Why do we let "creative genius" excuse everything?
in Psychology ·
I’ve been sitting here for the last hour just staring at my screen, feeling that weird, hollow pit in my stomach that comes after you realize just how much of our culture is built on a foundation of rot. It’s one of those things where you look at a person—someone who is celebrated, someone whose face is on every billboard, someone whose "eccentricity" is treated as a charming quirk of the artistic soul—and you realize that the pedestal we put them on is actually just a shield.
It’s happened so many times in this industry, and honestly, it’s happening in so many other high-stakes professional circles too. We have this collective habit of looking at "difficult" or "intense" people and deciding that their behavior is just the price of admission for greatness. We call it being "method," or "intense," or "unpredictable." We turn what is clearly predatory or abusive behavior into a personality trait that we can excuse because, hey, they made that one incredible movie or they wrote that one song that changed our lives.
I remember back in college, I had a professor who was a total legend in his field. Everyone spoke about him in hushed, reverent tones. He was brilliant, sure, but he was also a nightmare. He’d belittle students, make incredibly inappropriate comments, and create this atmosphere of constant, low-level dread in the lecture hall. But nobody said anything. Why? Because his "brilliance" was seen as a justification. We all just accepted that being around him meant being uncomfortable. We convinced ourselves that the discomfort was part of the "educational experience."
It makes me wonder: at what point does the "art" stop being a valid excuse for the person making it? When does the "visionary" label stop being a way to bypass basic human decency?
I think there’s a psychological component to why we, as an audience or a society, are so willing to look the other way. There’s a level of cognitive dissonance involved. If we admit that the person we admire is actually a monster, we have to reckon with the fact that we’ve been complicit in celebrating them. We have to admit that the art we love was birthed from a place of toxicity. It’s much easier to just say, "Oh, they’re just misunderstood," or "They're just a bit wild," than it is to face the reality that we’ve been funding and applauding a predator.
And then there’s the "floodgates" aspect. Every time a major story like this breaks, there’s that collective intake of breath. We wonder if this is the moment the dam finally breaks, or if it’s just a temporary surge before the industry goes right back to protecting its own. It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle of "revelation and denial." We see the truth, we feel the outrage, and then we wait for the PR machine to spin it into something manageable so we can all go back to consuming the content without feeling guilty.
But it's getting harder to ignore. The power dynamics are so skewed that it's almost impossible to imagine a way for things to change unless the entire structure of how we value "talent" is dismantled. We have to stop treating "giftedness" as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I’m curious to hear what you all think. Do you think we’ll ever actually reach a point where a person's contribution to culture is completely decoupled from their personal conduct, or is the "genius" myth too deeply embedded in our psyche to ever truly escape? Is it even possible to separate the art from the artist once the truth is out?
It’s happened so many times in this industry, and honestly, it’s happening in so many other high-stakes professional circles too. We have this collective habit of looking at "difficult" or "intense" people and deciding that their behavior is just the price of admission for greatness. We call it being "method," or "intense," or "unpredictable." We turn what is clearly predatory or abusive behavior into a personality trait that we can excuse because, hey, they made that one incredible movie or they wrote that one song that changed our lives.
I remember back in college, I had a professor who was a total legend in his field. Everyone spoke about him in hushed, reverent tones. He was brilliant, sure, but he was also a nightmare. He’d belittle students, make incredibly inappropriate comments, and create this atmosphere of constant, low-level dread in the lecture hall. But nobody said anything. Why? Because his "brilliance" was seen as a justification. We all just accepted that being around him meant being uncomfortable. We convinced ourselves that the discomfort was part of the "educational experience."
It makes me wonder: at what point does the "art" stop being a valid excuse for the person making it? When does the "visionary" label stop being a way to bypass basic human decency?
I think there’s a psychological component to why we, as an audience or a society, are so willing to look the other way. There’s a level of cognitive dissonance involved. If we admit that the person we admire is actually a monster, we have to reckon with the fact that we’ve been complicit in celebrating them. We have to admit that the art we love was birthed from a place of toxicity. It’s much easier to just say, "Oh, they’re just misunderstood," or "They're just a bit wild," than it is to face the reality that we’ve been funding and applauding a predator.
And then there’s the "floodgates" aspect. Every time a major story like this breaks, there’s that collective intake of breath. We wonder if this is the moment the dam finally breaks, or if it’s just a temporary surge before the industry goes right back to protecting its own. It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle of "revelation and denial." We see the truth, we feel the outrage, and then we wait for the PR machine to spin it into something manageable so we can all go back to consuming the content without feeling guilty.
But it's getting harder to ignore. The power dynamics are so skewed that it's almost impossible to imagine a way for things to change unless the entire structure of how we value "talent" is dismantled. We have to stop treating "giftedness" as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I’m curious to hear what you all think. Do you think we’ll ever actually reach a point where a person's contribution to culture is completely decoupled from their personal conduct, or is the "genius" myth too deeply embedded in our psyche to ever truly escape? Is it even possible to separate the art from the artist once the truth is out?
