Asshole Magnet
“The problem with Taleb is not that he’s an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.”—Dan from Prague
“Know what you are, John? You’re an asshole magnet.” She said other mean stuff (as did I), but I’ve forgotten the rest. We were in the middle of that particularly painful part of the break-up ritual. When the sweet wine of love turns into bitter vinegar in your mouth. When the potion you and Isolde quaffed a lifetime ago turns into a kind of Tourette’s-inducing truth serum, and we fall into an epileptic fit of compulsive truth-telling.
It’s taken me a couple of decades to realize this, but she was right about me. I do in fact have a lot of highly disagreeable friends. But this isn’t by design; it’s an unfortunate side-effect, the unavoidable byproduct of a lifelong love affair with courage. No virtue charms me more. But every love comes at a cost, even the love of a virtue; and alas, the courageous are often disagreeable and sometimes reckless. It goes with the territory.
We say “de gustibus non est disputandum” (there’s no accounting for taste) when we’re feeling cornered and embarrassed (e.g., when someone discovers your Céline Dion CDs, your kitten calendars, your extensive collection of vintage garden gnomes). We say it when we’re feeling lazy or wish to avoid conflict (e.g., you say “tow-may-tow” and I’ll say “tow-mah-tow”). We say it when we do not wish to defend that which we dimly suspect to be indefensible. Why do we frequently find it hard to give a rational account of our aesthetic judgments? I’m not sure. But I know it applies to our taste in people just as much as our taste in music, calendars, and collectibles.
Just as there are hot people who leave us cold, there are good people who we respect immensely but avoid socially. Love and friendship often march to the beat of unseen drummers. When pressed by a modern-day Socrates, I find it very hard, at times, to justify my seemingly eclectic taste in friends. Most of the time, I really couldn’t tell you why I gravitate toward the one, avoid the other. All I can say with certainty is that it’s got something to do with a highly idiosyncratic estimation of a person’s character.
I can tolerate some pretty major flaws in my friends, flaws that others find insufferable, and yet there’s one relatively minor vice, stinginess, which I find thoroughly repulsive. My estimation of the virtues is equally uneven. I find, time and again, that I am partial to particular virtues, such as courage. Moral clarity’s great but courage is better; because your heart can be in the right place, but if your balls aren’t, you probably won’t do the right thing when it matters.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)
