Musing on mediocrity, sub Mensa

Lionel Trilling, introduction to Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (Harvest, 1980), x.

We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us.  They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us.  We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing.  Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare.  How they glitter, and with what an imperious way they seem to deal with circumstance, even when they are wrong.  Lacking their patents of nobility, we might as well quit.  This is what democracy has done to us, alas -- told us that genius is available to anyone, that the grace of ultimate prestige may be had by anyone, that we may all be princes and potentates, or saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of the heart and mind.  And then when it turns out that we are no such thing, it permits us to think that we aren't much of anything at all.  In contrast with this cozening trick of democracy, how pleasant seems the old, reactionary Anglican phrase that used to drive people of democratic leanings quite wild with rage -- "My station and its duties."

Inferiority enervates the will as we indulge in self-pity, and the indulgence is never so piquant as when we contrast our own dimness with the brilliant example of a genius.  We are left to solve the labyrinth with our petty ball of string, while they invent a helicopter and mock us errant knaves from above.

I shake my fist at you, you genius in your helicopter.*

*Image taken from Leonardo 2.0, where Leonardo updates his blog, apparently.