Drawing out human brilliance

It was a forlorn day in spite of the golden sunshine in a sapphire blue sky,

At 32 degrees Celsius early last week it was too hot to do anything but sit, but certainly not outside. The humidity was suffocating and the mosquitoes and blackflies were working overtime.

So, I condemned myself to an afternoon of television. An afternoon of staring into the reflection of a world where people seem to become more obtuse and pathetic by the day.

But there on that insolent screen was an uplifting surprise. Three hours or so of flickering film showing me how brilliant and uplifting our world can be.

The first film was Temple Grandin, a 2010 biographical drama about an autistic woman who earned a doctorate in animal science.

Temple Grandin, born in Boston in 1947, was unable to talk until age four and displayed behavioural problems. She was diagnosed with autism, but her parents rejected a doctor’s advice to put her into an institution, and instead placed her in private schools where her high IQ was discovered and nurtured.

Temple had poor short-term memory and could not follow written instructions, but a long-term visual memory allowed her to become a visual thinker. She graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, followed by a master’s and a doctorate in animal science.

Over time she became aware that anxiety and fear found in both autistic people and animals is caused by hypersensitivity to touch and sound. She devoted her life to alleviating anxiety and fear in both.

As a teenager she designed a “squeeze machine” to help control her nervous tensions and improved versions of it were used in schools to soothe autistic children. Other ideas and designs revolutionized practices for compassionate handling of livestock on farms and in slaughterhouses.

She also became a professor at the University of Colorado and an international spokesperson for autism.

If that was not enough of a lesson in how brilliant humans can be, I then stumbled into the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar.

I have a long, complicated history with that movie and the soundtrack of the 1970 rock opera.

I was a young reporter in Alberta when two excited colleagues brought the musical album into the office. I was shocked by the music. It seemed blasphemous and indeed was criticized by religious groups throughout the world.

Over the years I began to look at Superstar as a work of art, leaving aside the various religious connections.  I began to fully appreciate the genius that went into this work.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and his partner lyricist Tim Rice both are musical geniuses.

 Lloyd Webber was a child prodigy who played the piano, violin and French horn in early childhood. He began writing his own music at age six. It helped, of course, that his father was director of the London School of Music, his mother a piano teacher.

When you see the brilliance of people like Temple Grandin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice you have to wonder why the world often is such a messed-up place. These people are brilliant leaders in their own spheres and you wonder why such brilliance is lacking in the spheres of national and international affairs.

So many of our leaders are run-of-the-mill folks who think like, and act to please, the overall crowd. They lack the courage to say and do what they believe is right.

When you watch movies like Temple Grandin and Jesus Christ Superstar, you see people who think differently from the rest of us. That is the source of their brilliance; they are not restrained by fear of thinking differently, and of course it helps to be aided by discipline, intelligence, creativity, and sometimes simple good fortune.

We live in times that demand brilliance in leadership: Millions are sick and dying in a pandemic that many leaders said happens only once every 100 years; the United States is imploding and leaving its world leadership open to China and Russia.

It’s not that there is a shortage of human brilliance. There are many brilliant people out there in every field. Somehow, we have to draw them out and into the overall leadership roles now so desperately needed.

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