introducing a more revolutionary and potentially lucrative one (the iPhone). Sometimes his obsessive passion—having “a bug up my rear,” he indecorously called it19—changed the world of technology, and sometimes it merely caused gratuitous personal damage. Sometimes Jobs was a genius, and sometimes he was just a jerk.
THOMAS EDISON WAS JUST CLUELESS. HE DIDN’T MEAN TO BE PERSONALLY destructive; he simply lacked empathy. In a poll taken in 1922, nine years before his death, 750,000 Americans identified Edison as the “greatest man in history.”20 After all, he had invented a long-burning incandescent light bulb, which had put an end to night. Granted, the light bulb had put candle makers out of business and sunk the whaling industry. But when it came to empathy for other creatures, Edison was in the dark. His approach to family and to people in general can be gleaned from his proposal of marriage to his first wife, Mary Stilwell, a sixteen-year-old employee in his Newark, New Jersey, lab, as reported in The Christian Herald and Signs of the Times a few years later.
“What do you think of me, little girl? Do you like me?”
“Why, Mr. Edison, you frighten me. I—that is—I—.”
“Don’t be in any hurry, about telling me. It doesn’t matter much, unless you would like to marry me. . . . Oh, I mean it. Don’t be in a rush, though. Think it over; talk to your mother about it, and let me know soon as is convenient—Tuesday say. How will Tuesday suit you, next week Tuesday, I mean?”21
Edison married Stilwell on Christmas Day 1871. That afternoon, he returned to his lab to work, and she became, according to biographer Neil Baldwin, “a fully fledged casualty of her husband’s accumulated neglect.”22 In 1878, Edison’s assistant Edward Johnson told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “He does not go home for days, either to eat or sleep.” Later Johnson remembered that Edison had once warned him, “We must look out for crosses [i.e., short-circuited wires] for if we ever kill a customer it would be very bad for business.”23 To appreciate the full extent to which the obsessive Edison might go in pursuit of an idea, however, we need only revisit the history of the “War of the Currents” and the execution of Topsy the elephant.
To be brief: In 1885, Thomas Edison was at war with his archrival Nikola Tesla over which current, Edison’s direct (DC) or Tesla’s alternating (AC), would light the United States. To discredit his rival’s system, Edison began a public campaign to disparage Tesla and prove AC to be deadly. Edison began electrical experiments using AC on dogs, paying boys a 25-cent bounty for each stray they could round up; in 1890, he facilitated, at the behest of the New York State penal system, the electrocution of a human. And if AC could kill a man, why not go big and kill an elephant? Thus on January 3, 1903, a female circus elephant named Topsy was electrocuted on Coney Island, a public spectacle at a public amusement park. Edison stipulated how the electrodes should be placed on the feet of the unsuspecting pachyderm. To make sure the destructive force of AC was evident to all, he sent a film crew employing his new motion picture camera to record the event.24 His short film survives today and is available on YouTube. Often the warning “viewer discretion advised” is a tease to drum up more viewers. Here it is not.
THE DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES OF OTHERWISE BRILLIANT INDIVIDUALS have been evident for a long time. In 1711, Sir Isaac Newton tried to destroy the reputation of Gottfried Leibniz in a squabble over who had invented calculus; Newton, as president of the Royal Academy [of Science], empaneled a court to judge the case, but then he himself rendered the verdict and wrote the opinion, one disparaging the reputation of Leibniz.25 Newton also fudged evidence in his experiments,26 stole data from colleagues, and failed to give credit where credit was due—all in the name of scientific advancement.27 Perhaps the novelist Aldous Huxley exaggerated when he said ironically, “As a man [Newton] was a failure, as a monster he was superb.”28 His fellow physicist Stephen Hawking summed up Newton in just seven words: “Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man.”29
Nor was physicist Albert Einstein, at least to his immediate kin. He fathered an illegitimate daughter but had no contact with her, and he put his second son away in a sanatorium in Switzerland, unvisited by him from 1933 until Einstein’s death in 1955. As his first wife, Mileva Marić, said in December 1912, “He is tirelessly working on his problems; one can say that he lives only for them. I must confess with a bit of shame that we are unimportant to him and take second place.”30 Einstein himself acknowledged his self-centered nature when he spoke of “my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart.”31
WHY DO GENIUSES HAVE A HABIT OF RELEGATING OTHERS TO SECOND place? Could it be simple egotism, the fact that the genius needs to be number one? “I don’t care so much about making my fortune,” Thomas Edison said in 1878, “as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.”32 Or is it simply obsession? The Nobel Prize− winning writer Pearl S. Buck called creativity an “overpowering necessity.” Although she used “he” and “his” in what follows, she presumably meant all geniuses: “[It is] the overpowering necessity to create, create, and create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very being is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”33 Beethoven said, “I live entirely in my scores and hardly have I completed one composition when I have already begun another.”34 Picasso expressed the same sentiment, albeit in different words: “Worst of it is that he [the artist] is never finished. There’s never a moment when you can say, ‘I’ve worked well and tomorrow is Sunday.’” Thomas Edison said, “Restlessness is discontent, and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”35
These are all sentiments honestly expressed. Indeed, how many of us use the excuse of “our work” as a way of avoiding familial and/or societal responsibility? A nightly dilemma of many busy professional parents: go back to work, or do homework with the child? Might obsessive geniuses teach us, in this case, by negative example?
