Of course, it's not just Mike's refusal to actually earn the praise he craves that makes him a pain in the neck to be around. We also have to remember that he's a combo platter of the worst traits of his parents. In his case, we combine John's stubborn pride (which explains Mike's refusal to admit when he's in the wrong) with Elly's belief that envious people want to ruin her because they can't withstand her awesomeness (which explains his inability to do things he doesn't feel like doing because following someone else's suggestions is a defeat) to yield a dull-witted person who wishes that there were a pill he could take to be instantly good at things so he didn't have to hear nagging about how he has to put in the work like a boring person.
What differentiates him from his parents is that unlike, say, Elly, who doesn't want to learn that things she thinks are difficult and scary are neither because admitting that would mean that she's a crazy person wasting time feeling sorry for herself or John who doesn't like to think about why he thinks things lest he be a mean person believing bad things, there seems to be something organically wrong with Michael that makes it impossible for him to understand things. We're dealing with a child who doesn't want 50 percent of everything ever to be half of everything ever because he believes that maybe fifty percent of something wants to be something different and we're being mean to it and forcing it to do something it doesn't want to do. We're thus stuck with
Axiom 4c:
Michael sees the world not as a series of facts that cannot be altered but as a narrative that can be changed in the interests of a sort of idiotic and lunatic fairness that can't possibly apply.
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