I got two, oh Mike all the time. Sweet and sour like a tangerine.
Most jerks, I assume, don’t know that they’re jerks. This raises, of course, the question of how you can find out if you’re a jerk. I’m not especially optimistic on this front. (…)
Another angle into this important issue is via the phenomenology of being a jerk. I conjecture that there are two main components to the phenomenology:
First: an implicit or explicit sense that you are an “important” person. (…) What’s involved in the explicit sense of feeling important is, to a first approximation, plain enough. The implicit sense is perhaps more crucial to jerkhood, however, and manifests in thoughts like the following: “Why do I have to wait in line at the post office with all the schmoes?” and in often feeling that an injustice has been done when you have been treated the same as others rather than preferentially.
Second: an implicit or explicit sense that you are surrounded by idiots.
illustration { David Bray, Better Must Come, 2009 }