But obsession has a positive flip side: productivity. Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, each running on average three hours, and 154 sonnets. Some critics have attributed Shakespeare’s dramas to a team or a committee of writers, believing that no one person could have accomplished so much. Likely these are the same critics who have not heard about Leonardo’s 100,000 drawings and 13,000 pages of notes, Bach’s 300 cantatas composed at the rate of one a week, Mozart’s 800 compositions (including several three-hour operas) written in thirty years, Edison’s 1,093 patents, Picasso’s 20,000 works of art, or Freud’s 150 books and articles and 20,000 letters. Einstein is best known for his five papers of 1905, but he also published 248 others. Compulsive productivity is a habit of genius, not a reason to deny it.
Should Shakespeare have stayed home in Stratford-on-Avon to help rear his family and not have abandoned them for London, the city that made him? Perhaps, but, as William Faulkner said hurtfully to his daughter, Jill, when she pestered him to stop drinking, “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.”36 Should Paul Gauguin have stayed with his wife and five children in Copenhagen instead of sailing off permanently to Tahiti? Happy family but far fewer Polynesian masterpieces. In sum, does the genius deserve a free pass?
Biographers, of course, are all too willing to supply one—to excuse almost any sort of destructive behavior. A week after Mozart’s death, on December 5, 1791, a Viennese newspaper wrote that “Mozhart [sic] unfortunately had that indifference to family circumstances which so often attaches to great minds.”37 But his sister, Nannerl, in a short biography in 1800, defended Mozart’s memory, saying “It is certainly easy to understand that a great genius, who is preoccupied with the abundance of his own ideas, and who soars from earth to heaven with amazing speed, is extremely reluctant to lower himself to noticing and dealing with mundane affairs.”38 And the reporter Lillian Ross, who often wrote about Robin Williams in The New Yorker, said this about the comedian in 2018: “Robin was a genius, and genius doesn’t produce normal men next door who are good family men and look after their wives and children. Genius requires its own way of looking at and living in the world, and it isn’t always compatible with conventional ways of living.”39
Can we hate the artist but love the art? For decades the nation of Israel said “no,” as it banned from its concert halls the transformative music of the rabid anti-Semite Richard Wagner. In 2018, the curators of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., postponed an exhibition of the works of Chuck Close owing to allegations of sexual harassment of female models. The sales and streaming of Michael Jackson’s music have declined since the damning documentary Leaving Neverland (2019) accused him of pedophilia.40 In 2019, 20,000 students in the University of California system demanded that a popular course on the films of the possible child molester Woody Allen be canceled.41 That same year, the National Gallery of London asked, “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?,” because the artist had “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls.”42
Yet as Jock Reynolds, the director emeritus of the Yale University Art Gallery, has asked, “How much are we going to do [by way of] a litmus test on every artist in terms of how they behave?”43 The painter Caravaggio, the genius who almost single-handedly created the dramatic chiaroscuro style of Baroque art, was accused of murder; and Egon Schiele, who was honored in 2018 with centennial exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, and Vienna, spent twenty-four days in jail on charges of statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. That was more than a hundred years ago. Is there a statute of limitations regarding destructive behavior for artists? If not, what then do we do with arguably the greatest of all Western painters, the genius and monster Pablo Picasso?
