Are the most skilled/smart/genius people around us arrogant? if they aren’t, mostly probably, they wont be a genius, arrogant statement, HUh!, yes, take it or leave it, but i will just try to reason along this notion.
Albert Einstein, Steve jobs(was), Alfred Hitchcock, Ayn rand, Miles Davis, Chic Corea, just to name a very few.
Arrogance can operate at various levels, bigger the stage, more convoluted is arrogance, it has something more than achievement/pride/ego to it. Arrogance itself isn’t the only problem, just like anything else, usually, there are lot of problems.
“If you want to convince me of X, you’ve got to present me with Y amount of evidence.” “X” usually is a variable(U would probably not want someone to prove that 1+1=2 all your life, you would just get on with it after sometime), So is Y then.The problems are small, large, but similar, at various levels, when it comes to why the problem is there at the first place.
Ego/pride is one thing, being obsessive about the procedures that have got some so far is another. There are people it seems who are able to balance both, but how far did they reach on one side demands answer, not necessarily to quantify whats happening but just for reference.
Arrogance can happen to you, if you gather power, not the particularly powerful types, those ones, the types i am talking about were /are arrogant by nature, their arrogance wasn’t a function of powers or situations, if it all, it died down in few cases, for good or bad, debatable it is, but i am certainly of the notion that it should wear away as life reaches closer to death.
Most common kind of arrogance is childish, born out of ignorance, people can defend religion, ethics, morals, without knowing much about these topics, that’s arrogance, but the arrogance doesn’t assert itself well, it has no direction, thought, attached to it, more “wrong”, really. If we are really collecting more biases by knowing more, then is the arrogance just a summation of all the biases along some line? How does reason make us less arrogant? Well we want to be above the “average line of happiness”, if that means we have to be arrogant because of any reason/situation we face, why not?
If we try to reason with a person with above questions, and try to convince somebody to leave his nature, it will be difficult, unless our reasoning can present him with few thousand dollars in few minutes(just assuming that is what makes most people happy almost instantaneously). It’s as if somebody is asking you- “Why should i be more happy?”, “I don’t want to be more happy”. That is self deception, fear of losing what we have already, human nature? Definition almost. It feels as if to break out of human nature, we have to be arrogant, its not being tough or rude, its just is some sort of supply if a demand occurs, it isnt common, or is it? But arrogance will be usually a incorrect measurement of X and Y’s as mentioned above.
I was just thinking, what level of arrogance do i represent?