Category: psychology

The Metaphysics of Marriage

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“The difference between marriage and cohabitation is nothing more than a piece of paper,” they’ve told me for as long as I remember. I believed that so much that I didn’t just repeat it and preach it, I lived it. I loved it too, for a short time, until my cohabitant turned combatant. She and I got into one of those mean and dirty “I’m not sure the relationship is going to survive this, and if it does, I’m not sure I want to carry on” fights. Our breakup was a “no harm, no foul, and it was nice learning how a relationship can fail with you” breakup. It was so easy, it was too easy. “These things don’t work out some of the times. See ya, sista.” When I married, however, I learned that after a big fight, both parties go to their respective corners, talk to their managers, and develop a game plan to use in the next round. The next round can involve better strategies to win that round, or it can involve a series of compromises. I’m sure long-time cohabitants go through all the same issues, but at the end of the day, it just seemed so easy for me to walk away. Marriage just felt more substantial, and I found myself working harder to make my marriage survive and thrive. I didn’t want the big “D” on my docket, so I learned that I would have to make what proved to be difficult compromises to make it work. Trying to understand how another person thinks led to me becoming well-rounded, more mature, and a better person. I advanced to a stage they call: adulthood.

Radio talk show host and writer, Dennis Prager talks about these matters, as evidenced by the quotes below, from Dennis Prager’s Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but Mr. Prager is not an expert on marriage, a marriage counselor, or a psychologist. He’s a radio talk show host and author who has been involved in two divorces. “He’s been married three times? Why would you consider his advice on marriage valuable?” I think we can all admit now that we’ve learned more from our failures in life than our successes, and Mr. Prager has also been married to his current wife for sixteen years at this point, which shows that he obviously learned from his personal failures in that regard.

“Either marriage gets better or it gets worse. Couples need to constantly work on their marriage to make their marriages strong.”

To my mind, the idea that marriage gets better or worse with age is almost exclusive to young marriages. I realize that all marriages, like all people, get better or worse with age, but if I married in my early twenties that poor marriage wouldn’t have had a chance. I changed so dramatically between twenty to forty that I was almost a completely different person. I was more stable, confident, and I knew myself better. I also liked myself better at forty, which might sound foo foo, but if we don’t like ourselves, we’re probably not going to like, much less love, another. Second marriages, or those who wait until their mid-thirties to forties, tend to last, because we make rational and less emotional decisions in life. Love is no longer the lone driver, as forty somethings have learned from the mistakes of impulsive actions and reactions based on short-term thinking. Having said all that, marriages between forty-somethings are just as apt to get worse with age for those who don’t constantly work on their marriage to make it better.

“Some romantic ideas can really hurt your marriage. Romance is good but romantic thinking can be damaging.”

“How can romance hurt a marriage? What an odd thing to write.” There’s a difference between romance and romanticizing. We all romanticize the idea of love, relationships, and marriage, and romanticizing them often leads to unreasonable expectations. The culprit for these unreasonable expectations, in my experience, is the love story. How many unrealistic expectations of romance and love are born in the love stories that movies and books provide? They give us the idyllic images we want, need, and begin to believe is out there waiting for us. “I deserve better,” we say when our very specific visions of a very specific Mr. Right don’t pan out. We all have our bullet points, of course, but did we create them, or were they created for us? When Mr. Right fails to meet our idyllic bullet points, captured in the scripts and rewrites of love stories, we venture back into the field. While there, we discover that Mr. Right is largely a fictional character born and raised to feed our need for Mr. Perfect. We all know Mr. or Miss Right is out there, we’ve seen them, but was our mental processing of this issue is a result of digital processing? Those idyllic images they planted in our head messed with us, until we created our own idyllic images that no one born of physical processing can achieve. 

“No human being can fulfill all of your wants or all of your needs.”