IN 1965, THE CULTURAL CRITIC LIONEL TRILLING WROTE THAT great moments in art are measured by “how much damage they can do.”44 Pablo Picasso did a lot of damage to the women in his life. He was emotionally and physically abusive, terrorizing his wives, partners, and mistresses, and pitting them against one another. A list is useful for keeping them straight:
Fernande Olivier (1904–1911): A Picasso Cubist painting of her sold for $63.4 million in 2016
Olga Khokhlova (1917–1955): First wife until her death, mother of their son Paulo
Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–1935): Mother of Maya; he painted Walter twice as often as any other woman
Dora Maar (1935–1943): Played an influential role in the creation of Picasso’s painting Guernica
Françoise Gilot (1943–1953): Mother of Claude and Paloma, successful painter still living in New York
Geneviève Laporte (during the 1950s): First met Picasso when she was a high school student
Jacqueline Roque (1953–1973): Second wife until his death in 1973
Such a list might suggest that Picasso’s women followed in sequence, but instead they came in clumps. When Picasso summered in Mougins in 1938, his new mistress, Dora, went along, but so, too, at a distance, did his wife, Olga, and Marie-Thérèse. When Picasso was resident in Paris in 1944 on Rue des Grands-Augustins, Olga, Dora, Marie-Thérèse, and Françoise came and went. In that residence, picked out by Dora, she and Marie-Thérèse once came to blows. “One of my choicest memories,” recalled Picasso.45
If Picasso’s women could not destroy one another by themselves, Picasso would assist. Among his favorite sayings: “For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats.”46 As to the physical abuse: Olga was struck down and dragged by her hair around the floor of the apartment on Rue La Boétie. Dora was knocked unconscious in the studio in Rue des Grands-Augustins. Françoise was attacked by three Mediterranean scorpions while Picasso laughed delightedly—the deadly Scorpio was his zodiac sign. Once in Golfe-Juan, France, he burned Gilot’s face with a lighted cigarette. Burning seems to have appealed to Picasso. As he said to Gilot toward the end of their relationship in 1952, “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence. Maybe that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.”47
Having terrorized the women in his life, the now-energized Picasso set about transferring the psychic electricity he had negatively generated to his art. “He first raped the woman . . . and then he worked. Whether it was me, or someone else, it was always like that,” recounted Marie-Thérèse Walter.48 Brush in hand, Picasso subjected the curvaceous body of Marie-Thérèse to his sexual fantasies; more than once he added to her forehead a large penis, presumably a facsimile of his own. The beautiful, talented Dora Maar began in Picasso’s mind as a stylish fashion icon but became progressively The Weeping Woman (Figure 12.1), her features made increasingly angular and disjointed—from fashionable goddess to hysterical doormat. Marie-Thérèse, Dora, and Françoise each appears in a separate psychodrama involving the vulnerable woman and the Minotaur, she the sacrificial victim, he the frightful beast bent on rape (Figure 12.2). As Picasso surveyed one of these drawings, he mused, “He [the Minotaur] is studying her, trying to read her thoughts, trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster. Women are odd enough for that, you know. It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her.”49 At what point does the victim flee the Minotaur, flee even a genius?
FIGURE 12.1: Pablo Picasso, The Weeping Woman (portrait of Dora Maar), 1937 (Tate Modern, London). “For me she is the weeping woman,” Picasso said. “For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms.”
Steve Vidler: Alamy Stock Photo
More could be said about Picasso as Minotaur, but the point is made. He was a monster. And like every revolutionary, this monster could last only as long as the public allowed, as he himself realized. “They [the public] expect to be shocked and terrorized,” he said. “If the monster only smiles, then they’re disappointed.”50 Picasso didn’t disappoint, but his artistic terror left collateral damage.
To Picasso, it didn’t matter. “Nobody has any real importance for me,” he told Françoise Gilot. “As far as I’m concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.”51 Out went his half-crazed first wife, Olga, who stalked Picasso wherever he went until she died in 1954; Marie-Thérèse, who hanged herself in 1977; his second wife, Jacqueline, who shot herself in 1986; and Dora Maar, who underwent electric shock therapy and joined a semimonastic convent, dying in 1997. Wounded but surviving was Françoise Gilot, who later married a second genius, the aforementioned Dr. Jonas Salk. Arianna Huffington, the creator of Huffington Post, hit the nail on the head with the title of her 1988 comprehensive biography of the artist: Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.
