I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. - Albert Einstein
The past decades have seen a dismantling of the myth of the lone genius. There are probably many good reasons for that. Nowadays scientists work in teams rather than alone. The times of Newton, Cavendish, Tesla and Einstein when a single individual could start a scientific revolution seem to have gone. Nobel Prizes in physics were typically awarded to individuals. From the 1950s it was typically two people and in the 70s teams of three became more common than individuals. Researchers in the past decade have stressed two factors for coming up with novel ideas:
- Being part of a scientific or idea network
- Serendipity
Steven Johnson expresses this succinctly in his book Where Good Ideas Come: Chance favors the connected mind. This is true, of course. It would be hard to picture a Sumerian geek coming up with the idea of relativity or a digital computer. It is like ideas are bound to be born under the right circumstances. Researchers often point to simultaneous discoveries, e.g.
1600s: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both discover calculus.
1800s: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both describe natural selection.
1950s: Jonas Salk and Albert Bruce Sabin invent the polio vaccine.
And yet - to stick with the Sumerians - they did come up with unthinkable inventions: the wheel, writing, geometry and irrigation. The wheel seems to have been such an unlikely invention that it was never invented in the Americas despite a developed agriculture and domesticated llamas.
And yet the idea of an embedded scientist and a lone genius aren’t mutually exclusive. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” wrote Newton, who was a loner and on the autism spectrum. I don’t think it’s fair to discard the “myth of the lone genius” altogether merely because it has become more difficult for loners to come up with novel ideas.
Some of the greatest minds in history were loners: Rousseau, Cavendish, Gandhi, Tesla, Darwin and many others. The Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were flocked by admirers for their ideas. True, but at the time there were probably more hunter-gatherer types alive than nowadays. Marx and Nietzsche were loners. Marx spent much more of his time in the reading rooms in the British Library than socialising and exchanging ideas.
All the above people were introverts. Today professors in leading positions are more likely to be extroverts than introverts. Teaching hundreds of students is not every introvert's cup of tea. Especially in leading positions - like pretty much everywhere - academics tend to be extroverts. The only department at my university that was full of introverts - perhaps not surprisingly - was the Department of Indo-European Studies. It was closed due to a lack of funding.
Introverts or not, there is this tendency of idea people to be or to become loners. Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor, became a recluse after having been in the limelight for years. So did Howard Hughes, the “Aviator”, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber (also an idea person) and Syd Barret, founder, lyricist, and guitarist of the band Pink Floyd.
There is a famous personality system, the enneagram, that has two types that are quintessential loners: type 5 “the thinker” and type 4 “the individualist”. We know that humans are social animals. Loneliness hurts because in our evolutionary past being a loner would have led to a drastically reduced life expectancy and a drastically reduced reproductive potential. We humans are sometimes also called “herd animals”. The latter is certainly not true for hunter-gatherer types, who are much less conformist than farmer types. Here we find one possible explanation why forager types tend to be or become loners. However, this isn’t the only explanation for this phenomenon. Another insight into the lone genius phenomenon might be found in our “survival strategies”.
Have you ever noticed that liberals tend to want to leave the country when conservative politicians like Trump are elected? The reverse isn't true. No conservative ever said they would leave the country if a liberal like Obama is elected. Why is that? We all have certain tendencies according to our evolved temperaments and survival strategies. Conservatives tend to be highly patriotic and very attached to kith and kin. Liberals on the other hand are often interested in far-away cultures and love spending time abroad, they are the quintessential ex-pats of the past or today’s digital nomads. These are very opposite tendencies that most likely come from our ancestral subsistence and survival strategies. How did evolution program us to react when resources become scarce or when our survival is threatened?
Hunter-gatherers have a split and merge pattern that allows them to avoid conflicts and rapidly move into new areas with locally savvy people when resources become low. Low resources and conflict make them leavers. Cultural Dynamics, a British think tank, calls this pattern “pioneer”. Foreign bands are seen as opportunities for merging and mating. This pattern is quintessentially xenophile and most likely to help strangers/non-ingroup members (altruism selection) Both hunters and gatherers are splitters and mergers, however, I have assigned merger to the prosocial gatherer evolutionary profile as they would initiate merging more often and splitter to the providing hunter profile as they would initiate splitting more often. Hunters are analysts in Keirsey’s temperament sorter and in the DISC system, gatherers idealists/diplomats and inspirators in the DISC system.
Farmers have an expanding and defending survival pattern. When resources become rare, they will try to increase productivity and take more arable land. If it is other farmers who try to take their resources, they will defend them by building walls and fighting. They rely on a close network of kith and kin (kin selection) as allies. I will call this pattern “defensive”. Foreign tribes are often seen as potential aggressors or thieves. This pattern is therefore potentially xenophobe, especially when threat is perceived. Farmers seek stability (stability in DISC) and are aptly called guardians (Keirsey) and settlers (Cultural Dynamic).
Pastoralists have an explorative/opportunistic pattern that can become a raiding and retaliating aggressive pattern (offensive). When resources become low they will try to raid neighbouring herder or farmer tribes. Pastoralists are often in a precarious situation as meat and milk alone do not provide all required nutrients, so they have to resort to trading and raiding. When attacked by other pastoralists they have a violent retaliatory culture that serves as a deterrent. Being opportunists, pastoralists can have different attitudes towards foreigners, they may be xenophobes, perceiving the foreign tribe as challengers, or they may be xenophile, perceiving possibilities for trading or alliances. Pastoralists have evolved a social dominance orientation that makes them want to be better than potential competing tribes (group selection). This survival pattern is variously called artisans (Keirsey), explorers (Fisher), Dominance (DISC), and Prospectors (Cultural Dynamics).
In his novel Ishmael Daniel Quinn called farmers takers and hunter-gatherers and pastoralists leavers. Pastoralists are certainly not as territorial as farmers, but they can’t be leavers because of their co-dependency on agricultural produce. To my knowledge, Steven Kessler is the first person to have described survival patterns. As he uses five patterns they are hard to map onto my system, but the best correspondences would be leaving for hunter, merging for gatherer, aggressive for pastoralist and rigid for farmer.
We get four basic political orientations, with hunter-gatherers being the most liberal/libertarian and farmers being the most conservative. Of course, these are all generalisations, but they do explain why liberals feel the urge to leave a country when illiberal politicians get voted and why conservatives never do. Farmers, on the other hand, do feel the need to build walls when feeling threatened and pastoralists may become aggressive towards immigrants when feeling challenged. In economic uncertainty farmers and pastoralists fear that their jobs are taken by immigrants; hunter-gatherer types generally fear them much less. Does this constellation ring a bell? It should. It’s the very reason why Donald Trump got elected president in 2016.
In a famous lone genius like Einstein, we can observe the fission pattern. However, being a forager type, Einstein also promoted fusion. Einstein saw world government as the only way to ensure lasting world peace. But he was sceptical that an organisation like the United Nations—which answered to the national governments of its member states—could prevent future wars. We see this paradox of being a loner and at the same time promoting something like a world community in many other idea people: Dante, Rousseau, Kant, Marx. In fact, I have argued that all the great unifiers in history were forager type people, from Sargon, Ashoka and Alfred the Great to Kemal Atatürk, Gandhi and MLK. While the idea of a “united world” seemed a possibility in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, alas it seems far less unrealistic in 2022 with major conflicts going on in places like Ukraine and Afghanistan and a chilly relationship between the US and China, the two biggest economies in the world.
In case you find the idea interesting check out my latest book Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries : The Secret of the Idea People for more details:
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