Calling upon our wife or husband to fulfill our wants and needs is normal, but demanding that they meet them all, with ultimatums attached, is shallow narcissism. When we enter into a long-term relationship, with expectations for marriage, we expect our prospective other to accept us as is, yet we set conditional expectations for them. We expect them to know us, as is, but we don’t place reasonable expectations on ourselves to know them as is. If we did it right, we should know our potential spouse before we marry them. We should know them warts and all, and we should know that as Dennis Prager points out the term “soul mate”  is equivalent with “clone” and unconditional love should be a term reserved for our children and pets. Relationships between full-fledged, complicated adults come loaded with a myriad of conditions, and we need to sift through the conditions we establish for them to make sure they’re fair, and if they are, we should require them to meet them and vice versa.

“Being in love means always having to say you’re sorry. The three words “I am sorry” can be more powerful than “I love you.””

The ability to apologize often comes in direct conflict with the ego. The ego is that evil, little guy who rests on our left shoulder, just below the ear, whispering, “Don’t let her get away with that.” The ego also characterizes what she said and defines and redefines it. “We firmly established our set of ground rules and our turf, and her words and actions just violated them.” It turns out, she didn’t say what we thought she said, or she didn’t mean it the way it sounded to us, and at some point our over-protective, super sensitive ego took over and led us down a bad road. “I’m sorry, and it will never happen again.”

“We need to teach him how to treat us,” her ego whispers to her. In the early stages of a marriage, or any relationship for that matter, we set out to establish ground rules for how we want to be treated. Those ground rules also come equipped with that one big, no compromising taboo. “You can violate everything else on my list, with some exceptions, except that. I’m very sensitive about that.” For a variety of reasons, and I don’t know if it’s psychological or philosophical, but when someone makes the mistake of telling us where it hurts, that’s the only wound we want to pour salt in.  

I’ve witnessed this peculiar predilection among every demographic, be it old, young, male, female, married, single, and everyone in between. I’ve seen it happen so often that I’ve toyed with it. “It’s hard to make me mad, seriously. I’m basically impervious to teasing, ribbing and razzing, but don’t make fun of my obsession with peanut butter. I’m very sensitive about that.” It’s a joke of ridiculous extremes of course, as I like peanut butter, but I have no unreasonable attachments to it. I throw that out there to see what “they” do with it. It might take an hour, a day, or even a couple days, but someone, somewhere will come up with a clever shot about my obsession with peanut butter, and you can see it on their face that they think they’re hitting us where we live, and they don’t give a durn how bad it hurts. We all do this, our great aunts, our lovers, and even our moms can’t seem to resist the temptation. Knowing about this strange psychological predilection is half the battle, and putting our loved ones through a test of their loyalty is another strange psychological predilection we all partake in, as we’re basically putting them in a position to fail. 

We’ve covered four of the eight points Dennis Prager covered in his Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but one of the most crucial characteristics I think he missed is the need to find someone who doesn’t mind being boring every once in a while. We need to find someone we enjoy spending substantial amounts of time around, and some of that time is going to be spent doing relatively boring things. That sounds obvious, but when we sift through our list of applicants for marriage or cohabitation, we find very fun and exciting men and women who can be extremely funny and wildly entertaining. The idea that a prospective mate can add some fun and excitement to our lives can plant the seeds for a whirlwind romance, as long as they’re in their element. The latter is the key for displays of charisma and energy requires a right time, right place setting, and we might need to take them out of their element to see if they can be boring. If you’re considering a substantial move with another person, you might want to find out how they conduct themselves on a lazy Sunday afternoon, playing parcheesi? Do they need a little sip of alcohol while doing it? They might not be alcoholics, but they can’t do something like play parcheesi without a little edge. Some might need a wager to pique their interest because they can’t imagine playing parcheesi just for the fun of it. Bill Murray once suggested traveling with someone before you marry them to take them out of their element, and to show you how they interact with service industry personnel. The point is we can learn a lot about loved ones at parties and other social functions, but we can learn a lot more about them by cooking a meal with them, raking the lawn, or sitting out on a deck with them and nothing more than a bottle of water. 

Self-Deprecating vs. Self-Defecating

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“… And he did that irregardless of the consequences,” I said. Yes, I said that, Mr. Student of Language and Mr. Word Lover said the word irregardless, and to my lifelong shame, I thought it was a pretty big deal that I was using a multi-syllabic in context, and I was using it in the company of a big-time erudite fella with whom I shared a love of language. And no, I was not as young as I want you to think I was at the time. Mr. Big Time, Erudite fella gave me a momentary flash of shock before he could conceal it with discretion, and in my convoluted brain, I thought that flash meant he was impressed with my ability to adroitly use a four-syllable word. 

