WHY IT'S DESIRABLE TO BE ECCENTRIC: "Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of." In 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history’s most cogent essays on the subject of Individuality, originality, genius, and eccentricity. To Mill’s view, mass opinion (what we might call “mass culture” these days), is an undeniable blight to individuality, and therefore directly threatens freedoms civic and intellectual, cultural, and democratic. While explicitly political, Mill’s argument reaches down to the foundations of human nature and culture, articulating many of the challenges artists and writers face in a media-driven society fixated upon dollars earned, hits per day, and “going viral.” Mentioned in this episode: John Stuart Mill; Mill's "On Liberty"; Victorian England; keeping up with the joneses; Ray Bradbury; bestseller lists; Billboard charts; Oprah endorsements; culture vs. commerce; becoming valuable to oneself and to others; despotism; John Gardner; the National Endowment for the Arts; the tyrannical majority; unpopular vs. uncommercial; persons of genius; arts funding.  Music: "Hands of Time" by Narrow Skies; "Interspacing" by Yehezkel Raz; "Fragments" by Borrtex; "Birds & Daisies" by Racoon Racoon (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist.)

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