On Occasion

My Struggle with Arrogance

July 31, 2010 at 9:51 am | Posted in Me | 1 Comment
Tags: arrogance, communication, intelligence, self esteem

When I was a kid, I believed I was the smartest person who had ever lived.

Let’s pause for a moment.  Language is a beautiful and hyperbolic thing, so it’s easy to let slip the full gravity of that sentence.   Truly: I thought I was the smartest.  Of all people.  Ever.

It’s difficult to believe that any person, even a young and stupid one, could seriously entertain such an opinion, and for any length of time.  How did I reconcile, for example, the fact that many people had great and numerous accomplishments that I did not?  Well, for starters, I believed that anything that I was bad at, wasn’t worth being good at.  In one brilliant swoop I glibly trivialized artists, singers, athletes, anyone who was good at talking to girls, and masses of other people.

If someone was better than me at something I did care about, I acknowledged their superiority in that one respect, but concluded that I was the smarter, better person overall.  I was one of those people who was pretty good at many of the things I tried (though, like a true Jack, I never mastered anything), so it was statistically impossible for any single person to be my superior in every endeavor I considered important.  My dad played chess far better than I did, but he couldn’t play a musical instrument.  Plenty of people were better musicians than I, but I could kick all of their asses in chess.   And if someone did play chess and music better, well, they probably weren’t as funny as I was.  Or, you know, as good at ping pong.  I always found some utterly crucial metric — “Well, I bet that person never beat Diablo!” — to give me the holistic edge.

Much of my childhood, when I wasn’t playing video games or chess, was spent in thought.  Around fourth or fifth grade, I began to Think about Things, with a capital T — life, God, human nature — and, after Thinking for a while, concluded that I’d come up with pretty much every correct opinion regarding every single question of any significance to the human race, and furthermore, that these gems of critical inquiry were so subtle, so nuanced, and so complex that I was the only person in all of past, present, and future existence who could possibly have reasoned them out.  (The whole of recorded philosophy, of course, was just a bunch of idiots thinking about crap that didn’t actually matter.)

My proudest intellectual achievement was my “proof” that God didn’t exist.  The Romans, I reasoned, believed that Apollo pulled the sun in and out of the sky, that Thor made thunderstorms, that Demeter decided if the crops would grow, and so on.  Nowadays, we considered these beliefs so silly that we called them “myths” — but only because we knew the true, scientific explanations.  Science still had not answered such questions as, “Why are we here?” and “Where do we go when we die?” — and, conveniently, these were exactly the questions that religion answered today.  Religion, therefore, was simply a set of fairy tales invented to satisfy the innate human desire to provide answers to puzzling questions.

Let’s ignore for a moment the illogic of my proof.  Let’s ignore the fact that consistency does not equal validity; that a theory’s fitting the data does not constitute a proof that the theory is correct.  A fourth grader may perhaps be forgiven for not appreciating such logical distinctions.  What is shocking is not that I believed I had a proof, but that I thought I was the only person who had ever reasoned along such lines.  My “discovery” that God didn’t exist cemented my self-estimation as the singular genius of human history.

I’m honestly not sure what I thought other people did in their spare time.  I guess I figured that everyone except me went into a freak state of catatonic hibernation whenever their brains weren’t directly engaged in some activity such as playing sports or taking a shit, whereas I put my prodigious intellect to use unraveling the timeless mysteries of the human condition.

The crumbling of my egomania began with a random event.  In a high school English class, I overheard a conversation among a few people I had casually dismissed as particularly unintelligent.  One girl began to express an opinion.  I don’t remember what the opinion was, but it was complex enough that I realized the girl couldn’t be making it up on the spot.  What was worse, when she finished laying out her argument, I couldn’t refute it trivially.  I remember thinking, with some shock: She must have thought about that!

Consider how telling this is.  Among the billions of sensory impressions that year, one of the few to strike me with sufficient emotional force to be etched into permanent, vivid memory was the simple fact that somebody else had thought about something.

When college began, I had the same cliché experience as every other smart person: “I thought I was smart, then I got here.”  In grade school, with few notable exceptions, comprehension had come easily and test preparation hadn’t been necessary.  My first physics exam — which I failed — was a brisk wake-up call to the fact that things were different here.

