The Cult of the “Genius”
Feb. 6th, 2026 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWhen I was in college, I was briefly friends with a young man who came off as an intellectual because he only read “important” books. I liked him well enough, but I never really took him seriously. He was one of those people who was always saying that he wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t write.
The fun thing about not writing is that, as long as you haven’t actually written anything, there’s no tangible proof that you’re not in fact a genius. So this guy was always being given opportunities, a few of which were denied to me because I actually did write, albeit not at a genius level. In my defense, it’s very rare for a college-age kid to be at the same level as an experienced master of the craft. And why should they be? The talents of youth lie elsewhere.
Anyway, I sometimes think about how many super-progressive people bent over backwards to give this guy opportunities, especially because he later ended up at the Heritage Foundation, where he was one of the contributors to the document that would become Project 2025 a decade later. After that, he got a PhD at a state school and ended up at a newly built Catholic university whose founders are all over the Epstein files.
And you know what? Even with all his opportunities, and even with an MFA and a PhD, and even with connections in surprisingly high places, that asshole still hasn’t written anything. And he probably never will.
The point of this story is that anyone who has ever self-published a zero-review novel on Itch.io has added more to the world than this guy, and any random person posting gay furry porn on AO3 is worth a million shitty literary “geniuses.”
The fun thing about not writing is that, as long as you haven’t actually written anything, there’s no tangible proof that you’re not in fact a genius. So this guy was always being given opportunities, a few of which were denied to me because I actually did write, albeit not at a genius level. In my defense, it’s very rare for a college-age kid to be at the same level as an experienced master of the craft. And why should they be? The talents of youth lie elsewhere.
Anyway, I sometimes think about how many super-progressive people bent over backwards to give this guy opportunities, especially because he later ended up at the Heritage Foundation, where he was one of the contributors to the document that would become Project 2025 a decade later. After that, he got a PhD at a state school and ended up at a newly built Catholic university whose founders are all over the Epstein files.
And you know what? Even with all his opportunities, and even with an MFA and a PhD, and even with connections in surprisingly high places, that asshole still hasn’t written anything. And he probably never will.
The point of this story is that anyone who has ever self-published a zero-review novel on Itch.io has added more to the world than this guy, and any random person posting gay furry porn on AO3 is worth a million shitty literary “geniuses.”
