There’s a Marvel character called Karnak who is a member of the Inhumans, a Kree-modified race of superhumans who reside on the moon. Yes, it’s a little silly, but I swear I’m getting to a point. The interesting thing about Karnak is that he has the power to see the fault in all things – any weakness, any small crack – and he will be able to exploit it for his own gain. He knows where to hit a wall to make it crumble to dust; he knows where to punch a man to stop his heart. His superpower is to know exactly the most efficient way to break things.
In recent runs, Karnak has been identified as a misanthrope. He’s a weird, difficult-to-understand man who lives by himself in a monk-like environment and doesn’t bother with standard social niceties. He came back to life because he found the weakness in death, and he just turned up one day. And you have to understand that Karnak being portrayed as a pessimist is a reasonable way to interpret his character.
After all, this is a character who can see the fault in all things. Of course, he is going to look at other people and see their faults and be completely disappointed by them because he cannot help but see the weaknesses in other people. He cannot look at a work of art without seeing the problems. His superpower is to find fault with everything, and it makes sense that it would make him a misanthrope.
He’s a useful person, obviously. Seeing the fault in things is a great power, and if you know how to exploit it for positive impact, then often nothing is more useful. But he systematically looks at the world and finds it wanting. Nothing is perfect; nothing is as strong as it could be. There is always a weakness, no matter how uniform something is, how strong it may appear – there is always some miniature flaw which he not only notices but his power draws his attention to the fault. And since, to him, these faults are obvious and other people do not fix them, he can look at other people and think of them as lazy. He can think to himself, “Other people would have fixed this fault, but they were too lazy to fix it.”
Imagine a version of Karnak that tried to present these discoveries more neutrally. There’s still no way for him not to come off as a pessimist. If his every contribution to every discussion is to find the fault in things, then there is an intrinsic emotional response of defensiveness from whoever designed that thing with the fault in it. Even if the overwhelming majority of what Karnak were to say were framings of, “I am identifying the fault or the problem, and I swear this is not a value judgment,” he would probably still come off as an asshole.
He’s still useful. In finding faults with everything, he can help work towards fortifying weaknesses and improving plans to be as close to foolproof as possible. But any interpersonal interactions that he has are doomed to go poorly. His superpower is red teaming, in being a counter-aggressive, in shooting down everything that anyone else comes up with. So, anyone who takes pride in the quality of their ideas will take this shooting down as a personal slight, even if they both share the interest of making something great.
The tragedy of Karnak is that there are few ways for him to effectively communicate with other people without upsetting them, and given that he doesn’t seem to have any choice other than to upset, he thinks to himself, “Why bother?” And so he becomes more brusque in social interactions, and thus is seen more negatively by others, and it becomes less worth it, and so on. It is a repeating cycle which ends up with Karnak barely able to interact with other people because he has such disdain for them. The tragedy of Karnak is he has a lot to contribute, but every word he says makes more work for other people.
The tragedy of Karnak is the tragedy of all pessimists, that in their minds, they are the only ones who see the problem and are desperate to communicate it to other people, but in a horrid and Cassandra-like twist, they are not listened to because their delivery of the bad news upsets people and frames them as an enemy. And every new comment frames them as more of an enemy, even if they wish nothing more than to collaborate and improve things.
The tragedy of Karnak is that he cannot collaborate effectively, not because of how he is communicating but what he is communicating, and the bearer of bad news gets maligned and vilified. And I’m not sure how to avoid the tragedy of Karnak myself.