A RALLYING POINT

"for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity"

Michael Round

July 17, 2009

He was reported to have had the highest IQ in the history of the world.  A genius - not just in one discipline, but many.

William James Sidis.

And when he died, this day in 1944, he was judged a failure.  A prodigious failure. 

We know better now.

We know of his study on the founding of this country.  Of black holes.  Of liberty and of the infinite.  Of other topics.

He was studying - and learning - about everything!

The media discovered one book he had published under the pseudonym Frank Folupa titled, "Notes on the Collection of Transfers", about Trolley transfers, and offered this as evidence he was a failure.  "Why would a genius write such a thing?"  My guess: trolleys afforded Sidis the opportunity to really investigate the city he lived in - its places and its history.  And he did.

There's a passage that comes to mind from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged when I think about William James Sidis:

"I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction to give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies' terms or to win at a game where they're setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they've taken by helping them rob your neighbors. One cannot hope to maintain one's life by accepting bribes to condone one's destruction. Do not straggle for profit, success or security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for existence.

"Do not attempt to rise on the looters' terms or to climb a ladder while they're holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike—in the manner I did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra penny to support the looters' state. Since you're captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you're free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey—but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose. Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they're unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.

"If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason.

"Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity—act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind's rebirth. 

Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged

At the marvelous site www.sidis.net , created and maintained by Dan Mahony, is this moving piece, written in 1944, by Mrs. Sharfman:

LAMENT FOR WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS, AN AMERICAN

When I think of America again,

Of what it could be, or was meant to be,

Or when I think of an American,

I shall see Sidis, with the light upon

His face, the light of genius, that made him more

An angel than a man.  He was no failure.

You could roll Harvard, its professors and

Its learning into one.  He could have taught

That one.  The proof?  Not one in Harvard knew

Enough to honor him.  He talked to little

Groups and told them stories; tales of the Gray

Champion who appears when Masachusetts'

Civil liberties are threatened.  Insights

Like jewels he strung upon a silver thread

Of knowledge; made American tradition

From concepts hard as a jade and bright as needles

Shining upon the tree of liberty.

The pine tree was his symbol and his fate,

He knew the debt we owe to Indians.

That we derived ideas of federation

And written constitution from them, he linked

The peace path of the Iroquois with our

Country's role among the nations; he saw

That our naturalizing of citizens

Stems from adopting strangers into the tribe,

Making them brothers, as the Indians did.

Of what he saw he made a theory

Of continuity; who heard him speak.

Or read what he has written, know the man

Outgrew the prodigy.  It was not all

He knew.  If any man since Leonardo

Had universal knowledge, it was he.

He traced the history of Boston back

Four thousand years; he knew Atlantis and

The mound builders; and transportation systems

Of many cities as he knew the paths

The Indian couriers took; he told people

The names of streets they never heard of in

Their own home towns; what bus to take; what train;

And followed travels of a hurricane

As easily.  Yet he could smile at Einstein

Having discarded more than experts know.

The Boston cop who smashed him on the head

One May day, when he marched in a parade;

Did not disturb that mind.  In Texas where

He taught, he looked each night upon a star.

"Capella, Capella, that's my star," he said.

"It shines on Boston."  The light that Sidis shed

Could shine on Boston and illumine there

The promise Sidis saw of a Promised Land.