Two Types of Arrogance

Benjamin Franklin’s piece “Rules for Making Oneself a Disagreeable Companion” is a playful, sharply sarcastic, fairly frivolous guide for the educated man who longs to become a person no one wants to be around. My first reaction to Franklin’s work was that it’s quite amazing that this exact type of annoying, selfish, arrogant person has survived over the course of at least the last three hundred years. To talk about oneself relentlessly seems as though it should have been included in the group of human habits that eventually went extinct over the course of evolution. I also noticed that with amazing clarity I was able to recall people I had encountered in my life that were guilty of spewing such self-absorbed nonsense any chance they had an audience. This has to be one of the most obnoxious things a human being can do in the presence of a fellow human being. Such self-promotion would surely never flow from my own mouth, as was evidenced by the way I reacted to the individuals I began to remember from sports teams, internships, and even classroom discussions. When faced with such an individual, I always chose to keep my own mouth shut, just to show the rest of the people around us how wildly different I was. But after reading “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” by Jonathan Swift, something occurred to me that may seem obvious, but had never crossed my mind before. I wholly agree with the notion that human beings spend a majority of their time asserting dominance or superiority over another. Competitiveness is surely one of those traits that is engrained in basic human nature. What I realized, though, was that by allowing an acquaintance to blabber on about him or herself while I kept quiet was actually serving the same purpose, perhaps in a more subtle way, that the aforementioned acquaintance’s blabbering served. I may have kept my mouth shut, but that was only in order to assert the fact that I was better than that. The mere fact that I didn’t have to constantly talk about myself surely meant that I was confident in my superiority over that acquaintance. It was only through reading these two pieces side by side that I realized even in an effort to avoid seeming competitive or arrogant, it’s competitive and arrogant by its very nature.