The Trouble With Being Right in a Wrong World

In the country of the blind, goes the proverb, the one-eyed man is king.In his 1904 short story "The Country of the Blind" H.G. Wells writes of a sighted man named Núñez who finds himself in exactly this position. Instead of being crowned king, however, the concerned citizens find his claims about "seeing" to be delusional and propose removing the organs that are clearly the cause of his mental illness. The story ends with Núñez fleeing into the wilderness where he presumedly dies in the effort.The message is clear: possessing an ability (or knowledge or genius) that nobody recognizes is more likely to cause others to see you as defective rather than superior. For instance, there are those, like Thom Hartmann, who assert that their ADHD is his superpower. The big idea behind his "Hunter/Farmer hypothesis" is that traits we label as distractibility, impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, hyper focus, rapid shifting of attention and risk-taking, would have been quite valuable to hunters,…

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