The Universe has existed for billions of years, and "Homo sapiens" - several tens of thousands. In that instant, we managed to create the most destructive force in the Universe - a hydrogen bomb capable of destroying our world with its missiles, skyscrapers, computer networks and television dreams. Humanity is on the brink of self-destruction. Shouldn't such a world be called insane? But who created such our civilization?
Everything that surrounds us was created by an incredible breakthrough of their mind. We should be grateful to them for not sitting in caves by the fire. Fanatical work, self-denial and loneliness are their lot. For this they were crucified at Calvary, burned at the stake, at best they perished in poverty, going mad.
Those who created epoch-making things, but did not encroach on the generally accepted, had money, fame, honor, were creators, but not geniuses. Geniuses went against it, proposed crazy theories, solved unsolvable problems. Exile, illness, loneliness, insanity and children diagnosed with "idiocy" - a list of their "awards". The thought that genius is madness entered the minds of the ancient Greeks. The Italian psychiatrist Lombroso considered almost all geniuses to be schizophrenics. But they were the ones who created our world. So is our civilization insane and where are we going?
The world, as it is, was created by their "crazy" theories, however, they were considered insane by those who were not given illumination from above, the opportunity to break out of the narrow paradigm. But the craziest theories are created by the brightest minds. However, not everyone agrees with this.
Great Losers
A child prodigy rarely becomes a genius. How many winners of mathematical olympiads, having entered Moscow State University, by the third year ended up in a psychiatric hospital! They say that mathematician Academician Aleksandrov received two marks in mathematics at school. Leonardo da Vinci, five hundred years before the appearance of the first plane, drew a diagram of it, but from childhood until the end of his days he was not given ordinary Latin. Geniuses do not fit into school concepts, their thinking defies logic. They solve problems in their own way, get two marks, and then this "in their own way" becomes a new word in science.
There are exceptions when geeks become geniuses without realizing their originality. When Mozart wrote his first harpsichord concerto at the age of four, his father exclaimed: “This concert is so difficult that no one can play it!”, To which Mozart replied: “Nonsense, dad! Even a child can play it. For example me . But if a genius in childhood tries to comb his hair like a common comb, he becomes only a talent. Some geniuses are lucky - they were not dealt with by their parents. In the Pushkin family, the daughter was the father's favorite, the son was the mother's favorite. Alexander lived on his own until the age of 9. After this age, genius can be knocked out only by destroying the genius.
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Is genius inherited? There were 8 generations of musicians in the Bach family, 57 of them were famous. But only one genius. Lombroso believed that a genius is almost always a schizophrenic. However, schizophrenia is a hereditary disease that is passed down through the generations. Genius is never inherited. It flares up unexpectedly, often with parents who are far from perfect. Beethoven's father was an alcoholic, his mother was a limited woman who died of tuberculosis.
Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate child of a stupid peasant woman and a notary who had sinned with her. Children of geniuses are often born idiots. Doctors diagnosed Einstein's son with schizophrenia. Einstein himself fell into madness in his old age. After his death, it was discovered that there was no gray matter in his brain - the carrier of intelligence. Although usually the children of great people are always the subject of research by historians, information about the six sons of Niels Bohr and the seven children of Heisenberg, two great physicists, is hidden. This does not apply to the children of great creators. We are talking about geniuses who "blew up" the world.
Doom masters or crazy maniacs?
The idea that genius is insanity was expressed by Plato, who considered it "a delirium given by the Gods." Observing how the prophets behave, falling into a trance, or how poets, not noticing anything around them, mutter something unintelligible, writing poetry, the ancient Greeks spoke of the "divine illness" that the gods send to the prophets and poets. They believed that there was a "genius", a guardian spirit.
He whispered their poems to poets, and their wisdom to philosophers. According to legend, Socrates had long conversations with his "genius", sometimes his disciples were present and saw how the sage spoke to someone invisible. Some thought Socrates was a crazy weirdo. But this "urban madman" went down in history as one of the wisest people of mankind. If scientists created everything that we see around us, then philosophers, poets, prophets determined the direction in which humanity was heading, talked about morality, duty and similar things.
The views of the ideologue of the French Revolution, Rousseau, determined the character of Europe after the monarchies began to change into republics. Modern Europe, one of the world's main forces, is the fruit of such changes. But who is Rousseau? A deeply sick person. He suffered from manic shifts in the psyche. Nietzsche's ideas about the superman pushed Hitler to the destruction of millions of people of "inferior" (according to the Nazis) races. The driving force behind this bloodiest carnage in history was Adolf Hitler, an occult man with delusions of grandeur and severe psychic shift, and his inspiration Nietzsche was mentally ill.
In addition to the listed "masters of thoughts", such major philosophers as Descartes, Plato, Schopenhauer, Spencer and others were insane. And among the largest leaders, the cruel Roman emperors Caligula and Nero, the emperor and conqueror of half of Europe, Napoleon, suffering from delusions of grandeur and persecution, and the demoniac Mussolini were recognized as abnormal. But, we will note that the speech here was mostly about philosophers and politicians, but not about technical geniuses or creative ones.
