Talent in an Age of Conformity

I was recently chastised with quite extraordinary ferocity by someone I thought was a friend, for an apparent failure to abide by certain workplace rules. I was told that I was being disrespectful, that whatever talent I may believe I have does not allow me to behave however I want, and that I should be more like certain more amenable mutual acquaintances.

This all came as a shock to me, as someone who is very rarely disrespectful (and if I am it is deliberate). Especially as I thought I had gone out of my way to be incredibly supportive of the person suddenly shouting at me. It was an unpleasant experience, but it did get me thinking about the nature of talent and ‘fitting in’ versus living by a more individualistic set of rules, and how the latter falls under so much suspicion in our conformist age.

Although the meat of the diatribe struck me as wildly unfair, and the comparison to the other acquaintance flat-out mean, on the accusation that talent should allow one to get away with certain eccentricities, I admit partial guilt.

Whether my talent level would be sufficient to qualify for an ‘eccentric pass’ would be an extremely subjective matter, and clearly not one I am best placed to assess.

However, that we make such concessions in society is beyond doubt. The comedian Jim Jefferies (himself fairly high on the talent/wanker Matrix) had a good routine about the difference between Elvis and Gary Glitter, and how the former’s talent allowed him to get away with far more than the latter (“Good song, don’t f*** a kid” being the most memorable line).

We give artists of all kinds a pass, or did until recently. In the Woke era of ‘cancel culture’ all this changed, as any transgression was suddenly potential cause to destroy someone’s entire life in minutes.

Of course, the tension between immoral behaviour versus artistic contribution existed long before Woke. But lately, even relatively harmless, eccentric behaviour seems to be off the table.

The current poster boy weird genius is of course Elon Musk. Much of the wild-eyed hatred he inspires amongst the Alistair Campbell types is due to his refusal to play by the rules—in that case the rules of the established progressive elite. But lately he has gone further and managed to also alienate the MAGA base over H-1B Visas, as well as mildly gross out basically everyone with his attitude towards family and children (‘Have loads, never see them’ appears to be the guiding principle).

And yet we would be fools to expect this extremely high IQ, ultra-productive Asperger’s sufferer to behave completely normally. It is not normal to be the richest man in the world. There is only one of you out of 8 billion people, so it is literally as abnormal as it is possible to be. Nor is it normal to say you’re going to get to Mars and for it to be a genuine possibility, rather than the last words you hear someone say before backing away slowly. It is not normal to run multiple, highly complex companies, as well as the most influential social media platform in the world, whilst also playing a large part in forming a counter-elite that has essentially replaced the establishment in the most powerful country in the world.

What are the chances of someone achieving all that whilst being completely conventional in his personal life? The answer is zero. And yet despite the clear advantages of living this way, certainly for the individual, and arguably for society (though we’ll get to that), Musk is treated with disdain by at least half the population. Of course much of that is now party political, but this disgust at the unconventional appears to go much deeper.

Note how JD Vance, an ostensible working class hero, was targeted during the Democrats’ campaign with the epithet ‘weird’. Of course this backfired when it turned out he really wasn’t that weird, but what a strange approach in the first place. I would argue that to come from his impoverished background and become the vice president of the United States, one would have to be a little weird. To be normal would be to remain stuck in his home town, drinking and taking drugs, and falling in and out of work.

To bring it back to my own, by comparison incredibly humble, example, what are the chances of a completely normal person appearing on a TV channel that has been labelled ‘toxic’ by the mainstream, and being prepared to offer socially frowned upon opinions on live television and under one’s own name on social media? To have ‘hit pieces’ written against you as standard, and go around unable to talk about what you do for a living? (For context, a former GB News producer once told his hairdresser he worked for the channel, and they refused to finish the haircut. I note he did not stay long at the channel after that).

To want to do such work is extremely rare, not to mention having the verbal and other skills necessary to succeed in it.

I say none of this to ‘big myself up’, but simply to observe that the normal bloke, such as the lads in my football team, would not do any of this. They may be very smart, but they wouldn’t want the risk, or they wouldn’t have such opinions in the first place, or they have barely even thought about politics and wouldn’t even know what the ‘culture war’ was.

That is all normal, while the person who is drawn to my line of work is by definition not normal. Yet the other day I was rebuked precisely for my failure to be normal in an entirely abnormal setting.

As Britain loses its identity, perhaps we are also losing our fondness for the eccentric, once a well-known characteristic of our people.

As Ed Dutton writes in his new book on Jonathan Bowden (one talented eccentric writing about another): “the English seem to be highly tolerant of eccentrics, because, as we will see, geniuses are often eccentric and can produce ideas that benefit their group by questioning convention”.

According to Dutton there appears to be an optimum number of geniuses that a group can handle. Too few and a group lacks innovation, too many becomes an issue due to their atypical sexual behaviour (most aren’t like Musk and often fail to reproduce) and just the fact that they are difficult buggers.

As Bowden himself put it:

Genius like that is against the grain, is largely hated while it’s alive, by many people, but revered after it’s gone. These people are extraordinarily difficult for others to get a handle on while they actually exist. They’re freaks of nature, sort of ‘special needs’ the other way around.

One immediately thinks of Musk, and the many memes mocking his odd behaviour.

Whilst I certainly wouldn’t class myself as a genius—apparently they tend to be low in conscientiousness, while I, pace the aggrieved interlocutor mentioned at the start of this piece, am almost painfully well-supplied with this trait—I do instinctively side with the talented, the eccentric, and the downright ‘weird’.

Lord knows it is difficult to deal with them at times (try working for three years with Lewis Schaffer) but I feel an instinctive solidarity with these necessary weirdos, who often stand alone against the cowering, vitriolic mass of outraged normies.

We need these annoying, brilliant freaks. Admittedly not too many. But we need them.