Assholes Who Turned Out to Be Right and Other Thoughts About Creative People

In the fog of my first couple weeks after surgery, I missed some intriguing developments.  Thanks to you folks who read this blog, I got some great emails to help me stay in the loop.  As I was wrestling with my email inbox last night, I found a note from Patrick with a link to a fantastic -- troubling, enlightening, and funny -- story at cracked.com (which looks to me like a cross between Mad magazine and The Onion, but is more fact-based -- they apparently have been around since 1958) on The Five Biggest Assholes Who Ever Turned Out to Be Right, which was posted on April 23rd. 

I was taken by the post because the author, Dan Seitz, did such a great job of finding people who were annoying, nasty, stubborn, mean-spirited, and otherwise socially inept or personally despicable, but  had championed unpopular but good ideas (or in some cases, ideas that were just different from the prevailing wisdom but they were dismissed because the ideas were advocated by an alleged asshole).  I urge you to read this quite detailed story, where you can learn about the exploits, quirks, and ideas of alleged assholes including baseball player Jose Canseco (he claimed that many stars, including himself, were using steriods, which turned out to be true), scientist  Peter Duesberg (very unpopular because he claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have -- until recently -- been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer), Harry Markopolos (who admits that he combines the worst characteristics of a math nerd and frat boy -- but spent 9 years pressing his accusations that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme).  

My favorite asshole who was right, however, is Fritz astronomer.  See this description from the American Museum of Natural History for more details.   But as Seitz tells us:

 
To give you an idea of how charming Fritz Zwicky was, when he was working at Aerojet, a bunch of customers from the military, including two admirals, showed up for an appointment to check on his progress. Zwicky met them at the gate demanding that they leave because they weren't scientists and were therefore absolutely unqualified to look at the stuff they were, um, buying. Outside of work, his solution to winning arguments was to try and punch people, which was mostly found adorable because he was a little old man who could be pummeled easily. It became less adorable when he said things like "I myself can think of a dozen ways to annihilate all living beings in one hour," and his scientific partner was afraid Zwicky was out to kill him.

BUT he was right in serious ways, even though it took decades  for his colleagues to find that out because they thought these were just wacky ideas from "Crazy Fritz" (pictured to the left).  As Seitz tells it:

Needless to say, the whole "total lack of people skills" thing made him so popular and beloved he got the nickname "Crazy Fritz." So it was easy to ignore Zwicky while he was off doing crazy things like inventing most of modern astronomy. The term "supernova"? He invented it.

Plus:

He also developed the theory that allows us to know how old the universe is. Dark matter? He was among the first to theorize about it. Gravitational lensing, i.e. using stars to look at other stars? He laid out the theory 40 years before it was actually proved correct. Zwicky was so ahead of his time, and so annoying, that it was basically routine in the 70s to say "Yeah, Fritz Zwicky thought of this 40 years ago but nobody took him seriously because he was a crazy douche."

Stories like these, especially the one about Fritz, are important to remember because -- although people who are stubborn, trample over everyone else, are unable or unwilling to use the most basic social graces, and treat others like dirt clearly deserve to be called assholes and may not be worth the trouble no matter how brilliant they are -- they are less burdened than most of us by pressures to think like everyone else. They may be  in a better position, as the first scientist to isolate Vitamin C -- Albert Szent-Gyorgi -- famously suggested (I am paraphrasing),  "To look at the same thing as everyone else, but to think of and see something different."  

I wrote a lot about people with this talent in Weird Ideas That Work, especially in the chapter on "slow learners."  I would also add, however, that there are many people who think for themselves and stubbornly stick to unpopular ideas regardless of social pressures and prevailing wisdom, but aren't assholes.  A good example was Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who did irritate people by pushing ideas they disagreed with, but was known as usually charming and well-loved.  He won a  Nobel Prize on Physics and many experts believe he deserved one, possibly two, others (e.g., Feynman solved a problem that another researcher won another Nobel for years later -- but the paper with the solution just sat in his drawer for many years because he never got around to sending the paper to an academic journal).

He also "went rogue" as member of the Rogers Commission that investigated the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle -- and despite pressures to stop from the head of it -- did his own interviews with NASA scientists and engineers that led him to believe that the explosion was caused by O-rings that failed under cold temperatures.   If you have never seen it, his demonstration to congress (which some members of the commission tried to stop) that when an O-ring was put in beaker of cold water, it became brittle and more likely to break, was the pivotal moment in the investigation -- it is a beautiful example of breaking down a problem to its esssence. Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission is instructive because, although he fought with the head of the commission William Rogers about the independent action he took and was famously called "a real pain" by Rogers, he wasn't doing it to be an asshole. He was doing to get to the truth.  Rogers probably thought he was an asshole, which reminds me that it is label that people should hesitate to use and accept as true, because it is often applied simply to people who disagree with us, are more successful than us, or who simply act or think differently than than us. 

