…Just as well as giants. This is what we stand on in our advancements as humanity according to a mathematician, economist, physicist and a managing director of Thiel Capital investment firm, Eric Weinstein.

The gist of his claim would be that we need “jerks” to evolve, grow and advance. Why? Well because “a jerk” is anyone who loudly protests the status Q, doesn’t go along with the consented upon opinions, doesn’t really care about tiptoeing around political correctness landscapes, anyone who may be rude and obnoxious, who you can’t get through an hour without being exhausted with their lack of tact, who is very disagreeable in the 5 main personality traits – but they are right in what they’re saying or doing. A jerk will tell inappropriate jokes, won’t sugar coat things for you, will be more concerned with the heart of an idea than all of the schmoozing and fluffing social norms mandate for it to be accepted, he/she may get unruly and argue with low blows, may be all over the place producing nothing at times, procrastinating, being auto destructive, only to be wildly productive and coming up with genius solutions at other times, they will plummet to rise. The jerks Mr. Weinstein is talking about are the geniuses of our time being stifled and incentivized out of mainstream which demands the beige collegiality, red tapes what can be said or how “true” truths can be, which imposes proper channels for everything and gets so caught up in bureaucracy loops that it loses the core idea out of sight just dealing with a self-created system in which you’re ok if you don’t contradict and keep your head down. These “jerks” won’t settle and are the ones that changed histories because they were the only ones in the room, office, city or their field who refused to conform and accept the agreed upon consensus.

It’s far easier to go along for the sake of convenience but the path of least resistance is very seldom the most productive one. Sure it may deliver a continuous stream of irrelevant, even quality mediocre results, but you need that guy/girl in the conversation who’ll say no more than 10 others who nod, as they just want to not rock the boat and get out of there by 5 to get on with their day. Weinstein’s jerks are the ones who have ups and down, and this is due to trying new things. If you never try anything out of the box and just continue doing what is already known and fairly systematically reproducible, although it may be bland, you won’t have as big swings into mistakes and falls, but you won’t swing into genius either. You’ll just be – consistently irrelevant.

The ones he called jerks are people who’re ASCH and Milgram negative. ASCH conformity experiments were conducted in the 50’s and they tested the extent to which social pressure and majority affect the person’s choices, beliefs and opinions, to the point where they will disregard the proof right in front of them and answer the same as a group to be safe and not stand alone in their opinion. Milgram experiments tested the obedience to authority figures when subjects themselves won’t be held accountable for the damage or pain they cause. Participants were willing to administer the electric shock to other participants if told so by men in lab coats and obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative-even when acting against their own better judgment, in discord with their personality or morals. So our jerks are people who will readily stand against a group if they believe that what the group thinks is wrong, and those who will refuse to continue on to increase the shock voltage obviously causing pain to another just because they’ve been told to do so by “an authority”. The world needs those people, it needs the strange ones, the ones who swim up river based on their own beliefs, moral structure and a custom built world view that doesn’t much care about being comfortable and accepted but cares more about doing right, true and meaningful things.

We need the weird jerks not to be chased out of structures, because they are necessary and are in the genepool for a reason – because true novelty is difficult to come by and any large real advance hinges on it. Problems in the system cannot be fixed by the same system that created them. Help and resolution needs to come from the outside, from those who don’t necessarily believe what everybody else does and don’t bother with niceties and eggshells of a structure too fragile in its inadequacy to allow for newness to enter and change it. Celebrate the jerks; their point of view may be very useful.