Shocking version
Now get ready for the shock. We are accustomed to consider Tsiolkovsky as the father of rocketry. And yet, in all fairness, it should be said that according to the information of Academician Belokon, the great mathematician Nikolai Zhukovsky was convinced that Tsiolkovsky was a "psycho". He dreamed of the word "paradise" in heaven. He believed that when a person dies, his atoms scatter throughout the universe, then settle in another creature, and the second life begins. If the deceased being was happy, then the atoms are happy, and the life of the new being will be happy. If the atoms are unhappy, the opposite is true.
The task of humanity is to destroy all unhappy life on Earth. Tsiolkovsky describes whom to kill: "… sick, crippled, feeble-minded, irresponsible … wild and domestic animals." He wrote: "I got a nervous breakdown, so strong that I forgot how to run, and this affected my children." Of his six children, two committed suicide. One of his life wanted to pierce his eardrum in order to become as brilliant as his father.
In his odious publications, Salakhutdinov doubts the scientific heritage of Tsiolkovsky's works, however, when similar doubts arose in the Soviet press in the early twenties, Chizhevsky helped publish Tsiolkovsky's works, considering him to be his teacher. It would be strange to doubt the competence of Chizhevsky, now he is recognized throughout the world as the founder of many areas of science, in particular, cosmobiology. And the founders of Russian rocketry, academicians Korolev and Glushko, considered Tsiolkovsky the founder of cosmonautics.
Confession of a Madman
In the 19th century, Karl Jaspers was interested in the question: can a genius create when his brain is already being destroyed, and from what moment, instead of creativity, will delirium begin? After all, it depends on this whether to regard our world as a bundle of brilliant insights or as madness? Jaspers called genius and schizophrenia "the most mysterious states of the soul." Swedish playwright August Strinberg, according to Jaspers, fell into a delirium of schizophrenia. He experimented on himself, studying the persecution mania. It is possible to judge what abysses the suffering consciousness is plunging into by his piercing books - "Confessions of a Madman" and "Hell". They are so dramatic that they are included in psychiatry textbooks.
But was it insane? Strinberg managed to look into the unknown, into another reality. Jaspers was convinced that genius creates the best works only in the initial period of schizophrenia, when the decaying consciousness reveals incredible depths. Then comes the decay band. Is it so? After going through the circles of "Hell", Strinberg worked for fifteen years, and brilliantly! Van Gogh became the symbol of the genius artist with the curse of schizophrenia.
Psychosis explains the incredible abundance of his paintings and his suicide. The late period of Van Gogh's work, according to Jaspers, is "daub without form." However, now this period is recognized as the most talented. Jaspers' conclusion: without schizophrenia, genius cannot manifest itself, but the development of the disease kills creativity, which is the tragedy of genius.
Crazy geniuses
In the 1860s, a professor of criminal anthropology from Turin Lombroso explained the origins of genius and schizophrenia with the same reasons. The list of sick geniuses compiled by him included Socrates, Savonarola, Rousseau, Napoleon, Schumann, Gogol. Almost all famous people were in a "borderline state". The strangeness of geniuses led Lombroso to the idea that genius is a kind of schizophrenia. Many had abnormalities in the genital area. Michelangelo was single, and insisted that art replaces his wife. Leonardo da Vinci loved men. Newton died a virgin.
Mad Rousseau suffered from sperm incontinence, was extremely depraved, suffered from megalomania, considering himself equal to God, as evidenced by this fact. He wrote letters … personally to God, and instead of sending them by mail, which would have been ridiculous, he went to church, put them under the altar of the cathedral. For weeks he quite seriously waited for an answer, considering himself equal to God! Since he received no reply letters, he concluded that there was no God. Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Michelangelo, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev were singles. By the age of 46, the composer Schumann lost his mind, drove his wife out of the house, he was overcome by nightmares: it seemed to him that he was being pursued by talking tables and stools that turned into monsters.
In an attempt to commit suicide, he threw himself into the river, but he was rescued. After his death, he was diagnosed with brain atrophy. Jonathan Swift, in a fit of madness, urged commoners to give their children for meat to aristocrats. When Archimedes shouted the famous "Eureka!", He not only jumped out of the bath, but also ran out naked into the street. By the way, the "grateful" students also added Lombroso himself to the list of "psychos".
The eccentricities of those who "made" the twentieth century
Among those creators who determined the technical development in the twentieth century, which was called the century of scientific and technological revolution, there are many bright personalities who had problems with mental health, or, at least, weirdness, eccentricity. I would like to cite some facts that Academician V. A. Belokon told me.
Physician Robert Mayer, who lived in the early nineteenth century, discovered the law of conservation of energy.
Without this discovery, it would be impossible to imagine all modern energy. Further down the chain, most modern engines would not exist. Imagine a world without cars, without nuclear icebreakers, a world frozen without communications and communications. However, the creator himself suffered from manic depression, which does not question the level of his intelligence.
