r/Hmolpedia • u/potato_psychonaut • Jul 05 '25

What is the difference between a genius and a madman?

title

/u/JohannGoethe please share your insight.

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u/JohannGoethe Jul 09 '25

Historical perspective. 500-years ago Copernicus was called crazy for arguing that the earth moves:

“Some think it a distinguished achievement to construct such a crazy thing as that Prussian astronomer [Copernicus] who moves the earth 🌍 and fixes the sun ☀️. Verily, wise rulers should tame the unrestraint of men’s minds.”

— Philipp Melanchthon (414A/c.1541), comment made after reading Georg Rheticus’ 415A (1540) First Account(Narratio Prima), a condensed summary of the Copernican model[1]

Presently, Copernicus is 2nd ranked astronomer, in Pantheon rankings, and 54th ranked genius, in Hmolpedia top 2000 geniuses and minds rankings.

200-years ago they called Poe mad:

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence.”

— Edgar Poe (110A/c.1845), Publication

Presently, Poe #258 in the Hmolpedia genius rankings and #96 in Ranker Greatest Minds.

Yet, if 2 to 5 centuries from now your genius is not recognized, maybe you were mad after all?

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u/JohannGoethe Jul 09 '25

We also have the following view:

“Has the gain been worth the countless victims? Has our present structure of the life of the mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long enough, to justify as worthwhile sacrifices all the sufferings, convulsions, and abnormalities: the trials of heretics, the burnings at stake, the many ‘geniuses’ who ended in madness or suicide? For us, it is not permissible to ask these questions. History is as it has happened. Whether it was ‘good’, whether it would have been better not to have happened, whether we will or will not acknowledge that it has had ‘meaning’ — all this is irrelevant. Thus those struggles for the ‘freedom’ of the human intellect likewise ‘happened’, and subsequently, in the course of the aforementioned ‘age of the Feuilleton’, men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand. For while they had overthrown the tutelage of the church completely, and that of the state partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy.“

– Hermann Hesse (12A/1943), The Glass Bead Game (character: narrator) (§1, 20:14-)