“You know that’s not a word, right?” a person informed me later, much later. “You can say irrespective or regardless, but irregardless is not a word. It’s considered redundant.” We called this woman an obnoxious intellect, and the one thing we all know about obnoxious intellects is that they’re not afraid to show the world how much more intelligent they are. They’re also not embarrassed to correct us one-on-one, in groups, or in front of the whole class. They revel in it as a matter of fact. She wasn’t embarrassed to correct struggling intellects, authoritative intellects, or anyone else temporarily trapped into being in her company. In the aftermath of her smug correction, I decided that her correction should merit nothing more than a couple more obnoxious points on her lengthy ledger, until I found out … she was right. The pain of that realization informed me that the path from humility to humiliation is but a matter of clicks. 

How many word dudes spent a portion of their young lives saying “eckspecially?”, until someone came along and said, “Could you stop saying that, that way? It’s my personal pet peeve.” When we find ourselves in such a position, we probably say, “Saying what, what way?” If you’ve committed such a transgression, you know that some mispronunciations are just so ingrained that if no one ever corrects us, we won’t even know we’re doing it. We’re so oblivious that we might even laugh when we hear someone correct another. Yet, we hear that said that way so often, from friends and family that “That’s just kind of how we talk,” but we still wonder how long we’ve made that particular error. Now that our mind’s eye is open to this faux pas, we hear our bosses say it that way, our parents, and even some big-time, long-time broadcasters, who are paid to speak, and presumably critiqued off camera daily, still say eckspecially on a regular basis.

If you’re as fascinated with language as I am, only because you’ve screwed it up so often, you’ve no doubt focused on (see obsessed) the way your neighbor expresses himself with language. His word choices, examples, and metaphors are so unique that we wonder if he’s from a different culture or country, until he informs us that he’s from a different state that it turns out that state isn’t that far away. Then, he drops an ‘intensive purposes’ eggcorn on us, and we know it’s not just him, it’s everywhere. We hear those who influenced our maturation, and commanded our respect, say, “I could care less,” and we hear our friends say, “I consider the point mute.” Depending on how intimate our relationship is, we might correct them, but even if don’t, we’ll have a conclusion to our confusion: ‘That must be where I got it.’

We all go down different lanes on different days with different people. One guy messes up his tenses with one group, and he shows that he knows what he’s doing with them in another. Another fella abandons all modifiers outside work, then when he’s mixed in with his co-workers, he’s dropping them all over the place. When we work for large corporations, we can learn a lot about your language and our language, by listening to accents, regional dialects, and all of the shortcuts various generations use to express themselves in hip, cool jargon we call colloqualisms. It’s what we hear, what we say, and “That’s just kind of how we talk.”

“I took English as a second language,” a friend of mine said after I corrected her, “and I passed with flying colors. Seriously, I got the best grade in the class. But talking to you, Cindy, or anyone else, on a casual level, is so different that it can prove mind-boggling. There are so many rules, laws, bylaws, and customs that dictate how you speak formally versus informal and casually, and a whole bunch of laws and rules that govern all the different groups and cultures. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to speak with you guys on a conversational level, much less a professional level, and counting English, I now speak seven different languages fluently.”

Our language says a lot about our point of origin, our heritage, our education levels, our social status, and whether we’re cool or not. “No one says, ‘Aiden and I went to the store,’ my niece informed me after I corrected her. ‘We say, me and Aiden went to the store, and that’s just the way it is, whether correct or not, it’s the way we talk.’” We wouldn’t even try to say ‘and I’ among our friends, because we don’t want them to think, ‘She thinks she’s all that.’ We want people to like us, so we alter our programming to serve the group-approved vernacular. We speak different around our former-English teacher-Grandma, “because she’s always ragging on us,” than we do our more relaxed parents, and it takes time and numerous corrections for us to learn the vernacular and colloquialisms our co-workers require if we want to fit in with them. 

