I still remember my first brilliant-jerk boss.
It was decades ago, back when shooting video meant bulky cameras and VHS cassettes. Eli (not his real name) was a local boy wonder, a wunderkind of Spielberg proportions, in my mind at least: a twenty-six-year-old medical resident who also had a thriving side business as a high-end event videographer. Think Duddy Kravitz, only a lot more cunning. No doubt he was aware of career synergy even before it had a name: all those wealthy, influential community contacts he was making with his side business helped him build up his medical practice in later years.
To me, he was a living nightmare. For two years, he berated me, belittled me, insulted me, yelled at me. And he’d say things like “You don’t have any stress, you know,” he once said. “I mean, I bark at you, and maybe that gets your blood pressure going.” After I finally quit, having slowly, painfully amassed some professional skills (and maybe a shade of backbone), I learned he’d been paying me a third of what he paid his other assistant. I’d been too cowed, too intimidated as a repressed, closeted eighteen-year-old to ask for more money or even a dash of respect.
I know this feels like the least important thing in the world right now, some Gen Xer’s random, haunting memory of a horrible boss from eons ago. How irrelevant it must seem in our dystopian present, with lingering racial injustice, a troubled American presidency (to say the least), economic turmoil…and, oh yeah, that microscopic little bug that’s made 2020 feel like the end is nigh.
But what if I told you all these are in some way connected?
Definitions
I can’t speak to everyone’s definition of what a brilliant jerk is, but here’s mine:
A person of exceptional achievement, stature, reputation, or authority — real or perceived — with a pattern of being gratuitously cruel or unpleasant, most often to subordinates.
They’re not just in the workplace, I know, but it’s often in that arena that we find the brilliant jerk. Makes sense, since workplaces are some of the most hierarchical places of our age. Since a huge part of brilliant jerk brilliance is just how incredibly well they exploit hierarchies, they’re just as insidious today, in our late-capitalist age, as they were in earlier times. Where, in the past, a brilliant jerk could be a tyrant king or a conniving courtier, in the modern world they’re “rock star” professionals or executives who “add value to the enterprise”—and, in so doing, establish a position of dominance within it. This is the source of brilliant jerk power: perceived indispensability.
But what makes them jerks in the first place?
I think some of it comes from the romantic notion of the tortured artist, mixed with the robber baron mystique of the 19th century. People often point to Steve Jobs as justification for (and maybe a model of) the brilliant jerk’s M.O.: after all, without him, there would be no iPhone. Ergo, you have to have that sort of person around to unlock innovation at that level.
I doubt this is universally true, and plenty of amazing, accomplished people (a few of whom I’ve had the good fortune to work with) aren’t jerks. I think the more common reality with brilliant jerk types is more pernicious. Let’s look at this bit from Swimming With Sharks, the 1994 movie where Kevin Spacey’s (ironic, I know) a brilliant jerk Hollywood studio executive lecturing his naive assistant:
Chilling, right? Such great insight into the mindset, and how it serves as perpetuator of both power and bad behavior. Brilliant jerks, without exception in my experience, have this super-aggressive social-Darwinian mindset (itself a construct of Herbert Spencer, not that other guy and his Galápagos finches). They don’t just view hierarchy, and the forceful exercise of it, as some unfortunate thing to overcome; instead, they view it as an inescapable condition of life itself. The universe is uncaring and tough, so we ought to be even more uncaring and tougher. I imagine brilliant jerks have movie-cliché drill sergeants running on continuous loop in their brains (which for my money Full Metal Jacket probably renders best).
The personal is political
To understand this mindset further, I think we need to look to politics. Ideology, more exactly, the ever-present left-right divide. To grossly oversimplify, we have the left/liberal worldview believing in the potential of humans to do amazing things together—and so it stresses the importance of bold, egalitarian, usually not-profited-oriented collective action such as done by governments granted with ample taxation; the right/conservative worldview, meanwhile, is more cynical: emphasis is on the unfixable crooked timber of human nature, the inefficiency of government, and the inherent laziness of individuals absent the good swift kick in the pants of incentive capitalism. The state’s job is to protect law and order and property rights—and leave the rest to sort itself out.
