Amazing. Tormenting his daughter is a “small part” of the man. And I reject this nonsensical binary choice. You don’t have a magic power where you can say that no one else would have made a similar product. You’ve made your position clear, he made a computer you like so let’s call emotionally abusing his daughter a “small” part of him and shove it under the rug. Disappointing
As you rant about “small parts”, have you stopped to consider, over the course of Jobs’ sixty or so years on earth, how much of that time did he actively spent “tormenting his daughter” and how much of that time was actively spent working 80 hours weeks to push against the worst instincts and constraints of corporate culture in order to create beautiful, breakthrough innovations that made life better? Yeah, didn’t think so. It’s not shoving anything “under the rug”. It’s called perspective.
Also, it’s wildly disingenuous to pretend the world wouldn’t be completely and utterly different without Steve Jobs’ contributions. And to casually assume that his contributions were somehow inevitable and that other people would have done the same if he weren’t there. It’s not only stubbornly naive, but the worst part is that it’s just bad faith discourse. You’re not being honest. It makes the possibility that someone would leave this conversation with a new insight far less likely.
Your judgement of the man smacks of someone who righteously and naively believes that people
should be perfect, without sin, and that the worst moments of our lives wipe out all the good that people do. It’s that kind of shameful, backwards morality that chokes our society, pushes mental illness and personal disfunction into the shadows, and ensures that our culture makes it as difficult as possible for people to heal, grow, and transform their lives.
Congratulations! You managed to reduce one of the most productive, important, and influential geniuses of our time—a man tormented with personal demons who somehow managed to overcome them enough to make contributions to human progress that have improved the lives of billions of people, and who worked hard until the end of his life to defeat those demons and become a better man, friend, and father—down to the worst mistakes he made in his past. That’s not easy to do.
And for the record, I’ve never dismissed his transgressions. They are well documented. Feature films have been made and nominated for Academy Awards that dramatized what a turd he could be. His life has hardly been whitewashed, as you falsely claim. “Jobs” and “jerkboss” have been inexorably linked in our lexicon. But are his personal failings really what will serve us to be focused on? Is that what’s unique and special about this man? Or don’t
billions of people also have difficult and unpleasant personalities, with vexing and painful issues in their personal lives, making your hyperfocus just one more bit of peek-a-boo fodder for our culture’s unquenchable thirst for turning over stones to gaze at the seamy underbelly, with the fruitless hope of feeling better about themselves by judging others? My original post was in response to someone who mocked the notion that Jobs could possibly be a
good friendbecause he was also sometimes an ******. Pointing out silly and wrongheaded that was.
I hope for your sake you’re able to see, for 60 seconds, what the world would be like if everyone was as reductive as you are being here; where everyone on earth, alive and dead, including you and everyone you admire and love, was reduced to the worst moments of their lives. Horror show.
