#035 Mad Without the Genius
A hot topic in our household had been the Magnus Carlsen-Hans Niemann cheating scandal ever since Magnus’ first cryptic tweet. It was a topic that I thought was pretty worn out by the time Untold: Chess Mates came out, but we kept our Netflix account a month longer than planned to watch it.
I ran to the internet as soon as it was over to make sure I wasn’t crazy. This is something I do when I hold a strong but highly subjective opinion. I look for people who agree with me, and when I find them, I relax because someone out there is arguing my side. In this case, I wanted to reassure myself everyone else feels the same way about Hans’ bombastic personality.
I don’t know if Hans cheated or not. I’m far less bothered by that question than I am by his overly romanticized self-mythology that sounds so much like it was taken straight about of a video game that I’ve wondered about the number of times he’d watched No Retreat, No Surrender as a child. He always leaves me with the impression that even if he isn’t cheating at chess, he’s definitely cheating at something.
I was shocked to find that a lot of people online, especially those who only know about the scandal through the documentary, believe that Hans is lovely and Magnus is the arrogant asshole.
This made me wonder what we expect from our geniuses.
Before I go on, I should say that I’m using the word “genius” loosely here. We can debate all day about what constitutes a genius or even whether geniuses are a real thing—personally, I say no, at least, not in the popular sense of the word.
I should also say that I’m not debating who is the better chess player. Magnus Carlsen became the World Chess Champion in 2010, at age 19 and has been ranked number 1 in the world ever since. Hans was ranked 12th at his peak in May 2026 and ranks 19th as I write this. He is 23 years old. Whether that makes the two of them rivals in any meaningful way is up to you, but as a person who casually follows chess, again, I say no.
When I watched the documentary, I saw Hans as leaning pretty heavily onto the “mad genius” archetype—telling us that he didn’t leave his NYC apartment for 30 days straight in order to feed the great chess mind that would never relent.
Magnus, on the other hand, with his general physical fitness and pretty blond wife, comes off as disturbingly normal for a professional chess player. In the documentary, he even claims to not work as hard as “some people.” For whatever reason, his brain just “gets” chess.
In weighing this, I thought about the only professional chess player most people can name, Bobby Fischer, who also had serious mental health issues.
For awhile, I was invested in the “mad genius” narrative, myself. Growing up, I could always clearly see both sides of the coin when it came to the various aspects my brain. My social isolation also means social independence. My tendency towards hyper-fixation means I deeply understand the things that matter to me. My ability to notice and recall details and coalesce them patterns means there’s a lot of stuff floating around in my mind that I wish I could forget. The list goes on.
I can’t remember when I started identifying my differences as a good thing, but it started when I was very young. Maybe it happened I learned about Edgar Allen Poe or Van Gogh. Maybe it was when I read the play Equus—which I interpreted as about sacrificing one’s own authenticity to relieve the pain of being misunderstood. Maybe it was anytime I read a poem, saw a painting, or heard a song that mirrored my own pain.
I grew to resent the idea that “happy and normal” should be the default goal for everyone, and while I was doing that resenting, I knew there was a faction of society that valued difference as something sacred, rather of something that needed stomping out. I became an art major.
I was a much more rigid thinker back then. Rigid thinking can also act as a form of self-protection, and for me, I was protecting myself from the idea of being jus plain “mad” without the “genius.” I always tried very hard to pose as normal on the outside, but deep down, I knew it was all a farce. I knew that mad geniuses didn’t exactly fit in, but they at least had a role to fill.
As time went on, though, that sentiment started to ring hollow to me. I’d met enough people who believed that they were entitled to all sorts of selfishness, assholery, accolades, or recognition because they’d constructed a glorified idea of self based on some archetype.
By the time I was a true adult, I’d completely soured on the idea of identifying with a particular archetype in order to justify one’s own bullshit.
Now that I’ve lived a lot more life, I’ve felt the downsides of my functioning much more than the upsides. There are no practical advantages to being able to solve an episode of Monk within the first few minutes or scoring well on an aptitude test. I’ve learned that there’s no definition of self that will actually protect me from the realities of the world. I can put my whole ass in as a writer, artist, or anything that supposedly leans into my talents, and still fail because the “mad genius” was a cardboard cut-out that only pretended to offer guarantees, when there are none.
This might sound like a bleak outlook, but I don’t think it is. It’s just a more ambiguous one. All it means is that I don’t know my future and I don’t know where I fit in. This is not new, and it’s not unique to me. Now that I’m older, it feels a lot more like freedom.