It’s tempting to look at these worldviews, and lump brilliant jerks into just one of them. Some of that, I think, is valid: it’s a lot easier to look at the conservative world picture and deduce the thought process: “well, if everybody’s a jerk, might as well be one too.” Except, I don’t think it breaks out that evenly, or that cleanly. Plenty of political liberals have been brilliant jerks, too—including some horrifically extreme examples, like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Heck, Harvey even fundraised for Hillary.
Why is that? I think it’s because no side of the political spectrum has ever been able to do away with the concept of hierarchy. Even egalitarian societies have chieftains who call the shots. The most radical Communist regimes ended up as police-state, inner-party hierarchies. Regardless of whether our pecking order’s based on hardworking merit, inborn ability, or unfair privilege, we humans tend to go along with it, in so doing granting certain people greater agency in our society. And whenever you have an asymmetry of power, you allow for poor treatment of the less-powerful.
Brilliant jerks we know and (don’t) love
It’s no great leap, given my back-of-the-envelope politics, to guess who I think is the most visible brilliant jerk of all these days—and an analysis of the current U.S. President’s mentors and influences substantiates my claim. To those who may scoff at the brilliant part, well, I’d argue that running his business the way he ran it (not well, but with the appearance of great success), cultivating the image he cultivated, then successfully engineering it all to win an American Presidency… it may strike many of us as horrific and dystopian, sure, but there’s no underestimating the brilliance of pulling it off. That his “brilliance” had a lot of help from luck and timing—and lots of family money—doesn’t diminish it. It’s part of it. That’s the thing about brilliant jerks: fairly earned or not, their projection of legitimacy sticks.
So how does it relate to other big world events? Let’s start with the Epstein-Weinstein duo. Now, I know tantrum-y bosses are not in the same league as sexual harassers and assaulters. But it’s probably safe to claim these behaviors are often branches of the same tree—and are not infrequently committed by the same people (as another bit of fiction, the show Entourage, so well depicted). No surprise: in both, power gives sanction to the powerful to mistreat others.
This brings us to more extreme behavior in the news these days. I know nobody’s calling murderous, racist cops brilliant either. They’re practically the definition of bad cops. But there’s a common thread here: entitlement, which derives from power and hierarchy. These are entitled jerks—literally protected from consequence, in the cops’ case, by qualified immunity. Same deal with the Kens and Karens we’ve been hearing about lately, mostly better-off white folks operating with relative impunity.
In these cases, it’s apparent to me now where that flavor of hierarchy came from, something I’ve been reading up on lately with mounting horror as a lifelong science geek: the legacy of 19th-century scientific racism. It shows that, even though science is supposed to be an impartial beacon on our understanding of the universe, it too can be perverted by human bias, and used to justify the most awful forms of inequality. Sure, I know most brilliant jerks today would decry this bit of two hundred year-old pseudoscience…except when they don’t, and it creeps into the conversation.
Can we overcome them?
Still, I know that, for those who haven’t been around them, brilliant jerks probably feels like how some circles view climate change: a bad thing we need to deal with at some point, sure, but otherwise abstract, diffuse…and perhaps not all that critical. I mean, if a few Amazon.com warehouse workers are being mistreated, but the company still manages to send out packages reliably and efficiently…are we going to call for Jeff Bezos’ head or boycott Amazon and bring it to ruin? Unlikely.
I think that’s the call to action here, tough. No, a horrible boss isn’t the same thing as a rapist, or a killing cop…but some motivating elements behind all of them share common ancestry. While it’s inevitable for things in some workplace circumstances to get exercised or heated (sometimes over the dumbest things), the one-way extreme behavior that characterizes brilliant jerks really should have no place in our world.
To answer the Steve Jobs question about innovation sans jerkiness, I offer up this thought experiment: imagine society without this behavior. Some brilliant jerk supporters, reading this, might counter that, without these hardasses cracking the whip, society would collapse into mediocrity, “socialism”, blandness, and, ultimately, impoverishment—heck, just ask Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand. To that I say: just imagine how many other people would feel, newly empowered, without brilliant jerks to hold them back. Think of what their new sense of agency might accomplish. We’ve been told to believe we need the bad cop, in our lives and careers, someone to keep the rest of us in line. But do we? And, if so, is the brilliant jerk model really the right bad cop for us to have?
Because, ultimately, society is a series of choices about what behavior we will and will not accept. Now more than ever, with the world on lockdown and our future uncertain, is the time to start pushing for some better angels of our nature to rise up.
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