The Dark Side of Genius

Steve Jobs's passing brought to mind something that has puzzled me quite a lot: the dark side of genius. The obits mentioned his bad temper with associates, but didn't make a big thing of it. You expect a bit of that in an effective leader, right?

But it's has been getting more attention since Gawker ran a post by Ryan Tate titled "What everyone is too polite to say about Steve Jobs".

The piece berates Jobs for "censorship and authoritarianism" - for instance blocking content he considered salacious from Apple devices, and creating a "culture of fear" within the company, with a special loyalty protection team searching computers for leaks and confiscating mobile phones. Jobs's "fascist tendencies" are also seen in his harassment of people who tried to get a scoop on new products.

Then Jobs is blamed for Apple's dependence on children in Chinese sweatshops to make its products, and for his lack of philanthropy (compared, say, with his rival Bill Gates). He scrapped charity programmes on his return to Apple (which considering its financial position was hardly controversial), and never reinstated them.

He's also criticised for "acting like a tyrant":

There were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees - the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements - have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple... Jobs regularly "belittled people, swore at them, and pressured them until they reached their breaking point. In the pursuit of greatness he cast aside politeness and empathy. His verbal abuse never stopped."

Gawker's sister blog had a run-in with Apple last year when it ran a video of a prototype of iPhone 4, and an editor's home was raided by police. That makes the criticism look personal.

In fact Jobs's behaviour is common in successful men. Talented people who see a chance for greatness, and go after it, put the result before anything else. The ends justify the means, they believe. If the little people who stand in the way of the vision get squashed, so much the worse for them. Or you could put it down to stress. During the second world war Winston Churchill's wife once took him aside to complain about his habit of angrily berating his staff.

To have a positive vision that has the power to enrich the lives of millions of people, and to strive to make it a reality, seems to involve a pact with the devil. You don't mind making a few people's lives a misery - it's worth it for "the cause". But if you're left with that karma when you're gone, how do you deal with it? Do you regret it, and in some way pay for it? Or do you just accept it as part of the deal?

What's so puzzling is where people show enormous qualities of empathy and humanity in their work, for which they are universally loved and revered, but which turn out to be utterly lacking in their behaviour to those close to them. Bing Crosby for instance - a petty domestic tyrant and bully, according to his son. The novelists Dickens and Hardy behaved with a shocking lack of feeling towards their wives. The British children's writers Enid Blyton and A.A. Milne (of Winne-the-Pooh fame) seemed instinctively to grasp the inner world of children, able to communicate with them on some very direct level, yet their own children remember them as cold and distant.

Just a few names that come to mind. I think one could make a very long list. It's an odd paradox of the human condition.

Comments

[realpc]

One possibility is that being a celebrity can lead to narcissism, instead of, or in addition to, the other way around. Great success depends on talent, motivation, confidence and luck. Luck might be the biggest factor, so I think the great geniuses aren't that different from the rest of us, beforehand.

But once they become celebrities, they are treated like gods. Even those of us who are ordinary can have trouble keeping our egos in line -- can you imagine how hard that would be for someone who is admired by the world?

And when the ego gets out of control, things get very bad. You cannot be in harmony with your social context, or with yourself, with an over-grown ego.

So that's a possible explanation. It also may be true that creative people are less emotionally stable, so that could cause friction in their relationships.

And yet another factor is that ordinary, non-famous, people also have lots of problems, but we don't hear about them.

[Sante Poromaa]

"What's so puzzling is where people show enormous qualities of empathy and humanity in their work, for which they are universally loved and revered, but which turn out to be utterly lacking in their behaviour to those close to them.

Personally I don't find this so puzzling. To be a public person means that everyone are invading your "private zone" and think they know you. Such people (priests, politicians for example) often feel that they need to keep some part of themselves truly private. People that have a very public "persona" that others admire and love, often therefore, have to hide, ignore or supress sides of themselves that doesn't fit this public picture. My own experience as a buddhist teacher have affirmed this. Everyone is a complex of different emotions and tendencies, light and dark. When you are admired as an icon of wisdom and compassion the sides of you that are, let's say ignorant and unfriendly, might be that which you hide in a private sphere you call your own.
What I mean to say is that public peoples private life become distorted towards "darkness" in proportion to how their public persona is distorted towards "light".

My experience is that people who seem unusually "good" usually have some hidden unusually "bad" sides to them.

[realpc]

[My experience is that people who seem unusually "good" usually have some hidden unusually "bad" sides to them.]

Maybe because being extremely "good" requires extra repressing of the shadow.

[Robert Perry]

Robert, I've never been particularly interested in Jobs, but for some reason I've read several pieces written about him after his death. And I've been reflecting on the same thing as what you write about here. Personally, I wish there could be consistency, that the public image and private persona could be the same. That's certainly what I strive for in my role as a spiritual teacher. I'm not saying I achieve it. I certainly don't want my students to see my bark at my kids. At the same time, I do want them to know my failings, and I do want to reach the point where you could film my private life and see no discord with my public professions.

[Tony M]

I'm also puzzled about the near cult-of-Jobs. (I live near San Francisco - you can imagine what it's like here. You'd think John Lennon was shot again.) By the same token, Bill Gates is treated almost like a villain. Yet Gates has given as much to charity as anyone in history and he takes an active roll in trying to create solutions to third world problems. No one succeeds in business to the level they have without being a bit of bastard. But outside of their businesses, Gates has been admirable. I don't get the disparity in their public images.