The Only Winning Move

Arnold Kling has a followup post to his earlier speculation that Ayn Rand’s enduring appeal owes to her being a kind of “ellaborate justification for low agreeableness,” about which I posted some thoughts. In it, he offers advice based on his own experience on how to get by as what I term an “anagreeable.” His sugggestions are useful, as are two of the ones currently posted in the comments. I’ll let you click through for Kling’s advice - it’s the two in the comments that interest me here.

The first is from someone awesomely named Joshua.

Once a decision is made, even if it’s not the one you would prefer, let it go and do your best to implement it (if that’s your job) or ignore it (if it’s not part of your job). One thing that people who are low on Agreeableness seem to have trouble with is dredging up old arguments and disagreements over and over again.

And how. I’m extremely bad about this. I find it very hard to go along with decisions I disagree with - and that cuts right to Kling’s point about Rand, actually. I’m certain that one of the reasons I like her books is that she offers me an escapist world where people are maximally allowed to make their own decisions. Everyone hates groupwork, right? But I’m the kid who makes it work. Which is to say, I’m the kid who would rather just do the whole damn project himself and let other people claim part of the credit than have to sit and discuss things in committee. Joshua’s hit on the main source of problems for anagreeables, I think, and this is very good advice. The first thing any of us should learn is how to move on once decisions are final. With regard to Kling’s point - this gets right to the heart of it. I guess it’s a chicken and egg problem to say whether anagreeables cause Libertarianism or the other way round, but the high instance of anagreeables among Libertarian ranks certainly accounts for our bullheadedness about matters of principle. Libertarians are worse than people of most other political backgrounds at compromising and working with what we have. It’s sad but true: in talking to a Libertarian about policy, you are more likely to get a lecture about where things went wrong historically than what we can do about them tomorrow. There’s definitely a lot of focus on going back to a point in time before some choice bad decision was made and undoing that decision.

The second is from someone who calls himself Horation (no one is ACTUALLY named Horatio, of course!). And his is twofold: learning to accept criticism and learning to praise others.

The first part is interesting to me because I’ve noticed in my own life that I can be quite good at accepting criticism - a champion actually - IFF I’ve been working at it. It really is like exercise. Do a little bit of exposing myself to criticism, and I rapidly get very very good at taking it unemotionally. But if I take a month or two off, it’s like I forget how to control my reactions, and even minor slights make me angry. And I think people around me know this - because I get this weird mixture of willingness to criticise but walking on eggshells when they do it - as if they’re never sure whether they’re dealing with Dr. Jekyll, who will be receptive and actually try to take their advice to heart, or Mr. Hyde, who’s just going to sulk for hours afterward. I can think of a couple of times in my life when I was particularly good at taking criticism. One was learning Swedish, and the other was learning Tai Chi. In both cases I had teachers with complex feelings about whether they wanted me to be learning the subject at all - in both cases because I was a foreigner. And so in both cases I took some pretty brutal criticism until something snapped, and I just decided that I didn’t want positive feedback from these people at all, and I was going to listen to what they said and practice in my spare time until I got it right, even according to the frankly ridiculous standards that were being set for me. I even got to enjoy it in a perverse way, in a “that which does not kill me…” way, as an opportunity to assert control over my emotions and make something positive out of a negative situation. And it worked! Not just at those tasks, but in general. But the effect eventually wore off in both cases too. Moral being - it really is something you have to work at constantly, or you lose it.

The second part is related to the first, I think. I’m very bad at giving praise. Just can’t quite bring myself to do it in most cases, even when I understand that it’s socially expected. And I think that’s because of the strategy that I adopt to dealing with my inability to take criticism. I guess the truth is that there are few, if any, people who enjoy taking criticism, and there are in general two strategies for dealing with this. You can either try to affect your environment, or try to remake yourself. People who heap excessive praise are generally following the first strategy. They’re hoping to make people like them, and hoping that their own readiness to praise will be reflected back at them, providing ballast for what bits of criticism they do have to take. They’re trying to set up a situation where praise is the norm - sugar to coat the eventual pill. These people are a problem for those of us who take the second strategy, because they use praise like a social currency. Our unwillingness to reciprocate gets magnified in their eyes, because they’ve gotten so good at giving praise that they’ve forgotten that it takes effort for the rest of us, especially when we’re asked to give praise that is less than perfectly sincere. For those of us taking the second strategy, since it’s very self-directed - something that we have to work at - I think we get worried about a free rider problem in praise. We’ve made an effort to actively shape our own perceptions of what people say to us, why can’t they? It’s a classic conflict, of course, and it’s pretty easy to imagine that people who adopt the second strategy are overrepresented amongst conservatives and libertarians, and people who adopt the first amongst socialists and liberals. We face the same problem - how to deal with criticism - and it really is the difference between “we all help each other (socialist)” (=”praising others is a moral imperative”) and “we all help ourselves (capitalist)” (=”learning to take a beating is a moral imperative”).