If you are in a group or organization where people who simply look, think, or act differently than everyone else are labeled as assholes, and the best you can be is a perfect imitation of everyone else around you, well, the odds are no one is thinking very much and there isn't much original thinking going on.

In short, although being oblivious or indifferent (or naive, by the way) to what others thing can help people see and develop new ideas (and is a hallmark of assholes at times), I think it is important to keep in mind that not all original thinkers are assholes (the trick is to see things differently and not to cave in when people don't like your "different ideas").  I should also point out that not all assholes are original thinkers.  There are plenty of mean-spirited jerks out there who mindlessly follow the crowd and are incapable of original thinking.  

P.S. Also note that the post at Cracked reminds us of another cost that assholes inflict on themselves and others -- if you are branded as an asshole, people are more likely to reject your ideas, even if they are right.  The negative reactions they have to YOU color their reactions to your ideas.  One solution, by the way, is if you are an asshole with good ideas, you might work with a more socially adept partner who is more skilled at selling your ideas.

Comments

[rich solomon]

Interesting and welcome perspective on the problem. If not-being-an-asshole is a kind of intelligence then the concept "every group has at least one asshole and if you can't tell who it is maybe it's you" is easily extended to substitute "idiot" for "asshole". That is, "it's great to be in the company of all these really smart people." Or is it?

The point is that very smart or overly achievement-motivated people's existence condemns them to suffer the presence of people they can't hold a conversation with, and may easily come to regard ordinary minds as lazy or idiotic, the same way that people deeply concerned with social intelligence may find the assholism of others to be intolerable. And for individualistic over-achievers social maladjustment may be compensated for by more time on one's own to practice one's craft. I'm not sure if social intelligence has an analog there.

We do well to remember that assholism is a personality trait, not a essence of one's being as it may sometimes seem when considering specific examples. So as with any type of intelligence, nobody can become a different person endowed with intelligence they lack in their present state of being, but anyone with a bit of interest and motivation can improve what understanding and ability they do possess, learn to be less quick-to-judge, more compassionate, or more aware of the workings of subatomic particles.

[paul long]

Bob, I enjoyed your post. For myself I'm careful of the corollary however: Being an asshole doesn't mean you are RIGHT. In my view it turns out to be a basically small percentage who are right about anything and the combination of asshole plus wrong headed seen in many corporate and political leaders is painful.

[Anon]

Another problem with the asshole who is right. If their assholivity index is sufficiently high, in my experience they can so "poison the well" that it becomes very difficult if not impossible for those who agree with them to advance the cause with those in the organization who count (i.e., have the gold).

Then there are the local supporters of the asshole who are personal friends and perceive the individual as brilliant and a huge asset to the organization. But because of their role doesn't include functioning with the organization's "gold holders," they don't see the toxic effects, can't understand the organization's reaction, and end up being enablers of the asshole's behavior.

[Simon Bostock]

Reminded me of something on Ambigamy:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ambigamy/200903/fallacy-pairs-every-infraction-theres-equal-and-opposite-infraction

Calling somebody an asshole when they're not being an asshole should be considered as big a weakness as being an actual asshole...

"I have an idea how to tame this taming-term problem. Fallacies should come in paired opposites on the assumption that for every infraction there is an equal and opposite infraction. For example, there ought to be a term of equal weight for the counter strategy of accusing someone of projecting when you don’t want to hear what they’re telling you."

[Daniel Christadoss]

Bob,
Thanks for helping us to look at the other side of the coin.
I believe this is why working as a team is important. We can bring out the best collectively and use each others skill set.
So much to learn and so much to share. Mentor and be mentored.

[Ron Gentile]

Sadly for pro cycling and more broadly sports, history may show that Floyd Landis is one such asshole.

[Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D.]

Fascinating post. Please move the P.S. up, though!!! (Given the work I do, it's one of the main points I see overlooked by too many executives, i.e., when you're an asshole, people hate you so much and are so motivated to "get you" that it may take you years longer to get your point across or discovery recognized because your colleagues would rather cut off their noses than give you any credit.

[DC Jobs]

As for the idea of using a socially skilled partner, it sounds like a great idea, provided that the jerk in question can find someone who can sell his ideas without stealing them.

[Steph Cowan]

Bob, Thanks for sharing this tidbit from cracked.com. What a hilarious character that Crazy Fritz was! And how ironic that, despite seemingly despising the human race he was born into, he contributed profoundly to our understanding of the universe! It is good to remember that even an asshole is not without value.