“We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.” – Louis Aragon, Treatise of Style (1928)
Are you sur real?! Come on! Who would come up with a quotation like that?!
Apparently, a 20th century French poet who was the bastard son of a former politician and a woman 30 years his junior who was then raised by his biological mother whom he thought was his sister and his maternal grandmother whom he thought was his foster mother who went off to the War to End all Wars expecting not to come back but who did come back to become a Communist and a poet and a newspaper writer and a lousy translator of Lewis Carroll’s work etc. [I suspect you meant the question to be rhetorical so as to advance your train of thought. Maybe you shouldn’t answer your own questions so earnestly. -Ed]
Nag nag nag. 20 years from now, people will know what kind of an editor you were…
So, the premise is that genius leads to time-delayed innovation such that the new ideas get simplified, packaged, sanitized, and have their rough edges sanded down so they can be understood and appreciated by the masses, aka, the non-geniuses.
Whether Aragon thought that he was the genius or was commenting on society in general is not something I know. I do know that if you’ve got a real solution, I’d love to see the plan.
Of course, his quotation could just be a sniping little comment by a fellow traveler. Your call…