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Leadership
How to Deal with a Know-It-All
There's a short, respectful game you can play to trip up a jerk.
Posted December 23, 2022 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- If someone talks as if they're the moral leader, play their chief of staff interviewing them about how they would lay down the moral law.
- If they lay down more than one moral law ,ask them how they want to resolve conflicts between them.
- Ask them what they want the objective definitions to be for all the moral terms in their laws—for example, how they want to define "liberty."
- They'll be flattered at first but disappointed to discover that they don't have their moral laws as thought out as they pretend.
As the saying goes, never fight with a pig. You’ll just get dirty, and the pig likes it. But that doesn’t mean your only alternatives are to escape, ignore, or humor one. Here’s a seductive way to interact with and even expose pigs without fighting.
Propose a role-playing game in which they’re the leader and you’re their servant, a lawyer, or chief of staff whose job it is to write a moral contract to their specifications that will become the moral law of the land.
They’re likely to be flattered by your attention and their role as the moral authority. The catch is this: For you to write laws that convey their moral dictates, they’re going to have to get very clear on what they are.
The sole object of the game is to flesh out the moral principles that they claim are the basis of their strong opinions. You’re merely seeking to nail down their stipulations by exposing any inconsistencies and asking them how to resolve them.
You control the conversation, keeping your client focused on drafting their proposed moral law. That means you can cut them off when they grandstand, monologue their broken-record talking points
or go off on tangents about the cherry-picked cases or facts that inspire their moral principles. None of that matters to their goal of making their ideal moral laws concrete and clear.
Here are the kinds of questions you’re asking.
First, what are their guiding moral principles?
If they have more than one, there’s potential for conflict between them, so ask them how would they resolve such conflicts. For example, if they claim that the ten commandments drive all their commitments, how would they resolve a conflict between “Honor thy father and mother” and “Thou shalt not kill” if someone’s parents encouraged them to go to war or kill an enemy?
Don’t take “that’s hypothetical” as an answer. Lawyers have to prepare for all realistic contingencies, and besides, “never deal with hypothetical situations” would be yet another moral principle. Does that one override all of their other principles?
You’ll also need objective definitions of the terms they’re using. For example, how, by your client’s standards, would a stranger be able to tell whether someone is or is not honoring their father and mother?
Don’t take “well, of course, we all know honoring when we see it” as an answer. Sure, we do, but by different subjective standards. The point is to come up with objective standards that satisfy your client.
You’ll also need to check whether their moral standards apply in all situations, particularly ones that burden your client. For example, if you’re client argues that one can never have too much freedom, what do they want to do about situations in which their opponents’ freedom causes your client big problems?
Here you can give examples to illustrate. They’re usually easy to imagine just by turning the tables, imagining your client’s opponents making the same moral demands. If your client says no restrictions on freedom, what do they want to do about their enemy’s total freedom restricting them?
You’re likely to discover and expose that all they really mean by their moral standards is that they like the same nice things their rivals want. Basically, “I like advantages,” in which case, who doesn’t? Join the club and get in line.
Not that you’ll say that. You’re their respectful chief of staff in this game. Still, your dogged focus on the practicalities of applying their moral principles will expose their self-serving bias. You’ll end up balking like a lawyer whose client doesn’t really know what they want.
Not knowing, they’re likely to stray to their broken-record talking-point comfort zone. But a lawyer’s time is money, and here you’re not trying to stretch out your billable hours. Cut them off when they stray from your questions.
You’re also a pro at keeping track of what has and hasn’t been answered, so when they stray from a question a few times, give it up but let them know they never answered it.
The game ends after a time limit is reached or whenever you can voice their strict moral contract in a way that satisfies them. Chances are it won’t satisfy you, but that’s beside the point. Chances are it won’t really have satisfied them either. You will have planted some doubt in their mind. Their moral law won't feel as solid to them as it did when they were spouting it on their soapbox. You’ll have shown without fighting or confrontation that they haven’t thought things through as completely as they pretend they have.
Give it a try. It’s fun. And then let them interview you as if you were the leader laying down the moral law of the land. We can learn a lot from such role-playing games.
