The Genius Famine: Why we need geniuses, why they are dying out, why we must rescue them

Geniuses are rare and exceptional people; but the great ideas, discoveries and inventions of human history, which have allowed the development of civilization itself, were the products of geniuses. The Genius Famine finds that a genius combines extremely high intelligence with a unworldly, intuitive personality. Geniuses will seldom fit-into normal society, they will seldom want to. And we shouldn’t want them to, because it is their unusual and socially-difficult nature which drives geniuses to come up with original ideas, and solutions to otherwise unsolvable problems. But modern society has been hit by a genius famine. There are ever-fewer geniuses and, to make matters worse, modern society has become actively hostile to those few geniuses we still have. The Genius Famine explores the nature of genius, why the genius famine has happened, how the famine will lead to the decline of civilization, and what we can and should do to overcome it.

Edward Dutton is Adjunct Professor of the Anthropology of Religion at Oulu University in Finland and an independent scholar.