A. Assumptions Still Hold
Even after centuries of disconfirmation, the assumptions of the eight paradigms remain alive and unquestioned. They are recited in classrooms, coded into economic models, embedded in policy, and whispered in everyday conversation. We tell our children that hard work will make them wealthy (meritocracy), that productivity ensures prosperity (productivism), that the market never fails to recognize value (classical economics), that rational actors reap rational rewards (rational choice), that the wealthy simply "think differently" (wealth mindset), that society naturally distributes roles and rewards fairly (functionalism), that innovation is self-rewarding (innovation-reward fallacy), and that class struggle explains poverty (Marxism).
Why do these assumptions still hold, despite so much contrary evidence? Because they serve a purpose---not for truth, but for order. These paradigms function as cultural anesthesia. They soothe the discomfort provoked by the cemetery of genius. They allow societies to transform systemic betrayal into natural law, to interpret tragedy as necessity, and to maintain faith in structures that consistently misallocate value.
The myth of Tesla's eccentricity is not just a story; it is a justification. It tells us he died poor not because the system failed, but because he was unfit. Van Gogh's madness is narrativized not as society's blindness but as his personal flaw. Ramanujan's obscurity is rebranded as the price of being "ahead of his time." These myths are not accidental---they are functional, preserving the illusion that the system is fundamentally just, even when it leaves its greatest benefactors to rot.
Thus, the persistence of these assumptions is less about their explanatory power than their ideological utility. They survive because they absolve society of guilt. They provide a script in which every grave in the cemetery of genius is not an indictment but a lesson: be more practical, be more disciplined, be more rational, be more aligned with the system. In this way, the illusions recycle themselves across generations, insulating institutions from accountability while gaslighting visionaries into believing their suffering was self-inflicted.
Unmasking this illusion, therefore, requires more than theoretical refinement---it requires intellectual defiance. We must reject not only the conclusions of these paradigms but the comfort they offer. For only when the anesthesia wears off, and we feel the raw wound of systemic blindness, can we begin to reconstruct a framework adequate to the reality of genius and its betrayal.
B. Architectures of Systemic Blindness
To understand why geniuses so often die poor, we must move beyond the surface narratives of eccentricity, impracticality, or bad luck. The deeper truth is this: societies are not neutral observers of genius. They are architectures---layered structures of economy, culture, and institution---that systematically filter, distort, and often suppress the value of disruptive minds.
These architectures of blindness operate through three interlocking mechanisms:
1. Temporal Misalignment
Genius frequently anticipates futures that the present cannot yet accommodate. Tesla's wireless energy, Van Gogh's color revolutions, Ramanujan's equations---all were "out of time." Societies, structured around short-term profit and immediate functionality, cannot recognize anticipatory value. As a result, genius is punished for its premature arrival, while opportunists harvest the fruits decades later when institutions have caught up.
2. Institutional Gatekeeping
Recognition and reward flow through institutions---markets, universities, corporations, galleries, governments---that act as gatekeepers of legitimacy. These institutions are inherently conservative, designed to stabilize existing systems rather than destabilize them. Genius, by definition, destabilizes. Thus, institutions tend to marginalize or appropriate genius rather than embrace it. Edison, with fewer radical ideas than Tesla, flourished because he mastered institutional games: patents, publicity, investors. Tesla did not. The architecture rewarded the negotiator, not the visionary.
3. Narrative Domestication
When systems cannot reward genius, they domesticate it. Van Gogh becomes the archetype of the "mad artist," his suffering repackaged as romance. Ramanujan is recast as the exotic savant, his poverty reframed as destiny. Tesla is remembered as the tragic eccentric whose brilliance was sabotaged by his own flaws. In each case, systemic blindness is rewritten as individual pathology. By narrativizing genius as defective, society protects itself from the indictment that it systematically abandons its greatest minds.
These mechanisms reveal a chilling symmetry: the very qualities that define genius---visionary scope, temporal anticipation, disruptive creativity---are the same qualities that trigger systemic blindness. Genius is not simply "overlooked"; it is actively filtered out by architectures that prize stability over transformation, profitability over profundity, conformity over transcendence.
To see this clearly is to recognize that the poverty of genius is not incidental. It is structural. The cemetery of Tesla, Van Gogh, and Ramanujan is not a field of accidents but the predictable byproduct of architectures designed to suppress what they cannot immediately exploit.
