The Age of False Geniuses: Why Our Culture Mistakes Power for Insight

We live in a society that thinks genius can be measured with a bank balance.

Every week, someone from the billionaire class offers a sweeping vision of what consciousness “really” is or what humanity “needs” to survive. These aren’t modest proposals. They’re cosmologies—delivered with the confidence of someone accustomed to being right in one narrow arena and treated as right in all of them.

The strange part isn’t that they speak.
It’s that we listen.

Headlines elevate every claim, as though fortune were a philosophical credential.

The absurdity doesn’t land because it’s ambient. In a materialist society, material success becomes the master key. If the world is made of stuff, then those who collect the most of it must understand the world best. That assumption quietly shapes everything.

And it leads to one of our era’s biggest cognitive mistakes—the Swiss Army Knife fallacy: one sharp blade becomes the whole toolbox.
Build a rocket: must understand metaphysics.
Dominate logistics: must grasp consciousness.
Scale a company: must know what civilization needs to thrive.

We treat domain-specific mastery as a universal passport to wisdom.

But the problem runs deeper. Our definition of intelligence has collapsed into dominance. What we now label “genius” is often just visible-target performance amplified by machinery.