Here is a statement sometimes heard, sometimes vociferously: “I can’t stand that person’s personality or style.” The person referenced might by a client, a coworker, a relative—or a former US president.
Is the person referred to immoral? That is, dishonest or unjust?
Sometimes an elaboration follows about a business or personal relationship: “It’s a personality conflict. We just clash too much and can’t get along!”
At my midtown Manhattan job several decades ago, it was clients who were said to have those “bad” personalities and, therefore, were impossible to get along with. Somehow I ended up with three such clients with one each abandoned by my two coworkers and boss. After working with the clients for a short time, I concluded, “There’s nothing wrong with these people. They are quite nice!”
On the surface, getting upset over a “personality conflict” or “style difference” seems bizarre. After all, personality or style may mean that one person likes to talk a lot and the other is quiet. These two personalities cannot get along?? Admittedly, the talker may have to ask a few questions to draw the quiet person out. But seriously?
Without saying so explicitly, one person in the personality or style conflict—probably both—think the other is immoral, requiring the ending of the relationship.
Let us define our terms. As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 55-56), personality
is our distinctive method of thinking and acting; it includes all of our beliefs and values—the moral ones, as well as the ones that form our psychologies, that is, beliefs and values about who we are as a person, beliefs and values about other people, and beliefs and values about the environment in which we live. The outward behavioral manifestation of beliefs and values are called traits and the traits that stand out, the distinctive ones, define our personality.Moral character, then, is a part of personality but must not be confused with our psychologies or our other traits that might be moral or immoral. Gregariousness and shyness are not immoral.
The outward behavioral traits define our style, or as the unabridged dictionary says, “an individual’s typical way of life.”
Personality and style are obviously related, but not identical. “Style” can be called the acting part of personality. The thinking part is what gives us mental habits that guide our choices and actions.
Two more terms to define: honesty means telling the truth, though not always. Exceptions would occur when someone is pointing a gun at you or threatening your privacy, or when the truth might unnecessarily hurt the other person. Justice means correctly judging a person as good or bad or somewhere in between and responding appropriately (1, 2).
Judging how honest or just a person is can be challenging in everyday situations, especially if you are not aware of, or allow for, the influence of psychology operating in the other person. Subconscious defensive habits often cancel free will to such an extent that the acting person, the one with the “style,” is not aware of what he or she is doing, such as talking too much or hyperbolizing or feeling afraid to speak up. None of these traits is immoral, or dishonest or unjust in any way.
The so-called difficult clients in my experience may have been demanding or even pedantic or confused and unclear about what they wanted. They may have been distrustful and angry over poor service in the past and wanted to be assured that this time everything will go smoothly.
My conclusion was that patience and anticipation of possible problems was key to keeping clients happy, and my coworkers and boss did not always indulge such patience, which apparently I did. I believed that my clients just needed to be listened to and that I had to practice that old business-as-usual adage, “promise only what you can deliver and deliver what you promise.”
No BS or hyperbole, in other words. Our clients were not dishonest or unjust, though they certainly exhibited many different personalities!
So what about the “style,” let’s say, of a former US president? One that called the country’s press the enemy of the people or expressed harsh criticism of anyone who did not do a good job or who criticized him. And was also known to hyperbolize.
I heard all of the above types of statements, sometimes with elevated volume, in my years living and working in New York City. Our former president was simply a New York businessman. And that is precisely what his naysayers did not like. He got things done and called his critics names. They declared his personality and style inappropriate, meaning immoral.
After all, he did not believe in turning the other cheek, and that was intolerable to anyone who believes self-sacrifice is the highest virtue in personal and professional life. And the “anyone” in this statement is bipartisan, as the doctrine of self-sacrifice is practiced by both leftists and conservatives.
Our former US president was not an altruist. He was an egoist who expressed, though not always articulately, the American sense of life. His constituents who also represent the American sense of life responded by electing him president. (See 1, 2, 3.) He was a rare and unusually strong supporter of the US’s national self-interest. Unfortunately, he leaned toward mercantilistic ideas when it came to international trade, but he also used tariffs as bargaining chips in his negotiations.
What is essential about our former president is that his “personality” and “style” expressed what is uniquely American by producing significant accomplishments and keeping us out of war for four years.
The appropriate response to all of the above types of statements, whether from a coworker or a president, is: “So what?”
Get back to work and on with your life.
A final note about the mainstream press. We now know how biased, not to mention dishonest and unjust, they were during the previous presidential administration and how eager they are today to silence alternative points of view.
Media that advocate censorship are indeed enemies of the people. They are the ones who will welcome a dictatorship to our country (1, 2).
See “How Free Speech Dies,” by Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady and my post on the same issue.
