Wealth mindset ideology, then, is less a theory of wealth than a mythology of convenience. It comforts the already wealthy by implying they are spiritually superior, while condemning the poor to a purgatory of endless self-correction. For the genius, it is not just irrelevant; it is insulting, reducing their struggles to a failure of imagination when in truth the failure belongs to the systems that could not imagine them.
6. Functionalist Sociology
If wealth mindset ideology privatizes failure, functionalist sociology universalizes harmony. In this paradigm, society is imagined as a well-ordered organism in which every role has its function, and reward flows naturally to those who serve the collective most effectively. Genius, by this account, should occupy a privileged position, for who contributes more to the long-term vitality of society than those who expand the frontiers of knowledge and imagination?
Yet the historical record dismantles this comforting narrative. Van Gogh was not rewarded because society had no immediate "function" for his tormented visions. Ramanujan's theorems, incomprehensible to most of his contemporaries, could not be "functional" in any immediate sociological sense. Tesla's wireless energy, which could have transformed civilization, was not integrated because it disrupted existing institutional arrangements rather than reinforcing them.
The flaw of functionalist sociology is its static conception of function. By equating social reward with current utility, it blinds itself to anticipatory value---the contributions that will only be recognized generations later. To the functionalist imagination, a lawyer or banker is richly rewarded because their role is "functional" to present institutions, while the isolated mathematician is neglected because their role is opaque. In truth, the lawyer and banker maintain systems; the genius transforms them.
Worse still, functionalism tends to moralize this distribution, implying that if the genius is unrewarded, it is because their contribution was not yet "needed" by the social organism. This transforms systemic injustice into natural order, as though Van Gogh's starvation were simply society regulating itself. In this way, functionalism erases the very possibility of systemic blindness, replacing it with a story of balance and equilibrium.
But society is not an organism seeking balance---it is a battlefield of recognition, power, and temporality. Functionalist sociology, with its tranquil metaphors of integration, cannot account for why some of humanity's greatest benefactors died in obscurity. Its story of harmony becomes a hymn of silence, drowning out the cries of geniuses abandoned by the very society they enriched.
7. Rational Choice Theory
If functionalist sociology imagines society as an organism, rational choice theory imagines it as a marketplace of decisions, where individuals act as utility-maximizers navigating constraints. In this framework, poverty or wealth is not a mystery but a consequence of choices. If a genius remains poor, it is because they chose curiosity over commerce, purity over profit, exploration over exploitation. Poverty, then, becomes not tragedy but rational outcome.
On the surface, this seems plausible. Tesla could have devoted his genius to incremental, profitable improvements instead of chasing dreams of planetary wireless energy. Van Gogh could have painted more "sellable" portraits instead of spirals of madness. Ramanujan might have studied a conventional engineering career rather than burning through notebooks of infinite series. Rational choice theorists might say: they maximized their own idiosyncratic utility---curiosity, expression, beauty---even if it meant sacrificing wealth.
Yet this reductionism is precisely its failure. Rational choice theory collapses all human drives into a flat plane of preference satisfaction, stripping away the structural forces that render some choices viable and others impossible. It ignores that Tesla's refusal to commodify his vision was not simply an "individual preference" but a confrontation with entrenched monopolies. It overlooks how Van Gogh's starvation was not the "cost" of his aesthetic utility but the result of an art market incapable of absorbing his work. It trivializes Ramanujan's poverty as a rational "trade-off" rather than a symptom of colonial structures that denied institutional support to Indian intellectuals.
