This is just a hunch, but do you consider yourself to be more honest than most people? Like most people are just hiding what they think because they're afraid of conflict, but you aren't, and so you face the world with what you think is a kind of bracing honesty?
I ask because almost every terminal asshole I've ever met has been like that. After all, nobody walks around trying to make people feel bad and alienate them (or at least very few people do). But the most unpleasant people I've ever met have been of the "I'm just saying what everyone else is afraid to say" variety.
Your comment, "the converse seems to be gliding through life nodding my head just to be liked" raises a red flag for me in this regard. You seem to be describing the normal concessions that most people make toward other people in order to make those people feel comfortable and make their social interactions go smoothly. It looks like you interpret this behavior as a sign of weakness or passivity. This attitude is, again, often a source of assholery. I'd suggest to you that there's something to be said for making people around you feel good, and that people who do it routinely might have motivations other than fear.
posted by Ragged Richard at 7:00 AM on December 3
Monday, December 27, 2010
More puzzle pieces?
Reading this thread on MetaFilter, “Help! I may be an asshole” (http://ask.metafilter.com/172103/Help-I-may-be-an-asshole) – quote from a commenter:
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3 comments:
The normal concessions that people make lead to dysfunction and relationships that are not genuine.
I now can go with that most people do not want to be genuine and I stay away from them.
I have come to find that all families are dysfunctional and that the problem is that I care.
This is kinda a tie in to the "object" comment I am jumping around; I do not like to receive information filtered to the persons advantage so I try and stay away from that. This leads to trying to be straight forward which many people do not really like. They get control in the information. I do not even care anymore if deep down they know they are wrong. I go with how the act effects my life.
[This got really long and Blogger wouldn’t let me post it all at once, so I’m posting it in chunks. Thanks for your comments – they really stimulate my thought processes and help me see more clearly where I’m trying to go! I’m sorry if it seems like I disagree with you – I sort of think we’re coming at a lot of the same ideas but from different angles? And sometimes we really agree, but sometimes it feels like our ‘language’ doesn’t quite match up, or something. *I’m* ok with that, I don’t need us to agree, exactly – it actually helps clarify what I really think to be able to talk to another person who’s had similar, but different, thoughts on the same subjects!]
[Also, I hope it's not coming across as too lecture-y! I just feel really strongly about this right now.]
One thing that keeps coming up in my reading is this idea of 'saving face'. I keep forgetting that this is really important to most people, including *me*. When I *remember* it, I sometimes wonder if maybe it isn’t actually the *main* motivator driving nearly *all* human behavior?
I've just spent the last several days reading MetaFilter (I find it a really useful place to get insightful ideas from a broad range of viewpoints, with generally fairly intelligent and respectful comments),
and this idea of ‘saving face’ keeps coming up over and over again, in various guises.
What occurs to me is that what shrinks call ‘dysfunction’ might simply be some outmoded human behaviors that we *all* practice to varying degrees, driven by this very need to keep our self-respect.
Nobody likes to be ‘wrong’, or feel stupid. It actually floods our whole body with shame chemicals, which is a situation to be avoided at all costs – if I’ve understood some of the things I’ve read properly, there’s an idea out there that we experience *shame* as a very basic, lizard brain ‘survival threat’, as in, “If you don’t chill out, your tribe is going to leave you out there alone in the jungle/desert/whatever and you’ll freeze to death/starve/get eaten by lions.” Being ‘shamed’ is *terrifying*, because it signals that, somehow, we’ve violated some basic tribal rule or ‘taboo’, and are, quite literally, in danger. You talk about lizard brain a lot, so I’m guessing you probably know that anything coming from that level is pretty ancient and has nothing to do with modern ideas of ‘logic’ – it *seems* to operate almost entirely independent of any so-called ‘rational’ ‘thought’ process – far below that, at the level of pure, raw, gut survival instinct.
I should never post comments when I'm this tired, because I can't go back and edit them - argh, grasshopper!
Sorry if this comment is a pain in the ass. I'm pretty sure it is, but I'm too tired to figure out *why*. I'll have to come back to it later. Should have saved it elsewhere for further consideration in less frazzled state.
Hope further comments elsewhere will better explicate without pushing any buttons.
Argh. My apologies. Still learning how to do this, ongoing.
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