One of the fastest and surest ways to make a person loathe you is this.
Explain to them how clever and capable and knowledgeable you are, and in the same breath hint, or say outright, how small or foolish or mistaken or naive the other person is.
Have you contracted this unappealing syndrome? One of the surest tests is to recall how many times you have opened a conversation with the sentence: let me explain something to you.
A slightly more covert symptom is the situation in which the other person describes some difficulty and you respond immediately with a personal story about how splendidly you handled that exact difficulty in the past — which places the listener in a position of inferiority and you in the position of one deserving honour and glory.
If you use that manoeuvre more than once a week, I have bad news for you.
You have manufactured yourself a considerable number of enemies and ill-wishers over recent years, and you do not know it.
In fact you would be shocked if I hinted directly, as I sometimes do, that you are digging yourself a social grave.
You would blink in righteous astonishment and emit a sigh along the lines of: what petty people there are in this world, and how can they not see that we are only trying to help them?
This is the exact opposite pole from the spoiled child who demands that the world serve him.
Here we are dealing with the spoiled parent, who demands that the world revolve around him in permanent gratitude — a slightly more sophisticated way of asking the universe to confirm your greatness and your particularity.
And the thing about consistent condescension that strikes me with astonishment is the sheer fact that there are people who genuinely do not notice they are doing it.
Which is the whole difficulty. Condescension does not feel like contempt from the inside. From the inside it feels like generosity — you have something valuable, and you are giving it away.
Here is the test that cuts through it. After you finish speaking, does the other person say more, or less? Genuine help expands people. Condescension quietly shuts them up, and they rarely tell you why.