Meaning of right man | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see right, man.
2. A man driven by a manic need for self-esteem, often driven to violence: "the violent man".

Examples

“Never having worked with Sayyidd before, only trusting that his superiors had selected the right man, Bakr was suspicious of Sayyidd's eagerness to abandon all they had worked for up until now.”

“Van Vogt's theory of 'the right man' is one of the most important contributions to the psychology of violence; unfortunately, it was cast in fictional form, and so never achieved the serious attention it deserved.”

“Like Arthur Lingard, the killer in his story, Wilson is himself an example of the cateory he is promoting -- "the right man".”

“It is a questioning of van Vogt's contention that the "right man" is altogether a bad phenomenon. "The Killer might be regarded as a wilful complication of the problem; an attempt to point out that 'right men' are not necessarily and completely wrong" (p. 11).”

“Georges Rapin's violent response to Dominique's threat of desertion suggests that he is a classic example of the "right man syndrome".”

“'[T]he violent man' or the 'Right Man' … is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel he is a 'somebody'. He is obsessed by the question of 'losing face', so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong… Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our amour propre. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, flies into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder… The Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. [B]iological studies have confirmed [that] for some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities…”

“Concretely, the Violent Male -- the extreme form of the Right Man -- edits out the suffering and pain he causes to others.”

“An interesting sociological theory, already mentioned, regarding crime is that of the Right Man—the man who is always right (Wilson, 1990), a person, basically with a sense of inferiority and a facade of idealism, who, because of misperception, justifies unbridled desire to obtain what he wants, even with violent acts. As state in Chapter 1, many murders, intelligent and with a paranoid personality, belong to this Right Man category.”

CEFR level