The guys an attorney; he's obviously pressing legal buttons because it's intellectually interesting to him. Bully for him.At the risk of really, really stepping in it:
My oldest was not identified as "gifted" until he was 11. A few months later, it dawned on me that his obnoxious habit of torturing me with argumentative behavior was rooted in boredom. (He was in special ed in public school as he is both gifted and learning disabled, something schools generally do a poor job of dealing with.) This realization empowered me to put a stop to this bad habit of his by making sure he was more constructively occupied and spent less time bored.
There is an old saying: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop". I have noticed that extremely argumentative people are typically quite intelligent and their arguments frequently seem to be something they do to entertain themselves, and damn the consequences. In most cases (of individuals I have personally known), where this is an incredibly obnoxious habit on their part, like my son, they also have some kind of personal handicap (in other cases of individuals I have personally known, they might have a handicap but I did not know for certain). Baiting people is a cheap and easy means to get around their handicap and get some of their intellectual needs met.
Someone utterly and completely convinced that "politeness makes no difference" may well have a personal handicap that may have never been identified. "Twice exceptional" individuals (gifted and learning disabled/handicapped) frequently go unrecognized. Their strengths tend to make up for their weaknesses and mask the problem(s). But it also generally makes for an enormously frustrating life so, unsurprisingly, most of them seem to carry a huge chip on their shoulder. Such individuals are often fairly paranoid as well, most likely due to routinely and consistently having their very real problems dismissed, poo-pooed, and so forth and generally being treated like they are imagining things. Since they aren't imagining things and do have a very real problem and their predictions are routinely borne out as more accurate than that of most people around them, they commonly become convinced that everyone else is also just an idiot. I have an "invisible" handicap that was not diagnosed until late in life and I spend a lot of time wrestling with something that Einstein described very well:
"A question that makes me hazy, am I or are the others crazy?"
On another note, IIRC, only 7% of face-to-face communication is the actual words we use. The rest is body language, voice tone, facial expression, and context (and I might be leaving something out). So if you have a chip on your shoulder and you walk up to the desk and haughtily look down your nose at the person across from you and your facial expression and body language just scream "I'm better than you, I'm sure you are an incompetent dolt and I am expecting you to be an ass to me", before you have said a word you have already negatively influenced the way the whole thing will go. Then you open your mouth and your voice tone just reinforces all that negativity. People who do that sort of thing are frequently not consciously aware of it, which tends to just make them believe the world is full of assholes since "everyone" routinely reacts negatively to them.
I can understand that sentiment. When I was very ill, in constant excruciating pain and doped to the gills, I could not keep both feet out of my mouth no matter how hard I tried. And I really tried like hell. But there are people in the world who will probably never forgive me. I feel no real compulsion to kiss their asses. I feel like "Excuse the hell out of me for living". Getting well/healthier has done a lot to improve my social experience. I don't have to try nearly so hard anymore yet I get better reception from people generally. For me, this means that subjectively there is a huge disconnect between how much effort I put in and the outcomes I get. That doesn't mean that if I am polite, it makes no difference. That means that trying to be polite and actually being polite aren't the same thing.