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The Commingling of Genius and Insanity

There is an undoubtable parallelism between genius and insanity.

Martin Vidal
3 min readNov 2, 2020
A painting of red-orange waves.
Photo by Sergio Souza on Pexels

Many a genius was once called insane. And why shouldn’t they have been? One person in a crowd of multitudes looks out and sees what no one else can see. On the basis of the conjecture alone, that there is indeed something which is not visible to the rest of us, or not perceived as possible by the rest us, we can find no difference between one who has a great deal of extra sense and one who has no sense at all. The prognosticator who warns vociferously of coming perils is a fool if wrong and a genius if right.

There is a certain ease in dismissal. It is an incomparably laborious task, requiring a great degree of skill and steadfastness, to prove the world wrong. However, it is as easy as a wave of the hand to outright reject a possibility. And so an individual, who can envision clearly the path to materializing some ambition, must contend with not only the toils of the task at hand but the incredulity of almost all observers of those toils as well — said observers fan their vanity with the upmost efficiency by, on the one hand, displaying their obviously superior perspicacity through a speedy rejection of the effort and, simultaneously, sparing themselves the envy which must necessarily follow acknowledging what is impossible for them is not…

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Martin Vidal
Martin Vidal

Written by Martin Vidal

I put the “me” in Medium. Like books? Check mine out at martinvidal.co

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