I, Arrogant

At some point during my teenage years I broke down. I could no longer stand to live in my own head. I had become so repulsive, so obnoxious, so frustrating to be around that I wished I could escape my own company. At the core of this was a tangle of personal issues and emotional hangups which I suspect everyone has some variation of, but at the time only one thing really stood out to me: I was supremely arrogant.

I didn’t merely have an inflated opinion of myself, or overestimate my abilities; one of the core assumptions I had (unconsciously?) made about the world was that I was inherently better than the people around me. This manifested in both self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. Every time someone else made a mistake, I made excuses for them — they can’t help it, that’s just human nature, happens to even the best people. When I made the same mistake, I attacked myself for it — I can do better than this, I knew beforehand what I should have done and didn’t, there’s no reason for me to be such a bad person. For a long while I had mistaken this impulse for humility, but at umpteen years old I suddenly recognized it for arrogance.

This realization was mostly thanks to my friends, who had long since stopped hiding their contempt for me. I hated being alone but I was hated when I was with others. This forced me into introspection, and ultimately revelation, as just discussed. I resolved to change myself, and began to strive for true humility in everything. I made less of myself, I poured my attention towards other people’s needs, I practiced distracting myself whenever I began to think about my own worth. I knew the trap lay in thinking about myself at all, so for several years I simply didn’t.

This led to a swing in the other direction, and I became too meek. I came to this realization eight months after a breakup, lying in bed staring at the ceiling. Being an obsessive loser, although no longer an arrogant one, I was still thinking about a single offhanded remark my ex had made regarding my ambivalence towards a dogs vs cats debate: “you have no opinions, Оставь. I wish you would just believe in something.” At the time I protested — I had many strong opinions, some of them extreme. I just didn’t enjoy debating over them, and I didn’t like taking sides on something as trivial as would I rather have a dog or a cat. I’ve had both, I like both, can’t that be enough? I remained baffled by this exchange until eight months later, when I suddenly sat bolt upright in bed and actually exclaimed aloud: “oh, she means she wishes I were more forceful!”

I have no idea if this is what she actually meant; it seems uncharitable to ascribe to her something she did not actually say. But either way, those were the words I needed to hear. Two things happened: I immediately lost all tattered remnants of attraction towards my ex, and I resolved to become more arrogant again.

I didn’t call it arrogance at first. I called it “being forceful” or maybe “higher self esteem”. But arrogance it undoubtedly was, and eventually I grew to see it as such. It might seem foolish to tack back into the same attitude that crippled me as a child, and arrogance, in particular, is such a dirty word. Arrogance is the surest sign of villainhood , pride the deadliest of the seven sins. It is a detriment to your own growth and an insult to everyone around you. At best, pride is a luxury afforded to the powerful, which they only can impose upon others due to their importance. At worst, it is a hobble to the lowly, a distasteful delusion and karmic justification for their humble means. There is no one less deserving of sympathy than the arrogant.

My goal was not to return to this malicious kind of arrogance; probably “arrogance” is entirely the wrong word for what I mean, maybe confidence is better. But confidence implies certainty, which I didn’t need for my purposes, and confidence is something that other people inspire in you. To be told I was confident would be like being told I was a more useful tool. I wanted to make people wary of my strength, not appreciative of all the ways they could use it. I wanted to be powerful, and from this ignoble desire I started to build myself into a nobler person.

I began with very small things that I noticed about myself, things that made my life worse and that were objectively bad. I used to be very careful about stepping out of the way of people I passed on the sidewalk, so I began intentionally not adjusting my course whenever I saw someone walking towards me, forcing them to step out of the way. I used to avoid eye contact: that became holding people’s gaze until they looked away. I became more aware of my posture and my body language, and made sure to open my shoulders, let my arms swing free. To be clear: I did not actually carry the confidence I tried to show. That wasn’t important — I was training myself to act a certain way, and acclimating to people responding appropriately. Ah, so this is what it’s like to have people step out of the way for you on the street.

I also began to practice in more overt ways. I removed “I don’t know” from my vocabulary, deciding I’d rather be wrong than uncertain. I began to promote myself for responsibilities I wasn’t qualified for, or honors I didn’t deserve. I erred on the side of overestimation. I created this blog, and an anonymous twitter account to promote it, and I’ve been shamelessly advertising what is in all likelihood a mediocre collection of essays and short stories which deserve to languish in obscurity forever, not that I care. My operating conditions are as arrogant as I can manage: everything I write is worthy of an audience, anything I say may be worth preserving.

I have decided that I would rather fail at what I attempt because I was simply not good enough, rather than because I was afraid to overcommit myself. One inspires hatred, but the other contempt, which is worse. I spent a long time underestimating my capabilities in a kind of false humility, and, having tried both extremes, I can safely say that overestimation is better.

Arrogance as a Clustering Strategy

After a conversation about it with a stranger, I sketched out a diagram something like this:

You can think of this like a set problem: Along the top you have a set of things you know you are unable to do and a set of things you know you are able to do. In the middle is a big cluster of unknowns, and you have to decide how to treat them. The three words at the bottom are three potential approaches, positioned by where they tend to group unknowns. To make it more(?) explicit:

Wisdom, or perfect knowledge, would essentially eliminate the unknown attribute, since you would have total understanding of what you can and cannot do. But, failing that, you will probably treat those unknowns either with humility, assuming you can’t do them, or with arrogance, assuming you can. This “maps” the set of unknowns all on to one or the other of the known sets, and that mapping is what you make your decisions based on.

What we’re doing here is starting with two defined categories (able and unable) and assigning a bunch of different samples (things we don’t know if we’re capable of or not) to one or the other. This is a 2-means clustering problem. One of the simplest solutions is an all-or-nothing strategy, like the humility and arrogance strategies above. It would be nice to add a little nuance to our heuristic, but ultimately there will be unknowns and we have to pick one to favor. Are we going to be generally humble, biased towards assumptions of failure, or generally arrogant, biased towards assumptions of success?

Self-confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which you’ll know if you pay any attention to the people who Make It. The more I skew towards arrogance, the more I find angles and opportunities to make my life better. It’s not magic — I won’t see these opportunities unless I look for them. People won’t offer things to me unless I look like I deserve them. An arrogant clustering strategy has made me stronger, but I still value the experience of practiced (false?) humility, which gave me context to ground my psyche in as I reach out towards what could be.

That is a convoluted and confusing way of saying the only way to succeed is to believe in urself :)