Arrogance (Authority ploy)
[back] Medical control ploys  Authority

Arrogance is an inverted style of ad-hominem."--Jim West
"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."---Simone de Beauvoir (a 1.1 comment)

[Arrogance is used to stop anyone (e.g. parents & medical students) asking the wrong questions, and for daring to question medical authority, and is a display of Histrionics. Works well if you can get away with it.  To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, no doctor is more arrogant towards his patients than one who is anxious about his medicine.]

See: Medical beliefs  Histrionics  [2011] Tell us your pediatrician bully story

The Are So Clever, Wise and Learned...   by Thomas Sheridan  when others become wise to their underlying imbecile nature, the Psychopath will still arrogantly parade themselves as being “scientific”, "rational" and general paragons of intellectual virtue - regardless of their lack of proper qualifications, or even having read with any great depth into the chosen subject. It is all window dressing wrapped up in grandiosity. In most cases the psychopaths hasn't the faintest clue about what they are talking about. It is just the right words to be regurgitated for the targeted gullible ears.

Example
[Aug 2007] The anti-MMR mothers who are putting us all in danger

Quotes
 George Will's attitude about the Holocaust issue is, unfortunately, all too typical of millions of relatively well-educated Americans today. His smug sense of moral and intellectual certainty about this subject is characteristic of the close-minded who know just enough about this trendy subject to pronounce on it with arrogance. [1993] How an Influential Journalist Twists the Truth by Mark Weber

''Condescending Tone.   Not all doctors are condescending. Let me make that point very, very clear upfront. I know there are wonderful doctors out there who listen patiently and respond in a human fashion to the concerns of their patients!  However, many Pediatricians are extremely condescending, especially when a parent questions vaccines! I had one doctor once march me down the hall to show me his numerous and impressive university and post graduate degrees beautifully framed on the wall! His point? 'I’m smarter and more educated than you are. You are a nobody to be questioning my Authority.' My response? I walked out.''

For Exhibit B, I offer up the following quote from Dr. Jed Hill (played by Alec Baldwin) in the movie Malice: “I have an M.D. from Harvard, I am board certified in cardio-thoracic medicine and trauma surgery, I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards in New England, and I am never, ever sick at sea. So I ask you; when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn't miscarry or that their daughter doesn't bleed to death or that their mother doesn't suffer acute neural trauma from postoperative shock, who do you think they're praying to? Now, go ahead and read your Bible, Dennis, and you go to your church, and, with any luck, you might win the annual raffle, but if you're looking for God, he was in operating room number two on November 17, and he doesn't like to be second guessed. You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.” [2011 May] Dr. David Gorski's Unique Brand of Moronism by J.B. Handley

"Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person’s will in order to mould him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating instrument medical school uses on its students: fear.
    If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the fear that’s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they’ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That’s what medical school has become. Since everybody can’t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school feeling bad.
    Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and demeanour of their professors.  Confessions of a Medical Heretic

Tim Field, a noted author and researcher of psychopathy, believes that the psychopath picks out people who can see through him: "A bully's (sociopath) apparent self-esteem and self-confidence is actually arrogance, an unsustainable belief of invulnerability honed from his willingness to act outside the bounds of society to ensure their survival. Targets (or victims) are people who can see through the arrogance to perceive the empty shell behind it - and bullies can sense who can see through them, furthering the target's elimination." (Bully OnLine).

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."---Thomas Pynchon

Weak argument.

Suzanne Humphries, MD