I am struck here by the perennial problem of how you (or whether you should) disassociate the achievements of a genius from their faults as a human being. Jobs’ daughter has much in common with Julian Lennon. I am pretty sure that John Lennon and Steve Jobs were frequently unpleasant to those around them but I will be forever grateful to them both for how they’ve enriched my life.
I empathise with Julian and Lisa and all the other neglected or abused children of creative geniuses but if we abandoned the achievements of all the creatives who were mean to their families our art galleries would be empty. Those who create things beyond all our expectations are not ‘normal.’ I sometimes wonder whether being a creative person is a kind of mental ‘illness.’ Having taught artists for most of my working life I’m convinced of it.
No, those are not the same concept. But a society that can’t distinguish one from the other explains a lot about the world we inhabit.
The notion of a person who lives a life without doing anything wrong is so ludicrous that it’s a giant red flag that the person holding it has divorced their perception of that person from any reality. That said, I see no need to forgive or condemn him, as I consider cults of personality, whether heroic or villainous or antiheroic, as creepy cultural poison. Personally I never met him and don’t feel it would have been a good use of my time to do so.
On the one hand, the way our culture is structured favors certain behaviors we’d consider callous (see our method of capitalism). On the other hand, I’m leery of deploying lay-definitions of medical terms such as sociopath, which from what little I understand is quite a complex mental health condition that can in no way be reduced to opportunistic jerk.
I’m sorry Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s father was a severely lackluster dad, and I’m glad she eventually found some solace, but I really don’t want to read about their family dysfunctions.
I wondered about that too, thought it might be that your post speculated that he had a personality disorder …however the OP calls him a narcissist so who knows. Your post mirrors my response . The house anecdote especially.
Probably for armchair psychology. There are people here struggling with various issues including personality disorders, and some of them are understandably quick to condemn posts that can be read to imply that such disorders cause people to act like Steve Jobs.
But I’m just guessing and loaded to the gills with sumatriptan anyway, so take a mighty boulder of salt with my opinions.
I don’t think it’d matter. If she wrote 99.99% of the book about only her life, and there was literally a single throw away line about Steve Jobs, that’s what the media would focus on.