Moving in and out of groups, we might fall prey to colloquialisms such as the ‘fianto contraction that is so popular in certain regions of the country we don’t even know we’re saying it, until some national comedian points it out. Even then, even when the comedian points it out, it doesn’t even get that a big laugh, because no one thinks they say it. Some don’t laugh, because they’ve never heard anyone say ‘fianto before, until they do that night, the next day week, or week when their mom says, “We’re going to go to the store. You can go too, ‘fianto.” The national comedian’s joke proved to be a depth charge joke that travelled the nation, with recipients catching each other committing the offense. It then morphed into ‘fianta, which isn’t a feminine classification of the contraction, but a further colloquialism that incorporates the ‘ta as opposed to the to, in I used ‘ta do it. The colloquialisms also extend to ‘ya as opposed to you, and ‘ferya, as in I’ll do that ‘ferya, ‘fudoitfermi. That’s just the way we talk, and if you don’t, you’re probably too young, too old, or too stuffy, and you don’t understand my demo, my group, or my culture.

We learn how to read the room, in other words, and we know we have to be careful, judicious, and very selective about the words we use. If we use language properly, we can accomplish the perception of the dignified, well-educated and erudite. Some of us strive for those impressions, and we try to use big words before we’re ready, to leap frog our way to greater impressions. “Be careful!” I want to shout out to those attempting to take the big leap to shortcuts that they hope garner impressions that are out of their lane. I don’t shout these warnings from afar, as the intro of this article makes clear. I’ve stepped into the multi-syllabic, malapropism minefield so often that I’ve experienced the, D) all of the above, answer when it comes to the difference between humility and humiliation, and I want to caution them to stay in their lane.

***

“I found out just yesterday that the term is scot-free,” a friend of mine said. I’ve been saying scotch-free my whole life. Why didn’t anyone correct me before?” We don’t correct each other because we don’t want to be that guy, because nobody likes that guy, and I’m only that guy with immediate family members, because I have a ‘better they hear it from me than that guy who will mock them’ motto when it comes to family. It’s also possible that we don’t hear the difference between scotch-free and scot-free, because it’s often so close that it flows so quick and smooth. If we catch it, we say, “Who cares, it was close enough,” which leads to their, “Why didn’t anyone tell me I’ve been saying it wrong for decades” complaint.

***

I didn’t have time to shout, “Be careful!” to Jarvis “the co-worker” when he casually stepped into the big word, multi-syllabic malapropism minefield by attempting to display a learned lexicon. Jarvis “the co-worker” was a big gob-a-goo who may have been dating material 80lbs ago, and he was a little greazy, but that only led us to believe he was smarter than the rest of us. Our equation for that solution was based on the process of elimination. What does an unattractive man with little-to-no charisma focus on? He must been so focused on developing his intellect that he forgot to develop a personality, or keep himself trim, and well-groomed. For all of his flaws, Jarvis “the co-worker” could charm us with his ability to poke fun at himself. Throughout the short time we worked together, the man told a number of jokes regarding his inability to adhere to the hygienic standard, his poor work ethic, and his weight problem.  

“You send that problem over to Jarvis the Hutt,” Jarvis said to a co-worker who was asking the group for help regarding a particular case she was working on, “and I’ll make sure it gets screwed up for good.” We all went quiet for a beat, gathering up what he just said, and then someone giggled, Jarvis joined them, and we all joined in. That comment balled up just about everything we thought of his workplace abilities in a tight, brief joke, and it crushed. Even the little, old lady, who never said anything to anyone, was laughing.

Anytime we hit that hard, we feel compelled to add a cherry atop the joke, and I didn’t have time to warn Jarvis “the co-worker” to “Be careful!” about stepping into the big word, multi-syllabic malapropism minefield, because I didn’t know was coming. “You know me,” he said “I’m very self-defecating.” I don’t know if people didn’t hear it, because he missed it by just a smidge, or if they thought he was close enough, but when we take the ‘P’ and the ‘R’ out of the sentence and replace them with an ‘F’, we craft an entirely different image in the mind’s eye. My first thought was that Jarvis just committed a slip of the tongue, but that ‘slip of the tongue’ thought generated a conjunctive image in my mind, more disturbing than Jarvis’s error. He was so close that I can only assume that whoever used the term in his company either didn’t enunciate the word self-deprecating very well, or Jarvis wasn’t using his listening skills, because he accidentally entered into my Personal Word Usage Hall of Fame by proudly declaring that he didn’t need assistance removing waste from his body.

