Aphorism #12: The True Source of Greatness

Thesis: greatness has always emerged where the noise is thinner.

The glory that was Greece emerged at the fringes of the civilised world, whose centre lay far east in Babylon and Persepolis. Christianity emerged at the edge of the Roman Empire; America at the edge of European civilisation; China, at the edge of the West.

The umbilical connecting the edges to the centre provides nourishment, but at a distance that enables novelty—evolution.

The closer you get to the centre, the higher the stakes (cost of living, competition with peers getting ahead). There is more opportunity, but at the cost of mimetic overload. Disconnection from the centre is Lilliputia.

But that umbilical connection to the centre, being fed by it without drowning in it, that is a sweet spot.

Bo Burnham’s Inside, written by a man who had enough success to afford to step back and enough connection to have the knowledge to make a masterpiece.

Antithesis: the scenius.

Greatness emerges where the stew is thickest. The songs poured out of Dylan “like ticker tape” when he was living in Greenwich Village surrounded by the booming folk scene. Paris was the beating heart of the Socialist theory’s golden age in the mid-to-late-19th century: Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Engels. At the same time, in the Café Guerbois, you could find Renoir, Baudelaire, Zola chewing the fat over wine and cheese with regular pop-ins from Monet.

Fast forward to the early 20th century, and it was the heart of the Lost Generation: Joyce, his assistant Beckett and his bulldog Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Matisse, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, Nabokov and Edith Wharton.