The Elitist Mentality
You've met that person. The person who comes off as arrogant, name-dropping, and condescending. It's clear that they think they're better than you in several ways, and while we all feel this way to some extent, this person has an unabashed knack of implying it in casual conversation. And they do it often.
The most annoying thing I've found is that you cannot compete with a person who has the elitist mentality, because they'll always find a way to put themselves above you. Maybe they're a lawyer, and you could go to law school yourself, thereby making yourself their social equal, but they'll find some problem with the quality of your work. You went to Wayne State University Law School, but they went to Columbia Law School, so they have a "better" education and therefore they're a better lawyer. You studied corporate law, but they studied patent law, which is, like, dude, so much harder than corporate law. Maybe they've been published in The National Law Journal, so you write and get yourself published in The New York Law Journal, but then they harbor the opinion that The New York Law Journal is a much lower quality publication and they take any piece of writing they can get their hands on.
You can't win with these kinds of people. In college, I knew quite a few people with this elitist mentality, and they annoyed me, particularly when they went on and on about how much smarter they were than everyone else. The highlight of dealing with them? I used to argue with one of them that they were not, in fact, any smarter than everyone else. I made the case that everyone has valuable knowledge, just different kinds of knowledge and that the perception of its worth tends to vary between people. For making this argument so often and with such fervor, this person called me arrogant.
It's irony on a base level; it still makes me laugh.
I think the best way to deal with these people is to play ignorant of their accomplishments, or feign blindness to their significance. One of my favorite gags on the American version of television show "The Office" is that one character is constantly mentioning that he graduated from Cornell. In one episode, one of his co-workers innocently asks him, "Where did you go to school again?"
The most annoying thing I've found is that you cannot compete with a person who has the elitist mentality, because they'll always find a way to put themselves above you. Maybe they're a lawyer, and you could go to law school yourself, thereby making yourself their social equal, but they'll find some problem with the quality of your work. You went to Wayne State University Law School, but they went to Columbia Law School, so they have a "better" education and therefore they're a better lawyer. You studied corporate law, but they studied patent law, which is, like, dude, so much harder than corporate law. Maybe they've been published in The National Law Journal, so you write and get yourself published in The New York Law Journal, but then they harbor the opinion that The New York Law Journal is a much lower quality publication and they take any piece of writing they can get their hands on.
You can't win with these kinds of people. In college, I knew quite a few people with this elitist mentality, and they annoyed me, particularly when they went on and on about how much smarter they were than everyone else. The highlight of dealing with them? I used to argue with one of them that they were not, in fact, any smarter than everyone else. I made the case that everyone has valuable knowledge, just different kinds of knowledge and that the perception of its worth tends to vary between people. For making this argument so often and with such fervor, this person called me arrogant.
It's irony on a base level; it still makes me laugh.
I think the best way to deal with these people is to play ignorant of their accomplishments, or feign blindness to their significance. One of my favorite gags on the American version of television show "The Office" is that one character is constantly mentioning that he graduated from Cornell. In one episode, one of his co-workers innocently asks him, "Where did you go to school again?"