The Genius Famine answered many burning questions that have arisen for me over the course of several decades.
- Where are the Japanese and Chinese geniuses if their average IQ is 106, second only to Ashkenazi Jews of 110? (There are very few Chinese Nobel Prize winners).
- As a corollary of that, why do the Chinese just copy American technology through reverse engineering and industrial espionage instead of creating their own? Yes, it is easier, but also derivative and destines them for second rate status.
- Why would someone who came top of his class in English, second to the top when transferred to an élite private school, find the vocabulary of Charles Dickens fairly challenging as an eighteen-year-old? (Names for Victorian ladies’ hats and kinds of wallpaper did not help.)
- Why are there no genius physicists at all anymore; the kind that make real, meaningful contributions to basic theoretical physics? We are still waiting for a grand unifying theory to reconcile quantum physics and relativity and a solution is nowhere in sight. In the first half of the twentieth century, we still had hall of famers, like Rutherford, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Max Planck, and Einstein.
- Where are the genius musicians, poets, philosophers, painters, and novelists? The 1990s saw the mishmash recycling of styles of post-modernism, with seemingly nowhere to go, as though music and literature had exhausted themselves. We had the nihilistic geniuses of Joyce, Picasso, and Schoenberg, in the early twentieth century, all of whom, Dutton suggests, were artistic dead ends. Academics could not have boosted atonal music anymore if they had tried, and it is effectively dead. Though it is true that the past can seem disconcertingly intimidating because there has been a lot of time to accumulate a list of worthy geniuses. But, it has been seventy years from 1950 to 2021. Think of what the physicists did in a mere 40, from 1900 to 1940.
- The late eighteenth and nineteenth century had Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler, Liszt, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Berlioz, Puccini, and Verdi. The twentieth century produced Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg, and that’s about it. And most people do not even like the last one.
In the usual roadside picnic, travelers might spread out a picnic blanket, take out a hamper, and help themselves to lunch. In the process, they might carelessly discard a banana peel or two and then drive off. The Strugatsky brothers imagine such a situation, except the travelers are aliens in a spaceship and the “banana peels” they throw out have the effect of altering space and time in the immediate vicinity. Roadside Picnic details the unintentional consequences of this brief terrestrial visit. The Zone is the remnant of this sojourn. There is a place within it that makes the deepest wishes of someone come true. Unfortunately, like certain ominous fairy tales where, for instance, someone wishes that he might never die and is turned into a rock, since rocks do not die, human beings do not necessarily know what their deepest, darkest desires might really be, so there is a huge potential for things to turn out badly. Certain people known as “stalkers,” really “guides,” guide people through the Zone in order to minimize their chances of dying and to maximize their success. The after effects of the alien visit include pockets of intense gravity that will crush a man if he steps into the wrong area. In the novel, one of the stalkers decides to exploit a teenager for his own purposes. He reasons that the kid will be shallow and that his desires will be worthless, so, instead of protecting him, the stalker will use him in the fashion of a mine sweeper to protect himself, in direct violation of his duty to the kid. Stalkers are paid for their services. The novel ends with great pathos. The stalker watches in horror as the youth runs toward his goal shouting “Happiness for everyone,” not at all the selfish and stupid thing the stalker was picturing, only to see the boy’s spine twist and rupture as the boy enters a gravity field. 
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, wrote The Visit
Ironically, these lines, as despairing as they are, are also beautiful, and beauty has immense value. Shakespeare was no nihilist. His famous tragedies, Macbeth and Hamlet, reveal the futility and ugliness of revenge; not the pointlessness of all human life. Macbeth’s speech, as one of the most memorable and quotable in the play, is taken out of context by that very fact, as though it summed up the author’s worldview, which it does not. 
Friedrich Nietzsche is a strange mixture of conflicting impulses; so chronically sick that writing was a physical agony for his eyes and his stomach permanently bothered him, yet he wrote paeans to the strong and mighty. A brilliant analyst of resentment, he had every reason to feel ignored being unread during his lifetime and self-publishing books that he mostly could not sell. He admired Dostoevsky, which itself is admirable, writing in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Nietzsche first stumbled upon Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in a bookstore in Nice in the winter of 1886-87 and immediately loved it, though Dostoevsky never knew of Nietzsche. Notes from Underground is psychologically and anthropologically penetrating, exploring themes of mimesis and resentment that were of immense interest to Nietzsche.
using measurement is then supposed to be a kind of nonsense. Morality, beauty, purpose, value, meaning, emotion, consciousness and mind, and all interior phenomena, not being quantifiable, would then be “subjective,” and thus regarded as not real, which is intensely nihilistic. The word “subjective” needs to be rehabilitated as having to do with treating people as subjects, rather than objects. Subjects are moral agents with interiors; with minds, thoughts, feelings, desires, ambitions, and volition. To treat someone as an object is to relegate that person to the status of a rock, an “It.” This is what all sciences do, including psychology. A person is transformed into data and facts. They are reduced to the facets of those that can be measured. To treat someone as a subject, a “Thou,” is to treat that person as having an interior life as rich, important, and meaningful, as your own, rather than a one-way “study” of that person. You engage in dialogue with them to discover their inner life; their thoughts, feelings, and desires, with moral worth; subject to subject. The “subjective” then is what is most importantly real about a person. It is what is being asked when someone queries whether you know someone. The tragedy of much of modern life consists in treating people as objects to be manipulated. To stop doing this, it is necessary to rethink the “objective” is real, the “subjective” is unreal, division. The good news is that since someone just made up this point of view a few hundred years ago, it is possible to change it. It is not an immutable feature of the human condition or human outlook. 
“Philosophy starts by doubting the reality of the perceptible world, of the world of objects and things.”
The Orthosphere 