Why Politics Often Requires The “No A-Hole Rule”

Around Minn Donkey rescueInteresting piece out of The Atlantic’s June 2015 issue that talks about the merits — I’ll refrain from using the word virtue — of being a… well… you know…

We have some well-worn aphorisms to steer us one way or the other, courtesy of Machiavelli (“It is far better to be feared than loved”), Dale Carnegie (“Begin with praise and honest appreciation”), and Leo Durocher (who may or may not have actually said “Nice guys finish last”). More recently, books like The Power of Nice and The Upside of Your Dark Side have continued in the same vein: long on certainty, short on proof.

And yet suspicions to the contrary remain—fueled, in part, by another book: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. The average business reader, worried Tom McNichol in an online article for The Atlantic soon after the book’s publication, might come away thinking: “See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I’ll be successful like Steve.”

You can see where this is going in a hurry.  Nice guys don’t finish first… they finish dead freakin’ last.  If the old line from Paul Newman in the movie Harper rings true, only cream and bastards rise.

I’ll leave the gentle reader to determine which predominate in politics.  Yet the line rings true in other fields — academia, for instance:

He tells a story about a former student who visited his office. The young man had been kicked out of his start-up by — Pfeffer speaks the words incredulously—the Stanford alumni mentor he himself had invited into his company. Had there been warning signs?, Pfeffer asked. Yes, said the student. He hadn’t heeded them, because he’d figured the mentor was too big of a deal in Silicon Valley to bother meddling in his little affairs.

“What happens if you put a python and a chicken in a cage together?,” Pfeffer asked him. The former student looked lost. “Does the python ask what kind of chicken it is? No. The python eats the chicken. And that’s what she” — the alumni mentor — “does. She eats people like you for breakfast.”

Those who have been in the political game long enough know precisely the behavior being discussed here, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s governance, office politics, water cooler politics, or any other human interaction.

Of course, there is a certain pragmatic merit to it all.  He who dies with the most toys and all that.

Yet there is a difference between the sort of merit gained by virtue, and that which is gained by vice.  In politics, too easily we believe the path to power should be gained by any means at one’s disposal.  No small wonder then why many people view politics (and politicians) as a vicious sport.

Gracián_GrausBalthasar Gracian was a 17th century Spanish Jesuit during the time of the late scholastics who mused on these topics, especially in an era dominated by Machiavelli’s The Prince — a latter day Rules for Radicals if there ever was one.  Gracian too was appalled by the lengths individuals would go to power, and instead demonstrated that one could be both a gentleman and a politician, with a few guidelines in his Art of Worldly Wisdom:

Better Mad with the rest of the World than Wise alone.  So say politicians. If all are so, one is no worse off than the rest, whereas solitary wisdom passes for folly. So important is it to sail with the stream. The greatest wisdom often consists in ignorance, or the pretence of it. One has to live with others, and others are mostly ignorant. “To live entirely alone one must be very like a god or quite like a wild beast,” but I would turn the aphorism by saying: Better be wise with the many than a fool all alone. There be some too who seek to be original by seeking chimeras.

Gracian quotes Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics commentaries on autarkiea (or self-sufficiency) to make a point.

In conversation recently, a friend remarked to me about how our nomination contests within the Republican Party ought to be “spirited exchanges of ideas”  — an euphemism for as nasty and brutal as they have to be — and once over, we should all rally to the standard.

The problem with that is that, rather than approaching the process with the a robust nomination contest within a process designed to bring forth the best candidate, we often emerge with a vicious process that produces mere survivors.  On this, Gracian offers advice:

Wage War Honourably.  You may be obliged to wage war, but not to use poisoned arrows. Every one must needs act as he is, not as others would make him to be. Gallantry in the battle of life wins all men’s praise: one should fight so as to conquer, not alone by force but by the way it is used. A mean victory brings no glory, but rather disgrace. Honour always has the upper hand. An honourable man never uses forbidden weapons, such as using a friendship that’s ended for the purposes of a hatred just begun: a confidence must never be used for a vengeance. The slightest taint of treason tarnishes the good name. In men of honour the smallest trace of meanness repels: the noble and the ignoble should be miles apart. Be able to boast that if gallantry, generosity, and fidelity were lost in the world men would be able to find them again in your own breast.

Probably needs to be printed on postcards and mailed to folks, eh?

Gracian makes a show about the habit of advancing others before yourself.  It wraps up all of Gracian’s virtues: character, reputation, charity, magnanimity, intellect, courtesy.  My grandfather owned a copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom that was handed down to him by the Jesuit priest who adopted him, long before it was re-popularized by the mass publication market.

One might think I would have had this committed to memory.  Sadly, whenever I pick up the book, I always find the admonishments I constantly miss.  To wit:

Do not make Mistakes about Character.  That is the worst and yet easiest error. Better be cheated in the price than in the quality of goods. In dealing with men, more than with other things, it is necessary to look within. To know men is different from knowing things. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.

In that, I am often far too trusting of others.

Yet there has to be some demarcation line between the radical and faux-revolutionaries and the men and women of character in this world.  Sometimes, that means rejecting the shortcuts to power, and turning one’s back on the vicious in favor of the virtuous, lasting, and true.  After all, is this not what conservatives are ultimately trying to conserve?

So no — it does not pay to be a jerk, at least not in the long run.  One might get a short-term gain temporarily pirating the reputation and hard work of others, but in truth they are only punching above their weight class.

They all come down to earth eventually.

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