Anyway, fascinating discussion - as are all discussions that I can related to my own character, I admit it! - and I hope to hear some other useful bits of advice from other commenters as the day goes on.

Atlas Shrugged is my favorite novel. I’m well aware of what the problems with it are. No, it isn’t the greatest literary achievement in human history. In particular, the character of John Galt (and the last third of the book, in which he appears) could use some work. I always had trouble imagining that this man who only ever communicates in speeches about politics and morality will be able to settle down to a happy life of making ever-more-groundbreaking improvements to his already-revolutionary motor once the Wesley Mooches are expelled from the halls of power. The idea that the world’s most perfect man needs an unworthy opponent in order to thrive is ceratinly not the impression Rand was shooting for, but there it is. No, I don’t agree with all of it either. In particular, there’s a lack of graciousness about the supermen that’s hard for those of us who occasionally make mistakes to admire. Additionally, the unresolved questions of how you sustain a political system that is geared toward the capable minority rather than the mediocre majority are neither stated nor answered, but they are legion in the astute reader’s mind. It is my favorite novel all the same - because nowhere else have I encountered a read that was as relevant to my personal life and as entertaining as this one. It is an inspiration to me every time I read it.

So I was pleased today to come across this blog entry on countering passive-aggressiveness using Atlas Shrugged. The particular context is dear to my heart: underhanded America-bashing from European weenies. It isn’t just Europe, of course. I’ve run across the same problem in Canada, Japan and South Korea. Everywhere in the world there are people who can’t abide the fact that Americans exist and, like AA failures offered a sip of whiskey in their coffee, just can’t seem to stop themselves from slipping insinuations into the conversation when confronted with one of the species. But in my experience the problem is particularly bad in Europe. In Japan, whatever anti-Americanism you run across is hard to distinguish from the general background noise of their own cultural superiority complex and tendency to passive-aggression in all affairs. In Korea, they have the decency to say it to your face. Not a subtle bunch, the Koreans. And in Canada, you just feel sorry for them, because you know that the Europeans they try so hard to align themselves with don’t really think any better of Canadians than they do of Americans. No, Europe is the only place it ever really got under my skin - and boy, did it ever. It’s just wearying after a while to have to constantly be on your guard with everyone you meet, because these attacks always come straight out of the blue.

I’ll let Rawness’ post speak for itself. Go have a look, and also have a look at the reasoning behind the approach if you have the time. In a nutshell, the idea is that this is an instance where Rand’s advice about “refusing the sanction of the victim” applies. The kind of underhanded America-bashing that one encounters so much of in Europe needs your complicity to work, and so by denying to comply (that is, neither getting openly offended, nor allowing the attacker to simply retreat after the sting - as Hank Rearden does in the courtroom scene in Atlas Shrugged) you beat it. In my experience, this is solid advice. Trying to argue the point mysteriously only ends up making you look overly sensitive, but letting it go is even worse, as it guarantees you’ll be treated with condescension by that person from there on out. The only thing you can do is exactly what’s suggested: let it play out for a bit, then start to calmly ask pointed questions. It’s so devastating in its effectiveness that you really have to see it to believe it.

The only thing missing from Rawness’ post - and this is NOT a criticism as I don’t have any bright ideas on this front myself - is an explanation for where the behavior comes from. There’s this stab at it (from the second link):

Passive Aggressors have a weakness that you can exploit. See, they desperately want to engage in confrontation for whatever reason. Maybe they feel powerless in general and have typically felt this way since adolescence and winning conflicts are a major ego boost for them. Maybe they are trapped in middle management hell. Maybe they have unresolved issues about something, and you remind them of those unresolved issues. In some form you are the embodiment of whatever it is they have issues with, be it because of your race, your culture, your personality, your archetype (maybe you remind them of the big jocks that pushed them around in high school, the cool guy that got all the girls they couldn’t, the hot chick that never gave them a time of day growing up, the optimist they always envied). For some reason, they have a need for conflict and victory in general, and something about you in particular especially triggers that need for victory.

That’s all true, of course, but what I’ve never been able to understand is what it is about Americans that triggers this need in Europeans? Some of their criticisms are, after all, perfectly accurate, and while I do feel that envy plays some role, I’ve never met anyone doing this who I felt honestly wants to be American. Just saying “it’s envy” is too pop-psych for this; the real motive, whatever it is, is likey to be much more complicated, and I’ve never, not anywhere, run across a satisfying explanation for what it could be.