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The home office of Dr. Veritas Ratio was a quiet place. He wasn’t one for background music; the scratching of a pen was far better than that of a bow here, and it should be able to speak for itself. It had done so through each of his degrees, through each of his inventions, through each dissertation and presentation and gathering of research and wisdom and knowledge into the codex he carried each day. It had done so while preparing the presentation he had given that afternoon, the one defining his acceptance to the Intelligentsia Guild. A defense of logical epistemology, he’d called it publicly. An explanation of his general and educational philosophies on the disease called ignorance and how it ought to be treated. In some sense a near biography of the mind many praised as a genius, guiding others to salvation.
The office was certainly quieter than the lecture hall had been after Professor Roseth had become his example. A thesis where disagreements only proved his point further - perhaps the simple fact that he’d constructed such a logical trap was the reason he’d already received the email confirming his unanimous acceptance. Certainly, telling these proud and respected minds their failure to comprehend his methods and ideas had won him no favors - abrasive practice had won him no favors at almost every turn. Still, though. It did demonstrate his point beautifully.
Knowledge is not for everyone; and even those who may grasp at some knowledge cannot grasp it all. A very simple concluding line to show the face of his point. Obviously no one wanted to accept the possibility that they couldn’t understand absolutely everything, and pointing to geniuses only made the mundane people more certain that it could be possible. Some, of course, would accuse him of hypocrisy, of silently excluding himself from the rest of humanity, of thinking he would be uniquely qualified to know it all. They missed the point more than anyone else in that room. Of course he couldn’t know everything either. That was why he had an entire second clause to his philosophy that no one ever seemed to remember.
Were Ratio a normal man, he would surely be celebrating his latest achievement. But he hadn’t celebrated his doctorates, his inventions, his lessons in a very long time. Instead he sat at his desk, staring at the ceiling, debating with himself. Because for all the successes people lauded him for, he seemed to be the only one seeing the one continuous failure underscoring it all.
Knowledge is not for everyone; and even those who may grasp at some knowledge cannot grasp it all. So what to do for those who grasp less than yourself, or nothing at all? For the average genius, the answer was nothing at all, it seemed. Simply distribute the results of your brilliance and never explain how you achieved what could otherwise be called miracles. The mundane humans could never trace their steps; could never even dream of the path of the exceptional, could never fathom how to reach the solutions they’d been given. To the genius, being a shooting star in the sky was a way of life, magnanimously leaving their stardust behind before leaving and never being seen again.
But the mundanites? Whatever problem the exceptional genius had solved for them, it would not be the only problem faced in their lives. If they couldn’t comprehend the process of solving those problems, they were helpless in the face of adversity. And if there wasn’t an exceptional person around to save them, that could simply be the end of the line.
Thus, his point. Not everyone was exceptional, and there were many degrees of unexceptionality. So to those more exceptional than their surrounding peers, it was a duty to extend their hands, not to solve all problems, but to teach others the resilience and deductive skills needed to solve their own problems. The concept wasn’t new, especially among the educational sorts of scholars. But in his experienced opinion, even educators failed to truly understand it, focusing too much on the narrow bounds of academic performance and easily-measured assignments to consider the applicability of their deeper lessons.
It wasn’t the first night Ratio had spent staring at this ceiling considering his problems. But this night, with these problems, after these events, felt almost oppressively exhausting. Perhaps some part of him had still hoped that the foremost scholars in the galaxy without the gaze of Nous would be able to understand him, even dimly. Perhaps he’d still hoped that for once, his explanation could be brief and comprehensible, that the scholars and educators assessing him would already understand the importance of truly bringing others up behind you, even if it meant seeming too harsh to approach. Not everyone could be exceptional, and not every problem could be handed off to someone who was - the mundanites would be forced to confront this truth eventually; it was if anything safer and kinder for them to confront it in the relative safety of academic failures, of rejections while you still had other options, than to let them rely on other, smarter, faster, stronger people to think of an answer first right up until their entire lives were in the balance. There was hardly shame in the universal experience of failure; protecting and coddling the average, mundane, unexceptional people from this basic facet of life was nothing but a childish disservice. But even he, exceptional, genius, could not grasp how to make others understand that fact.
“This is not the end,” he murmured to himself, eyes tracing the soft divots in the ceiling. “It would be so much simpler if it was. But it’s not. And it can’t be.”
Giving up on others would be the one failure he could not tolerate in himself. He had tried, today, to make the Intelligentsia Guild understand that they could not remain insular, perpetually publishing only to other academics and their IPC sponsors. That simply developing personal knowledge was not enough to help those outside their gates. And he had, evidently, failed. It was not acceptable to remain injured by this, to falter from the discouragement of being misunderstood or not understood at all by those lauded as excellent among those not favored by the divine. If this presentation wasn’t enough, he would devise others. Penetrating examples these chronic researchers couldn’t ignore. Walk them though his methods, passing them down the ladder rung by rung until he could finally reach people. But never, ever crumble to the temptation to allow them to suffer and fail simply because they were too much bother to keep helping. Even if that meant the end of the journey could never come until he met his grave, he would simply have to die wishing he’d been that bit more exceptional to let him learn how to cure that disease called ignorance once and for all.