I recently took a tour of the Nemours Estate, and from the very first room, the docents kept repeating the same line: “The DuPonts were brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” The first time they said it, they were talking about AI DuPont being able to take apart a large engine and put it back together himself. He didn’t have to. He could have easily paid someone to do it. But he did it himself. And that, they told us, was brilliant.

And then they kept saying it. Every member of the family: brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

I’m not so sure. I have to wonder how much of what we call “brilliance” is actually just the luxury of having every single detail of your life taken care of, combined with the freedom to follow your own interests, day after day. AI DuPont could take apart an engine because he wasn’t worrying about paying rent, keeping the lights on, cleaning up messes, or making sure anyone around him had enough to eat. He could be entirely absorbed in a task he chose. And then the next generation, and the next. They all got to live that way. They were free. They could excel because their environment gave them space to do so.

I think about my own life, and what I’ve seen of the world most of us inhabit. If someone handled every logistical, financial, and social burden for me, if I had no worries about survival, I could be “brilliant” too. I could pursue deep, difficult work without distraction. The truth is, the system is set up so that the upper class has the luxury of time, safety, and support. Most of the rest of us are in survival mode, working hard, solving crises, keeping our lives running, often so that others can enjoy theirs. The celebrated brilliance is built on the labor, sacrifice, and inequality of everyone else.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, this concerns human potential and nervous system capacity, and how both are shaped by the environments and opportunities we have. When your life demands you must constantly manage stress, scarcity, or threat, your nervous system is busy keeping you alive and regulated. You simply don’t have the resources to develop and refine your skills in the way someone like a DuPont can. Survival and mastery cannot coexist at the same level in the same moment. The environment shapes the brain. It also shapes opportunity, curiosity, and the ability to explore, experiment, and integrate experiences fully.

So when people say the DuPonts were brilliant, I think it’s worth remembering: what looks like individual genius is often a miracle of resources, freedom, and systemic inequality. They could have been smart, talented, and curious, but the real magic was having the world take care of everything else for them so they could simply show up to their chosen pursuits. Most of us will never have the luxury to access that kind of brilliance.

It’s a reminder to me that when we celebrate individual brilliance without looking at the context, we ignore the structural forces that create and protect it, and we’re also underestimating the potential brilliance of the people living in much harder, more complex conditions. The greatest genius is in surviving, persisting, and creating in a world that often actively works against you.