The great irony was that I weathered the experience better than most, yet still suffered all of the negative effects to my self esteem.  I ended up with an A in that damn physics class.  I left college with a 3.78 GPA, which was vastly better than what I had in high school, and certainly a step up from my 3.1 middle school days.  The thing is, in grade school, my grades were bad because I didn’t do any homework.  I knew — or believed — that I could have a 4.0 if only I expended the slightest effort.  Then, in college, when I did try to do well, I found that much more than my slightest effort was required.  I had to work my ass off.  Other people did not.

This was it: I’m not a genius.

Bashing my own intelligence gave me my first intoxicating taste of self-criticism.  If I was wrong about my brilliance, then what else was I wrong about?  By the end of my freshman year, I had completed a 180 degree reversal of my self appraisal.  I used to think everyone else was inferior to me; now I thought they were all superior.  Other people had useful abilities, meaningful life experiences, and social skills.  What did I have?

Lest this begin to sound melodramatic, I should note that my early college years were not a dark time or anything like that.  I wasn’t depressed — not exactly.  But I did view myself — coldly, clinically, dispassionately — as an awkward, socially inept, and completely uninteresting person.  I knew that some people liked me and even appeared to enjoy being my friends, but I didn’t know why.  It was an honest puzzle.  I assumed that the people who befriended me were either imperceptive, or else unusually charitable and forgiving.

My sophomore year, I began taking an extra class every semester so that I could complete an English degree alongside my CS degree.  In retrospect, this might be the smartest thing I’ve ever done.  My computer science classes were largely miserable and a waste of time.  By contrast, none of my English classes were significant on their own, but together they taught me how to speak and write effectively.  After several semesters, I discerned a major difference in my ability to articulate ideas in an interesting way.  I came to believe that while I may not have as much inherent substance as other people, my ability to think — and then articulate — could still make me an interesting person.  By the time I graduated, I was in a happy middle place between the egomania of my childhood and the casual self-loathing of the previous few years.

Unfortunately, my solution had a price.  The residual arrogance of my youth and my newfound eloquence did not mix well.

“You think you’re smarter than me,” a friend of mine once said suddenly.

“What?!” I said.  I was shocked.  I respected him greatly.  In particular, his knowledge of politics, people, and relationships I held to be vastly superior to my own.  “What makes you say that?”

“It’s the way you talk down to me,” he said in a quiet tone I’ll never forget.

“But…”  I was so baffled I didn’t know how to protest.  “But that’s how I talk to everyone!”

A telling moment.  I did talk to everyone that way — and everyone came away with the same impression.  In fixing my speech, I failed to recognize that putting words together artfully did not suffice for social intelligence.  I boldly argued with people because I wanted to know not just their opinions, but the reasons for those opinions.  I felt that debate was the only way to suss out true understanding.  But my tireless desire to contradict, my tone of voice, and my other nonverbal communication gave the distinct — yet unintentional — impression that I viewed others’ opinions as insignificant before my own.

For a few years, I clung to the idea that I was fine just the way I was and that everyone else was simply not perceiving me correctly.  While filling out a self-analysis form a few months ago in preparation for my yearly review, I stubbornly (and, perhaps, a bit passive-aggressively) declared that I was a phenomenal listener.  As evidence, I cited several ways in which my opinions had changed significantly since I started working full-time — ways that wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t listened, and then carefully considered, my coworkers’ points of view during certain arguments.

When we met to discuss my review, my boss kindly told me — professionally, and not in so many words — that being a great listener wasn’t worth a damn if I imparted to everyone the impression that I wasn’t.  Some combination of respect for my boss, the simplicity and frankness with which she made her point, and the fact that said point was only the latest in a longstanding series of warning signs, finally drove the idea home.

So this is where I am in my lifelong struggle with arrogance.  I don’t think I’m arrogant, but I act as though I am.  I’m surrounded by people whose perspective I’m eager to learn, and they may never know how much I respect their point of view.  Literally: they may never know.  That’s a serious problem, and fixing it is my current project.