FIGURE 12.2: Pablo Picasso, Minotaur Leaning over a Sleeping Girl, 1933 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). This and similar drawings by Picasso appeared in the National Gallery’s 2016 exhibition Picasso: Man and Beast.
agefotostock: Alamy Stock Photo
IN 2009, MARK ZUCKERBERG SAID, “MOVE FAST AND BREAK things. . . . Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”52 Silicon Valley computer engineers quickly moved from mainframe computers to workstations to desktops to tablets and finally to smartphones, each new product destroying the exclusivity of its predecessor. What “stuff” did Zuckerberg want broken—products, institutions, or people?
Today Facebook has a market capitalization of nearly half a trillion dollars and Zuckerberg himself a net worth of more than $60 billion. Facebook is genius on a global scale. With 2.7 billion subscribers (including its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger), Facebook reaches a third of the world’s population, serving as the planet’s principal source of news and connectivity to others. The advantages of Facebook are obvious: by aggregating many lines of communication and commerce on a single platform (money, messages, people searches, news feeds, photos, videos, video conferencing, focus groups, and so on) people and products can be brought together with unprecedented speed and efficiency. No longer is it necessary to paint and post signs to rally citizens to an anti-gun demonstration or to notify your neighbors about your yard sale. It can be done quickly, efficiently, and on a massive scale—and it’s all “free.” You only need be willing to pay at the expense of your privacy—and perhaps your freedom.
As the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, has observed, however, “Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.”53 The obvious dark side of Facebook begins with the data breaches and the unauthorized use of personal information sold to advertisers. In Facebook’s world of “surveillance capitalism,” confidential information flows directly to Facebook itself or through partnering vendors or phone app developers. Your contacts and location, the medicines you take, your heart rate, your political affiliation, your vacation interests—it’s all there for Facebook to exploit as “sponsored posts.”54
Less well understood is the capacity of Facebook algorithms to bind people into focus groups, which are fed increasingly narrow streams of information, potentially leading to pumped-up extremist groups. On February 12, 2019, the New York Times ran two headlines on two successive pages of the paper: “Facebook Group of French Journalists Harassed Women for Years,” and “When Facebook Spread Hate, One German Cop Tried Something Unusual.” Each demonstrated the capacity of Facebook technology to harass or mislead. On March 15, 2019, a white extremist killed fifty Muslims in a mosque in New Zealand, inspired in part by his ability to stream live video on Facebook. Facebook has thus far proved incapable of regulating disinformation, harassment, bullying, and hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian agents, masquerading as Americans, acquired bogus Facebook identities, joined political advocacy groups, posted messages, and purchased Facebook ads that reached 126 million users.55 Sometimes those “Americans” paid for the ads in rubles (not genius).56 On February 14, 2019, a committee of the British House of Commons issued a report on interference in the “Brexit” vote about which a spokesperson concluded that Facebook had behaved like a “digital gangster.”57 That same month, a longtime Silicon Valley investor and observer, Roger McNamee, published a critique of Facebook titled Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Manipulated by an unregulated monopoly, liberal democracies are indeed Zucked.
As to genius Zuck himself, did he foresee all the destruction caused by data theft, or is he simply a victim of unintended consequence? Recall that an article published in the Harvard Crimson on November 19, 2003, reported that Zuckerberg had nearly been expelled from Harvard, charged with “breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy.” At the time, Zuckerberg appeared to be a socially maladroit computer geek obsessed with code.58 Typical of his thinking then was what he said to a friend in an online exchange, as reported on Business Insider:59
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
What has changed? Apparently not much, except that the number of us dumb fucks has grown to 2.7 billion.
IN HIS PLAY JULIUS CAESAR (1599), SHAKESPEARE SAID, “THE EVIL that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” The power of Shakespeare’s eloquence is such that we fail to see that, when it comes to genius, the Bard may be wrong. We hold on to the good but forget the destruction. This capacity for collective amnesia may be an evolutionary advantage that enables progress. We tolerate transformative jerks and the personal and institutional destruction they cause because, on the whole, it is in our long-term benefit to do so. As the novelist Arthur Koestler said in 1964, “The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”60 If the innovations of the genius are beneficial enough, we tend to forgive and forget.