Trump, Jobs, Zuckerberg: We idolize jerks

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

This is an age of assholism simply because we find the phenomenon and its practitioners so interesting — or provocative, or compelling, or compellingly repulsive, or sometimes all of those at once. I’m not thinking so much of assholes of opportunity like Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson, or of incidental assholes like James Cameron or Brett Favre, whose assholism only adds a colorful sidebar to an independently impressive career. There’s little about those people that’s particular to the age, save that in earlier periods the public probably would have been spared the details of the personal tics and twitches that qualify them for the asshole label. What’s unique to our time is the fixation with certain iconic assholes, who exemplify each in his way the problematic allure of the species.

Steve Jobs, for example, was a modern personification of the asshole as achiever, someone whose assholism seems to be inextricable from his success as a leader. The traditional paragons of the type are the storied tough guys from military, business, and public life whose leadership styles are packaged in memoirs and advice books like "What It Takes to Be #1: Lombardi on Leadership," Rudy Giuliani’s "Leadership," "29 Leadership Secrets" from Jack Welch, and above all a four-foot shelf of inspirational works on George S. Patton, the first general to have been explicitly designated an asshole by both his men and his superiors. From "Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare," we learn:

Salon.com > Geoffrey Nunberg

Trump, Jobs, Zuckerberg: We idolize jerks