Who was the most pompous jerk in history?

[sydhe]

In recent history, Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan is right up there.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov. I particularly like the rotating statue atop the Neutrality Arch.

Further back, Charles X of France and Nero are candidates. Isaac Newton was pretty unpleasant, too.

 

[aronnax]

He declared himself emperor, not king and his habit of eating human flesh and drinking blood puts him so far into crazy-territory that he should be disqualified.

King, Emperor, same diff.

He was dropped of charges of cannablism.

However, he said he had secret meeting with the Pope and then proclaimed himeself the 13th Apostle. That must count for something!

 

[civiijkw]

.... Isaac Newton was pretty unpleasant, too.

I think Newton got some training in being a jerk by how he was treated by the prior recognized head of the scientific establishment. He was obviously a genius but that head could not accept that somebody else might eclipse him and thus pushed many people to doing a hatchet job on Newton's work.
Actually there have been many scientists that have denigrated valid work and stolen others ideas. Without checking my references, I think one scientist was ostracized because he tried to reduce the death rate of new mothers by getting doctors to wash their hands before delivering a child (he actually gained enough influence in one hospital to enforce that for a while and reduce its death rate, but after he was kicked out the doctors merrily went back delivering with dirty hands and a higher mortality rate amongst mothers).

Various media figures have a lot of experience at jerkdom because trashing somebody's reputation is a good way to get ratings (i.e. look at what happened to Richard Jewell at the Atlanta Olympics or look at Dan Rather's investigative reporting). An extreme example is how the start of the Spanish-American war was instigated.

There are a number of late 19th and early 20th century industrialists that were unpleasant. How many people would dismiss concerns about a social revolution by saying "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half of the working class". Social Darwinism was taken to such an extent that there were some seemingly plausible arguments actually in favor of slavery because at least the master would make sure that his slaves didn't simply die (if the actual treatment of slaves had not been so bad then a good spinmeister might have taken that argument and been successful in avoiding the universal condemnation of slavery - settling for merely more or less widespread condemnation of slavery).

Christopher Columbus comes to mind. During his first voyage to the Americas he declared that a reward would go to the first to sight land. When the lookout cried out the equivalent of "land ho" Columbus looked for himself and then gave himself the reward because land wasn't really sighted until he saw it.

 

[Gooblah]

Christopher Columbus. Genocided an entire native population, introduced smallpox to the Americas, refused to believe he had landed anywhere but India, gave natives a label of "indians" which stuck, etc, etc.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Joan of Ark

How could she be pompous ? She's been burnt when she was 19!!

@everyone:

Louis XIV was probably obnoxious, but De Gaulle wasn't. He just succeeded during a short period of time to give to Frenchmen the illusion their country was better than the truth. Someone bringing hope can't be considered pompous to me. In all your French bashing, you tend from time to time to forget that French people are also human beings, with a heart and feelings. They aren't simple coakroaches that is fun to crush on the carpet.

Anyway, the most pompous guy I've ever heard of is probably Jean-Paul Sartre. Never I've seen someone so much wrong in all his ideas pretending all his life to be a genius history finally proved he wasn't at all.

 

[civiijkw]

Christopher Columbus. Genocided an entire native population, introduced smallpox to the Americas, refused to believe he had landed anywhere but India, gave natives a label of "indians" which stuck, etc, etc.

I think I have a different definition of jerk. I don't think Columbux realized that he was introducing smallpox, so I doubt if that can be used to label him a jerk. On the other hand, in the 1760s Lord Jeffrey Amherst deliberately gave smallpox-laden blankets to the Indians with the express purpose of having them die. That comes closer, but I think it bypasses mere jerkdom and goes directly to demonicism.

I'd think that a jerk is somebody who does something, knowing what the effect is, and not caring if the effect is bad. This is different from things like Amherst's action that were done specifically for an effect. That also removes from mere jerkdom actions such as Mongol catapulting of plague-ridden bodies into besieged cities, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Dresden, Sherman's march through Georgia, the Taliban destruction of the giant Buddhas, Stalin's purges, etc.

The action must be deliberate. That removes things like most introductions of smallpox to Indians and the introduction of syphilis to Europeans.

The action must be with a callous disregard for the consequences.

 

[luiz]

Anyway, the most pompous guy I've ever heard of is probably Jean-Paul Sartre. Never I've seen someone so much wrong in all his ideas pretending all his life to be a genius history finally proved he wasn't at all.

Certainly the most pompous philosopher, gotta agree.

 

[Loki130]

I hear Macarthur was the kind of guy you'd see drive by and think, 'what a jerk' (or something along those lines, anyway)

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Existentialists and postmodernists generally fit the bill as well.

 

[citedon]

Many of the most valuable contributions to mankind have been achieved by people whom many others consider to be pompous jerks. Quite often, they are very task oriented and don't care what others think about them. Of course, I don't mean to say that all pompous jerks accomplish great things or that all great things are accomplished by pompous jerks, but it sure seems to happen a lot.

 

[kcwong]

I don't mean some crazy dictator or some scheming ne'er do well, I mean pompous self-rightious mean-spirited disagreeable jerk. Who was it?

That is not a single entity for our time.

I'd say spammers, but among them, spammers that spam just to disrupt and annoy others.

Closely followed by programmers who create spam bots.

 

[Moss]

I don't mean some crazy dictator or some scheming ne'er do well, I mean pompous self-rightious mean-spirited disagreeable jerk. Who was it?

In an online realm there lies a poster who calls himself Perfection...I think he'd be up there...

 

[Fifty]

Anyway, the most pompous guy I've ever heard of is probably Jean-Paul Sartre. Never I've seen someone so much wrong in all his ideas pretending all his life to be a genius history finally proved he wasn't at all.