“Well, that probably explains why your jokes stink so much,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“You said self-defecating, and I think you meant to say self-deprecating,” I said. He gave me one of those looks that suggested he struggling to understand, but he didn’t want to admit to it, so I explained the difference to him.

“No wonder you gave me such a odd look.”

“Yeah, I was going to say, you probably don’t want to practice that in public.”

“Why didn’t anyone correct me before?” Jeremy wondered aloud. Then, he added, “I wonder how often I’ve made that error, over the years?”

Our personal hall of shame slips probably don’t match Jarvis’s Hall of Fame malapropism, but we’ve all heard things incorrectly and repeated them so often that when obnoxious intellects call us out on them, they introduce us to the fine line between that humility and humiliation. Humility is a statement we make, by choice, that we’re no better than anyone else, and humiliation is something inflicted upon us by others attempting to say that we’re worse than everybody. They’re so closely linked that they’re both rooted in the same Latin term humilis. Yet, if humility is a self-imposed choice we make to think of ourselves less, how come the humiliation thrust upon us by others makes us think of ourselves so much more? 

Know-Nothings vs. Mr. Know-It-Alls

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“You’re such a Mr. Know-it-all,” she said, he said, they all said.

“A know-it-all? Me? Are you serious? I’ll have to check my ledger, but I’m pretty sure I’m about seven I.Q. points away from a know-nothing.”

The first time someone accused me of being a Mr. Know-it-all, I did not know what to do. What defense are we supposed to mount? “Actually, Sandy, when you get to know me, you’ll realize I’m actually quite the dullard.” Prior to that charge, I was pretty sure my plight in life would consist of various insults regarding my lack of intelligence, so Sandy’s charge left me speechless. I thought it was absurdist humor on her part. You know that joke. The jokester holds the tongue-in-cheek preposterousness of their joke in, and they hold, hold, until ultimate seriousness is established, and then they break, “I’m just kidding.” I waited for that break, and not only did it never arrive, she turned to someone else to engage in an entirely different conversation, confident that her point hit home. The idea that she was serious only made the charge seem so absurd, ridiculous, and hilarious.

“She just called me a Mr. Know-it-all,” I whispered to the guy to my right, who knew me better, but he decided not to join in on the laughter.  

We all know a Mr. Know-it-all. They usually wear silk, magenta robes while smoking imported cigars, saying, “You’re just so unsophisticated” and “I don’t agree with you, because I choose to think deeper.” I knew I was not one of those, because I knew to be sophisticated, you had to have “a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture.” To qualify for Mr. Know-it-all status, I also thought you had to be complicated, and when someone questioned the veracity of your claims, you said things like, “It’s complicated.”

I don’t care how you break down your definition of a Mr. Know-it-all, if you tried to tell my good friends and family that I was one of them, they’d laugh harder than I would, and they wouldn’t have been kind to me in their assessment. In an effort to appear objective, I must admit that if a number of people level such a charge there might be something to it, and I might be substituting an exaggeration of the term Mr. Know-it-all to clear myself of all charges.

***

In his BBC Science Focus Magazine article, titled The Hidden Psychology of ‘Know-It-Alls’: Why They Think They Know Everything, with a You don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this subtitle, writer Dean Burnett attempts to tackle the psychology of the Mr. Know-it-all phenomenon from the “Don’t you just hate them” perspective. He also tackles the issue from a “It turns out know-it-alls are always wrong for a variety of psychological reasons” perspective.

He concludes his article with the note: “It could be that to become a know-it-all, you have to know far too little.” It’s a nice, theatrical summary of his thematic “Don’t you just hate know-it-alls” piece, but if you “know far too little” aren’t you a know-nothing?

