Sometimes genius is about breaking through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity. For example, Galileo's work on kinematics required a break

Sometimes genius is about breaking through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity. For example, Galileo's work on kinematics required a break through in attitude: that the discussion of quantitative phenomena required measurement and calculation. Given the limitations of metrology at the time any-one who strayed away from adjectives and blather was doomed to confuse themselves with experimental error. Galileo had to break through the insanity of simply accepting those limitations and cultivate the sanity of plugging away at improving your experimental set up until you got usable numbers. As a more modern example, the happy few who have made fortunes anticipating the current financial crisis have a claim on the title "financial genius". The insanity is believing that you cannot be too highly leveraged because house prices never fall. The genius lies in not getting sucked into the madness at the time; it looks unimpressive later, after the bubble has burst. "Unimpressive later" but how did it look at the time? If you break through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity, your contempories look at you askance before delivering their verdict: it is you that is mad. This does horrible things to our ability to look at the realtion between genius and mental illness. Even if the route to genius lies in cultivating sanity, us mundane onlookers will still come away with the idea that geniuses are mad and be tempted to go in the opposite direction. People love that Niels Bohr quote "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." but quantum mechanics does not need to be invented twice. The usual nature genius is to see through the turbid intellectual drama of one's own time to grasp ideas that will one day seem plodding and obvious.