right man

plural right men

1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see right, man.

   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.

   2011, Brad Taylor, One Rough Man, →ISBN

2. alternativeAlternative form of Right Man.

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

   1975, John A. Weigel, Colin Wilson, page 99

   3 more examples

   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.

   1972, Colin Wilson, Order of assassins: the psychology of murder, page 90

   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).

   1983, K. Gunnar Bergström, An Odyssey to Freedom: four themes in Colin Wilson's Novels, page 97

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

   1985, H. Montgomery Hyde, Crimes and Punishment, →ISBN, page 966

plural Right Men · alternative right man

1. A man driven by a manic need for self-esteem, often driven to violence: "the violent man".

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

   1987, Robert Anton Wilson, The new inquisition: irrational rationalism and the citadel of science, page 225

   2 more examples

   '[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…

   1984, Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind, 2006, Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology, Afterword, p. 219-220

   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.

   2005, George B. Palermo, Richard N. Kocsis, Offender Profiling: An Introduction to the Sociopsychological Analysis of Violent Crime, →ISBN, page 55