Defining Arrogance

You can see it everywhere nowadays: self-promotion. I stay away from social media as much as possible, because it seems like it is an endless feed of people only showing the good side of their life or trying to show how wonderful they are. There’s even a term for it now: influencer. Apparently this is a job title, where your popularity allows you to influence the decision of your followers, so companies ask you to sponsor their products or services. I don’t really understand this myself and I guess it’s because this is not my generation. More often than not, a common claim to fame for an influencer is simply they are good looking, they were born into wealth, a combination of both, or they are just faking it until they hopefully make it.

If my father were born in the influencer generation, I imagine he would try everything he could do to join their ranks. But he wasn’t. For much of his early life, he wasn’t really much of anything in particular when we think of what society deems as success. Following his childhood, he was trying to make it in a rock band. That’s when he met my mother in California, while he was living there and she was on a trip. Following their move to Minnesota, my father held odd jobs. He taught guitars. He painted houses. There’s nothing anything wrong with these jobs, but they weren’t anything that would make him famous.

I always wondered if arrogance is something that you have from an early age or if it’s something that slowly creeps up over time. From the time I was young, the only father I knew was a person who was very arrogant. I didn’t now him when he was younger, perhaps when he was less arrogant. There wasn’t really much for him to feel arrogant about in those early years with my mother. 

Then he found two things: religion and law school. Both of these things gave him a means to feel superior to others. In terms of religion, by simply telling others that he had a calling from God to preach, he received reverence and respect from his fellow congregants and later his followers. By becoming a lawyer, he became someone who now had another valid reason for the rest of society, not just his followers, to respect him. It was another reason for him to feel better than others.

After he was released from jail, I tried to encourage him to make friends. He had a lot of interests (books, music, flying, and history, just to name some of his favorites) and I told him that he could definitely find someone who had similar interests. When this happened in the mid-2000s, I showed him various websites he could use to meet up with those with similar interests. Some months went by and he said he tried anything, but just couldn’t make any friends. Nobody wanted to be with him because he was an ex-con. This was always his excuse.

But it wasn’t true. One time when we were talking amidst his usual feelings of self-pity and despair, he admitted to me he couldn’t find any friends because he wasn’t confident anymore that he was better than those he would meet. He explained to me that in his life before, it was always clear that he was better than those around him. He was the pastor, the one who spoke directly to God. He was the lawyer, who led a successful law practice, made lots of money, drove fancy cars, had a big house, and even had his own airplane. He was the pilot, who flew that airplane and had a skill that few others had. It was clear that he was better than others in his eyes, and this gave him enough self-confidence in his relationships.

All these relationships weren’t really friendships, though. They were just him being on top and others below, and him using these people when he needed to and moving them aside when he didn’t. I don’t think I ever actually say him with a real friend in the entire time I knew him.

With him out of jail, without a job, no longer a lawyer, with no congregation, and no pilot’s license or airplane, there was nothing he could use to give him the confidence to feel better than others. This is why he really couldn’t make any friends. Because from his point of view, if he’s not better than those around him, he can’t be friends with them or have any kind of relationship.

It’s sad to think that his entire adult life he never really knew what real friendship was.  

The amazing thing was that he kept this arrogance throughout the rest of his life. Even when he had nothing left and was living in a shithole apartment without any family or friends around, he always thought that he was right and that he was smarter than everyone else. This was one of the big things that drove his family away from him, especially his children in their adult lives. He was a very difficult person to be around because of these traits. He claimed he was just eccentric, and that would go on to also claim that eccentric people are usually gifted and smart, which would be a not so direct way of him telling you that he’s really right, you are wrong, and he’s better than you.

My father’s career as a lawyer was probably the worst thing for him because it just ballooned his arrogance. Even before he got his law license, my mother told me he liked to read, especially about history. She told me that before he went to college, he wanted to be able to embarrass people and make them feel small with his words. He could already do it to some extent because he was well read (he would read the dictionary for fun), but his ability to do this exploded once he finished college and law school.

Embarrassing people with difficult words or phrases, or bringing up some obscure historical figure or incident to prove a point, was just another way for him to make you feel smaller.

He would do this all the time. During his divorce with my mother, he filed numerous briefs, objections, and even a personal injury lawsuit against my mother (none of which succeeded). Even in these documents - addressed to judges and attorneys - he wrote in a way that he tried to put the reader down. He even included definitions to common words, such as “contempt”, in these documents. He would capitalize and bold entire paragraphs.

This trend continued throughout his life. Whenever he would be mad at something, even with his own children when he felt he was unjustly wronged, he would compose sentences of words nobody uses in daily life, throw in definitions and his analysis of the definitions, all to try to show you how stupid you are and, if you are that stupid, you must be wrong and he must be right.

Living this way with him was truly exhausting, and it made even trying to have a casual relationship with him difficult. His inescapable need to be better than everyone, and to show them that he was better, led to him being alone for the rest of his life.