The creator of the foundations of electrical engineering Nikola Tesla died in poverty, uttering "delusional", as it seemed to his contemporaries, ideas. Among them was the idea of a laser, without which it is also impossible to imagine our world. Not to mention laser disks, which have become "drugs" for music lovers, laser computer disks with their amazing information capacity, it is worth remembering the use of laser technology in medicine, in space industries, in military technologies. Meanwhile, the poor fellow lived in the last years of his life in a hotel, paid for two years in advance, and at the same time did not have a penny.
Driven to despair by poverty, he even called the FBI just before his death, saying that he had invented a device capable of creating a directional electric beam. He wanted to hand over his invention to the "competent authorities" in the hope of getting some kind of livelihood from the US government. However, these narrow-minded "falcons of the invisible front" considered him "crazy" and his request was ignored. When they came to him about a week later, a long-cold corpse was found in the room. According to one version, the genius died of hunger. According to rumors, this was the work of the FBI.
Meanwhile, Nikola Tesla can be called one of those who "created" the twentieth century. A transformer, created on the basis of Tesla's developments, is present in every TV, we see transformer booths on the streets of cities, we habitually use electricity at home, without which the whole world would sit in darkness, with torches, and there would be no mention of industry.
Academician Sakharov was distinguished by eccentricities, which was noticed by his colleagues who worked with him in Sarov. Somehow Andrei Dmitrievich lost the sole of his boot, then he untied one lace, and tied one boot together with the sole with a bow. They say that he even ate the salad warmed up, as he considered it unnecessary to spend part of his energy on digesting cold dishes. But are these eccentricities a sign of abnormality? Not. Rather, the breadth of thinking, and the absence of stereotypes in it, which is incomprehensible to the gray man in the street.
One of the fathers of Western aircraft construction, Howard Hughes, who had already created his main projects by the age of 35, having become a millionaire, was known as a big eccentric: he walked naked, never cut his hair or shaved, was maniacally afraid of infection and colds, which is why he always slept on the operating table. so that if something happens, doctors have time to do their job. He has grown very long nails.
Fearing infection, before making love with his next passion, of which he had a lot, he forced her to take a saliva test and other tests. One of his lovers, who felt the beauty of this approach to medicine and love, was Merlin Monroe. On the basis of one of his developments, years later, within the framework of a secret project for military purposes, the world's largest aircraft was created. Howard Hughes' developments, along with Russian projects, became the basis of the next generation aircraft, aircraft of the XXI century.
Genius must be unrecognized
Tsiolkovsky called a genius the one whose discovery is recognized no less than twenty-five years after the death of the author. Tsiolkovsky was considered crazy, his belief that mankind would build cities in space was considered delusional. He died in 1935. After 25 years, Gagarin flew into space. Where does insight come from? Geniuses often make discoveries in their dreams, often they are "dictated" to them by dead geniuses. Mendeleev opened the table of elements in a dream. To Newton, the solution to most problems came in a dream. The philosopher Cardano had a dream in which Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation and told him about it, although he had no idea what it was about. After a while, Newton discovered this law. Pascal set up experiments in a dream, in reality they led to a discovery. Schumann believed that Beethoven and Mendelssohn dictated the melodies to him from their graves.
Progress fee
Is Lombroso right when he called Auguste Comte crazy just because he believed: the time will come when the fertilization of a woman will take place without men? The time has come. Bacon's insights (XIII century) about the creation of ships without rowers, chariots without a horse, aircraft, submarines have already been realized, and in his time aroused suspicions of the author's madness. Schliemann's idea of finding Troy, Chizhevsky's theory of the influence of solar activity on the course of history, seemed insane. It is now recognized by science. Modern psychologists believe that Lombroso was wrong.
According to statistics, one out of six people is a carrier of the schizophrenia gene, evenly distributed among all peoples. There are no more schizophrenics among geniuses than among other people, but the most gifted are carriers of the schizophrenic gene, and their children are schizophrenics. This is the price of progress. The gene for schizophrenia may not manifest itself during life, in five percent it becomes a disease, and makes the chosen ones geniuses. And yet, genius is not a disease, genius is not a madman. "Crazy" ideas are born in the smartest heads, and ideas that explode the usual train of thought have created our wonderful world.
Food for thought:
1. Mentally ill were 9 percent of modern leaders, scientists and artists
2.2 percent of them committed suicide, 3 percent attempted
3.25 percent of outstanding poets had mental disabilities
Mentally ill:
1. Writers: Edgar Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Hederlin, Strinberg
2. Philosophers: Socrates, Descartes, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Nietzsche
3. Scientists: Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Darwin, Tsiolkovsky
4. Composers: Gluck, Handel, Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, Donizetti, Pergolesi
5. Politicians: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini
The normal were: Spinoza, Bacon, Galileo, Dante, Voltaire, Columbus, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Schiller, Mozart, Pushkin, Kant, Goethe
Violetta BASHA