Unfortunately, thats a major problem with 20th century French philosophy in general, which was more or less an insult both to the field of philosophy and to the tradition of great French philosophers like Descartes. French philosophy has become more about "being an intellectual" than actual serious analysis of philosophical problems.

The vast majority of good philosophy today comes from the USA, England, Canada, and Australia.

 

[Perfection]

What about New Zealand?

 

[citedon]

What about New Zealand?

Would you care to expand on that? I'm not trying to be difficult. I just don't know a lot about New Zealand. About the only thing I know is that the sheep outnumber the people. I had always thought that they were a pretty agreeable sort of people. Was it just a joke?

 

[Plotinus]

Pope Alexander VI (the Borgia pope) deserves consideration. He raised the bar very high for hypocrisy, greed, corruption, ruthlessness, nepotism and a lot of other negative words that I can't think of right now.

I think Alexander VI does not deserve a lot of the criticism he gets, like many of the Renaissance popes.

Churchill was certainly arrogant and pompous, not too sure about the Jerk part. I find it hard to dislike anyone who thought burning De Gaulle at the stake was a good idea.

I find it very easy to dislike someone who wanted to campaign under the slogan "Keep Britain White". Churchill was actually partially responsible for the rise in racism in mainstream politics in the second half of the 1950s.

I think Newton got some training in being a jerk by how he was treated by the prior recognized head of the scientific establishment. He was obviously a genius but that head could not accept that somebody else might eclipse him and thus pushed many people to doing a hatchet job on Newton's work.

I'm not sure who you're talking about there; there was no "scientific establishment" in Newton's day, just a bunch of nutcases doing weird experiments who happened, as it turned out, to be more or less on the right track. In any case, the hatchet jobs that were done on Newton in his youth were nothing compared to the hatchet job that he did on Leibniz later on. I suspect that Newton simply couldn't stand the thought of someone else being cleverer than him, and German to boot.

Would you care to expand on that? I'm not trying to be difficult. I just don't know a lot about New Zealand. About the only thing I know is that the sheep outnumber the people. I had always thought that they were a pretty agreeable sort of people. Was it just a joke?

I think he was asking if there's any decent philosophy coming from New Zealand. I have to say I can't think of any. I thought David Chalmers was from New Zealand, but Wikipedia says he's from Australia. Not that I trust Wikipedia, and also there are quite a few New Zealanders who are commonly wrongly thought to be Australian, such as Sam Neill or Russell Crowe.

Anyway, my suggestions:

Paracelsus. So insufferable he spent his life being kicked out of universities and travelled Europe railing against pretty much everyone.

Epiphanius of Salamis. A raving nutcase who thought pretty much everyone was a heretic, and ended up disagracing himself by trying to denounce John Chrysostom as a heretic.

Descartes. Very self-righteous and convinced of his own genius; spent much of his time engaging in angry correspondence with the Dutch university authorities over precisely why his ideas should be taught. Couldn't see why people had a problem reconciling his ideas with religious orthodoxy, because he was convinced that his own ideas had been proven to be correct, so religious orthodoxy just had to deal with them.

Jerome. Undoubtedly the most pompous jerk of them all. Also spent much of his time denouncing everyone as a heretic, including his own former best friend. Unbelievably self-righteous and self-promoting, to the point of denying that he had ever been an Origenist when his own books proved quite clearly that he had been. Brought shame on the whole church through his bitter denunciations of Rufinus, which continued for years after Rufinus' death. Generally a complete git, but a witty one, so he generally gets away with it.

 

[philippe]

Does anyone want to link this thread to Kafka2?

 

[privatehudson]

I find it very easy to dislike someone who wanted to campaign under the slogan "Keep Britain White". Churchill was actually partially responsible for the rise in racism in mainstream politics in the second half of the 1950s.

I would argue that he's a bit more complex than one single slogan can account for (then again he's more complex than burning De Gaulle at the stake but that was a joke). He quite often came up with outbursts or daft suggestions that he later retracted himself or when colleagues pointed out the stupidity of them. Besides although the slogan is inherently racist the proposed policies behind it aren't very far removed from the modern day political thought on the issue of immigration, and by that I do not mean the extremist parties either.

Its not like that period was known for particularly sensible slogans anyway. The Labour party were campaigning in 1951 with "whose finger is on the trigger" implying that Churchill was nothing more than a warmonger destined to lead the country into conflict with Russia. In fact he spent a good deal of his second term trying to arrange summits with the Soviet Union.

 

[Plotinus]

I would argue that he's a bit more complex than one single slogan can account for (then again he's more complex than burning De Gaulle at the stake but that was a joke). He quite often came up with outbursts or daft suggestions that he later retracted himself or when colleagues pointed out the stupidity of them. Besides although the slogan is inherently racist the proposed policies behind it aren't very far removed from the modern day political thought on the issue of immigration, and by that I do not mean the extremist parties either.

I'm not sure that any of that really makes any difference. A racist slogan is a racist slogan no matter what policies it is intended to represent. The views of the mainstream political parties today on immigration may be objectionable in various kinds of ways, but I don't believe they are fundamentally racist, because while they want to reduce or manage immigration they don't want to do this on the basis of race. Where there is prejudice involved I think it is more likely to be xenophobia rather than racism. Churchill's views on the matter, as expressed not only in that slogan but also in his reported cabinet discussions, make him closer to the modern BNP than to the modern Conservative party. Besides, even if one attempts to explain this sort of thing on Churchill's part as a "daft outburst" rather than a deliberate policy, I don't really see how that's any better, at least as an indication of their personality.

Still, I don't think this is very germaine to the discussion. Churchill's racism certainly makes him a "jerk" but it doesn't in itself make him a pompous one.

 

[shortguy]

Cicero was the first to come to my mind.