For those of us who make it a habit of reading articles from the other perspective, as some of us are inclined to do, we think Mr. Burnett loathes people who are right most of the time. We can only guess that he has been corrected, correctly, so often that he was probably pounding his keys when he wrote this article. We can all empathize, because it is annoying when we start in on a heart-felt discussion, only to have someone step in on our story and correct us on some seemingly insignificant fact. When it happens often enough, it can build a level of resentment that leads us to write an article on it.

We could be wrong, and since we’ve never heard of Mr. Burnett prior to this article, we must assume we probably are. Yet, we have to think that Mr. Burnett wouldn’t build such resentment for a know-nothing who is easily checked and always wrong. We have to assume that if Mr. Burnett decided to write an article on this subject after running into a lot of people who know more than he does, and his reservoir of patience for people who call him out dried up long before he sat behind a computer.

I write this as a former know-nothing who supposedly became a “Mr. Know-It-All” to some, but I learned. I learned to avoid the bullet points of a Mr. Know-it-all, because I learned that everyone loathes a Mr. Know-it-all.

If I were commissioned to write an article on know-it-alls, I would avoid Mr. Burnett’s populist, “Don’t you just hate them” clapter angle and try to focus on the gestation cycle of the know-it-all, as I know it.

Who are the know-it-alls that we’ve all come to loathe, and how did they come into being? My guess is they followed a path similar to mine. For all of the conscious and subconscious reasons listed in Mr. Burnett’s article, the know-it-alls I know are uncomfortable, insecure types who seek to prove their newfound knowledge. We, like presumably Mr. Burnett, grew tired of them correcting us, and when we did our research to call these people out on their corrections, we found out that … we were wrong. It is so embarrassing that it can prove humbling to the point of that thin line that separates humble from humiliating, and we never wanted it to happen again, so we went out and gathered ourselves some information.  

We sought information outlets, and we found good, great, and no-so-great outlets. We gobbled up all that information up like the nutrient-deprived individuals we were. Were we right, no, but we were learning, and the learning proved intoxicating. Did we lord this newfound information over others? We might have, but it wasn’t about that for us. We wanted to prove ourselves to ourselves that we were no longer dim-wit bulbs. We were never those gifted intellects who have known nothing but certitude and confidence in our intellectual abilities. Those types rarely need to prove themselves in these arenas. We did, because we just got sick of being run over. 

We learned everything from the “important” to the silly and inconsequential to try to avoid being called a know-nothing ever again. We wanted answers to the five Ws on the ways in which the world worked. Our motivations were not altruistic of course, as we wanted to prove ourselves, but when we saw our friends wrestle with their own know-nothing stigmas, we thought we might be able to help them out. We were eager to share all of the information we were gleaning. 

“[Know-it-alls are] individuals who will enthusiastically lecture you about any topic or area,” Mr. Burnett writes, “despite blatantly having little to no expertise in what they’re talking about. And often, even though you do.”

We’ve all been in those conversations with a group of let’s say four-to-five people, and we’ve heard them drop all the typical platitudes and takes. We stand in the middle of all that, politely listening and waiting for people to finish. “Hey, have you ever heard this [different perspective on a topic we all thought we knew so well]?” we ask when they are done. 

“Okay, Mr. Know-it-all,” they say with exasperated fatigue.  

“No, I’m not saying you’re right or wrong,” we say. “I just thought you may have never heard that perspective before.” The other perspective is the cookie they were supposed to chew on, and they’re supposed to say, I don’t think that’s right, but what an interesting perspective. Let me chew on that for a bit. 

We love it when others open up other avenues of thought, and sometimes we make the mistake of thinking others love it as much as we do. We think it might ignite another thought process in their head and stimulate further conversation. It doesn’t, because those who loathe Mr. Know-it-alls loathe different perspectives, because it challenges their worldview. Mr. Know-it-alls learned the hard way that some of the times it’s just easier to go along to get along.

Mr. Burnett argues that Mr. Know-it-alls base their assumption of superior knowledge of a subject on a psychological quirk we call the ‘naïve realism’ phenomenon, “[Naïve realism] describes how people instinctively assume that their perception of the world reflects objective reality. In actuality, everything we perceive and ‘know’ about the world has been filtered through a complex mesh of cognitive biases, sensory shortcuts, shifting emotion-infused memories, and more.”

