It has been my unfortunate personal experience that obnoxious, entitled, snotty, stuck up, hateful, narcissic, me-first, I-deserve-it-all, the-very-best-is-just-good-enough, screw you, douchebags/dickheads are spawned by parents with the exact same characteristics. The apple does not fall far from the tree. The spawn in question is a pretty girl and she is going to go through men in her life like a shark in order to get what she wants, when she wants it, and it had better be the very best because she deserves it.
I don’t think that teaching your kid to be like one of the Cobra Kai guys is a good strategy for the long-term success of your kid.
So, you’re raising a Wall Street executive? Congessional lobbyist? Evil Overlord?
It depends where you live, I suppose. Although Game Theory seems to suggest that altruism is always the best single long-term policy, in some situations a policy of alternating being a shit and being nice, depending on feedback, will win out too.
So you’ll have to teach your kid all that, and also how to be nice, I guess - the superficial charm won’t do enough, they’d have to actually be nice for stretches of time in all ways, but be able to switch back. Psycho, in other words.
But this only applies in a society that values individualism over the group. In better-socialized countries like Scandawegia, Japan, China, I don’t think the stategy you propose will be as certain of success as in America or the UK/France/Italy…
Sounds like a recipe for a personality disorder to me.
My experience is that kids who learn early that other people can’t be trusted (which is what you’re describing sounds like) tend to often be a bit messed up later on.
A constant 1 to 5 percent of people are born sociopaths. So they are born, not made.
Interesting question, though. Yesterday, I debated with myself if I should pay through the nose for a set of legal Disney movies for my toddler, or if I could save hundreds of bucks buying ripped versions on Ebay. What would I be teaching my kid that way? (I bought the copies).
I don’t think parents have enough control over their children to inculcate within them these traits.
It won’t work, they will rebel and devote their lives to feeding the poor.
Both Machiavello and Sun Tzu would disagree with the other two points.
The child would turn on you in your old age, if not sooner.
Sure. Pretty much any job tlike that. Specifically I was thinking about the hoard of assholes I just spent the week with at an industry conference.
That’s sort of what I mean by “superficial charm”. Basically you aren’t nice because you are a nice person. You are nice because it is expediant for getting what you want.
Kids learn what they live despite what we try and teach them.
Sometimes I hear myself saying something my parents used to say and it makes me laugh. You are the model that they will follow. Although they will go through periods of disdain for us they will become like us.
I have the same morals that my parents had. My children as adults also have the same morals I had that they swore they never would.
So to raise your kids to be douche bags, you have to be one yourself.
LOL! Thanks, I needed a laugh this morning!
To be honest, you’re probably overestimating your ability to shape your kid. What’s really going to turn him* to the dark side is the success of these strategies among his peer group. If his schoolmates have the wit to shun and ridicule him when he pulls this Evil Overlord crap, he’ll quickly adapt (or become a bitter, twisted loner fully occupied with revenge fantasies.) If, on the other hand, he finds that these strategies do make him popular, successful, and otherwise rewarded he’ll stick with them.
So your first move is to find a community full of no-good peaceniks intent on raising their kids as co-operative angels, then introduce your devil-spawn into their midst.
(Or her. I assume you’re as happy raising a “bitch” as an “asshole”.)
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The parent’s of this type of kid are probably the people that will suffer the most from their manipulation, lies, and theft.
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Whilst ruthlessness and lack of empathy can IMO be useful in certain vocations and situations, this is usually only the case when they are present with other skills and factors. Amoral intelligent people, with a strong will to succeed, might go far, but if they aren’t so bright and driven they will probably live a much happier life by obeying the law. The vast majority of your high school bullies are probably now living extremely miserable lives.
So would Nietzsche: “mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man”. In fact, teaching children Nietzsche would only undermine most of the other points on the OP’s list, and Machiavelli and Sun Tzu wouldn’t support many of them either.
This isn’t to say that a child raised on a diet of these three thinkers would likely wind up the next Francis of Assisi or anything, but most of the specific “values” mentioned in the OP would have been seen as cowardly and contemptible by these men.
So… You have to be an asshole to be a Wall Street Executive? What is this, stereotype week?
In my experience the only traits you’ll find in common between executives are hard work, focus, and ambition. Usually they have very good people skills. Other than that, they run the gamut from Mother Theresa to Gordon Gekko - just like everyone else.
I also think you give your kid far better odds of being successful in life if you teach him or her to follow society’s traditional values. There’s nothing about being an asshole that carries an advantage in a modern society.
That’s an interesting question for debate in itself. Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen jobs in all different sectors of the economy in which assholery leads to profit. Here’s three examples:
(1) BestBuy associate whose job it is to sell HDTVs. Some of these guys feel bad about the lies they are asked to tell customers about the $75 HDMI cables (“oh, the better cables give you a much better picture”), so they only give the pitch half-heartedly, or don’t give it all. But some of them could give two shits about knowingly ripping people off, and I’m sure they make more in commissions for it. This is true in a lot of different sales jobs. I once worked for a company (for about 1 day) whose whole business model was targeting uninformed small businesses, offering them confusing and incomplete information about certain credit processing services, and getting them to sign up for much more expensive services because they didn’t fully understand how it worked.
(2) Lawyer whose job it is to buy up debts and bring collection actions. Some of these guys go through the work of actually serving process to the debtors and following the rules. But some of them could give two shits about process, and they will fake service just to get default judgment because its just cheaper that way and they are happy to pay the various fines when they get caught. This too can get multiplied across large parts of the legal field, from lawyers who overbill their clients to lawyers who make a living frivolously suing deep-pocketed defendants knowing that it is cheaper to settle than to fight.
(3) Real estate agent whose job it is to find people homes. Some of these guys are honest and will tell you about the recent ant infestation, or the train that goes by, etc. But some of them could give two shits about full disclosure, and they will happily get more leases signed than their competitors by being dicks. This phenomenon is also multiplied across many service jobs.
I could go on and on, from used car salesmen to movers to financial services executives. The simple fact of life in a market economy is that it pays to not feel bad about deliberately fucking people over. Indeed, it can be very rewarding if you take joy in it.
Generally, necessity brings people around to being able to fulfill a sales position. I don’t think you really need to teach someone that as a child, a hungry stomach does it well enough.
And it’s not being an asshole, it’s just doing salesmanship. You can still go back home and be a perfectly nice person.
One can be a nice asshole. Even a loving, caring asshole. The loving doesn’t absolve the asshole-ness.
Salesmanship is not the same thing as intentionally misleading or outright lying.
I agree. I think people are equating two different kinds of “being a jerk”. There are jerks who are mean, obnoxious or nasty people. They say what is on their mind and don’t care about the consequences. Ironically, they are probably actually very honest, but in many ways that honesty causes them to not only offend others but to become resentful that they have oastracized themselves.
Then there is the other kind (which is what I’m talking about). This is the borderline sociopath who will flatter and charm and be outwardly polite to get what he wants. But then he will act in a completely contrary way if it suits him. And if you have nothing to offer this sort of jerk, he will likely treat you with a combination of contempt or disdain. They may actually be a fun and likeable person, provided you don’t ever need anything from them.