This is undoubtedly true, but isn’t that what we call a quality conversation? If you bring your subjective insight into a conversation, and I bring mine, it might be possible for the two of us to arrive at an interesting conclusion that leaves us both stimulated and satisfied. Even if we don’t, different perspectives can result in different perspectives that might act as a linchpin for greater insight. It might also lead to an interesting conversation. No? I’m the Mr. Know-it-all here? 

If you’ve ever reached a point where you thought you knew-it-all, you encountered another know-it-all who may have been a know-nothing, but they dropped that one, tiny little “What was that again?” nugget on you that shifted your perspective on the matter just enough to make you think they were not such a know-nothing after all. I love that. I love when someone manages to disprove all of my preconceived notions about them.

As an alleged Mr. Know-it-all, I appreciate my species in one respect. When I meet a different genus of my species, I see it as my intellectual duty to defeat their thesis to bolster mine, and in the process, I gain greater understanding of my philosophy on an issue.

Some of you might read this and think, I’m not a Mr. Know-it-all, or a know-nothing. I follow a fundamental understanding of the way the world works, I just don’t lord it over my friends, family, or co-workers. I’m just Larry.

“Ok, Larry,” we say almost instinctively dismissing the ‘D) none of the aboves’ who strive to achieve the hallowed nothingness status to avoid the ridicule of believing in something. Larry strives to avoid being a know-it-all, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s not a know-nothing, but as we watch him drive away, we realize he’s probably a Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy. Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy covers every inch of his bumper with stickers, because he has no outlet. He doesn’t correct anyone, because he fears someone perceiving him as a know-it-all, but it eats at him in a way that could lead some to believe that he might be a know-nothing, so he wears T-shirts that say important stuff, and he informs those driving behind him that he is kind of a big deal. I’ve learned to avoid Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy more than Mr. Know-it-all, because Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy often walks into a conversation packaged in a pressurized swimsuit.  

On those rare occasions when a Larry cannot maintain his silence, we see him transform from mild-mannered Larry into Qualifier Man. Qualifier Man’s powers are cased in efforts to appeal to everyone all of the time. He can’t talk about the temperature of the water in the cooler at work without prefacing his comments with at least three qualifiers. His qualifiers please us, because he’ll openly admit that he doesn’t know enough to know what he’s talking about, but after about three or four displays of his prowess, his qualifiers become tedious. “Just say it!” we mentally scream at him. By the time Qualifier Man finally begins his “it’s just my opinion and feel free to disagree” characterization of the temperature of the water, he’s too late. We’ve already summarily dismissed his opinion in the manner his qualifiers require.

Larry makes sure that we know that he knows that others’ opinions differ from his, and he concludes that buildup by offering up a milquetoast opinion that tries to appeal to all of the people all of the time. “Just put your stuff on the line,” we mentally scream when he’s done, and while we’re all thinking that, his advocates, his opponents, and probably even a Mr. Dean Burnett dismiss him. The important note here is that we do not seek to dismiss Larry, but it’s a natural reaction to his “I could be right, or I could be wrong,” and “I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with what you’re saying,” qualifiers that take so long that we don’t like him or dislike him. We dismiss him. Say what you want about all of the Mr. Know-it-alls, but you respect them for taking a stand, believing what they believe, and being unafraid to say it amid the “Don’t you just hate them?” crowd. When you’re debating how Latin American grain prices affect American farmers, is Larry your go-to-fella? No, you go to that blowhard, Mr. Know-it-all, because you almost accidentally respect his opinions more, even when you disagree with them. 

“If you’re going to be wrong,” my 8th grade teacher taught me, “be wrong with conviction!” She said that after I wrote an assigned opinion piece in which I carefully considered all opinions all of the time in that paper. Mr. Burnett alludes to the idea that a Mr. Know-it-all strives for respect, and we can see that, but respect is a nebulous result. In a world of Dean Burnetts, hating those who correct him, I would suggest that the art of gaining respect has less to do with being correct (though a lengthy track record of being wrong will lead to a Mr. Hot-Air characterization) and far more to do with a confident presentation, or “going after it with gusto” than being a pleasant, nice Qualifier Man, who fears being a Mr. Know-it-all, ever will.