Assholes

by Aaron James

  To illustrate, consider a small business meeting and a certain major investor. Because he is a major investor, he cannot simply be expunged from the meeting. We are not now thinking of the merely “difficult person,” or SOB, who is on balance a force for good, which we mentioned in chapter 2. The guy of our concern is mostly unproductive; he is not working with the group for the group’s purposes, except when they merely happen to coincide with his. He is competing for attention; for his chance to comment on every comment; for control over the conversation’s direction; and, ideally, for final say in the group’s choice. Others will be vying for influence and power, to be sure, but mainly behind the scenes or at any rate with a good measure of civility. Our man is not always patently uncivil but not quite civil either; he can’t quite hide the fact that, in his view, this is of course his meeting, that a decision he disagrees with would be completely outrageous and raise serious questions of retaliation. He needn’t openly threaten retaliation, with memories fresh in the group from the last time things didn’t go his way. The threat is now taken as a given by all and amply conveyed by his elevated tone or awkward glare.

  In such a setting, the asshole’s work is possible only because enough other people are upholding the cooperation he exploits. There would not be a meeting in the first place if the others didn’t show up and more or less abide by meeting rules. The asshole is, in a sense, not just a person but a social role created within the loose structure of cooperation. The role could be assumed by a different person in the group when the chief asshole is on vacation. (The chief asshole will usually have established that he is the kingpin, having forced the secondary asshole to normally stand aside; otherwise, there won’t be room in town for the both of them.)

  The effective asshole usually appreciates the deeply social nature of his work. He knows there are limits. People won’t stand for deviancy that is too far beyond the pale. When people can readily agree that someone’s conduct has become just too rank, just too outrageous, they will easily rally together and stand against it. This, according to Émile Durkheim, is the positive social function of deviancy: it helps rally the cooperative troops. But assholes aren’t unwittingly productive in this way. They aren’t rank deviants but rather deviants in the gray, hard-to-identify areas of cooperative life, where cooperative people easily disagree or fail to see the same things. Something feels wrong to all, but no one can quite make out exactly what it might be. Or if someone does see it, even plain as day, he or she won’t know that others see it plainly as well. The fact that many others aren’t getting it or aren’t more bothered or, worse, are facilitating it can leave one not just upset at the asshole but sorely disappointed in one’s fellows.

  In a climate of heighted sensitivity and lack of conspicuous agreement, cooperative people can easily turn on one another. People have very strong feelings about the asshole but also about how others respond to him. Some involved seem to be enabling the asshole; they are being co-opted, taken for suckers. For many, this is disturbing to watch. How could they not stand up for themselves? If they must insist on being lackeys, why can’t they do it on their own time, when they aren’t enabling the asshole at the group’s expense? A different type of person lashes out against the asshole, often for fear of being a sucker. This, too, is hard to accept. It can cause as much trouble as the asshole himself. With low-level combat being waged, the work of the group is not getting done.

  Because these can be very strong feelings, a group of well-meaning people may easily divide over how the asshole should be handled, finding themselves in an uncivil peace. One coalition might favor taking a stand against the asshole at great cost, for the sake of the group’s self-respect. A different faction might form around keeping the peace, even at a high price, so that the normal work of the group can carry on. Within each subgroup, the fellow members will find comfort in their agreement about how disappointing members of the opposing coalition have been lately. They may feel ever confident that theirs is the way forward and that it is the opposing coalition—and not really the asshole—that stands in progress’s way. That obstinate group may seem almost as bad as the asshole himself, or maybe worse. Meanwhile, the shrewd asshole will carefully stoke these opposing feelings and expand the scope of his powers.

  THE FRAGILITY OF TOLERANCE

  The natural solution is tolerance. The group must cultivate tolerance of divergent reactions to a difficult problem; it must accept divergent asshole-management styles. With only a moment’s reflection, cooperative people can all realize from their own experience how disturbing encounters with an asshole can be. They can all relate to feeling unable to muster a good response or suddenly finding oneself at one’s worst. If the group can converge around this as a shared understanding, it will not be so readily destabilized. It will be readier to accept divergent reactions. It will be better able to find workable ways of together limiting the damage the asshole does.

  There, however, is the rub: arriving at any such shared understanding is itself a task for collective action, which is beyond the efforts of any one person taken by him or herself. No one can do it alone, try as one might. A shared understanding is required but can also be difficult to establish and readily undone. Cooperative people will often agree about tolerance in the abstract but disagree sharply about tolerance in the specifics; they’ll disagree about what is tolerable and where to draw lines. In the gray areas where the asshole flourishes, there aren’t necessarily clear-cut wrongs, or, where the wrongs are clear, there aren’t necessarily clear-cut sanctions to be applied. There may be no bright-line violation of reasonable expectations, and so ample room for dispute about what is or is not a genuine breach. There may be no clear and firm enforcement strategy, and so disputes may arise about what response, if any, to take. And there may be no obvious way to resolve these disputes. The disputes will center on deeply personal feelings and slight differences in interpretation from different vantage points. And those very differences in feeling and interpretation may lead to disputes about how to resolve disputes (e.g., about what workplace or meeting rules to adopt). There may then be no obvious way to get organized, no salient “focal point” solution to the general problem, that stands out as the way forward together.

  This will be true even or especially when all are deeply invested in the joint venture. In the start-up company that promises to soon make huge amounts of money, few will be inclined to jump ship, even if staying on board means dealing with an asshole. Because the asshole requires the general cooperation of others to do his work, his extraction of special benefits from the relationship in effect exploits the participants’ willingness to sustain it or, what comes to the same thing, their felt inability to leave. He cannot push too far, not so far that most involved decide that the burdens of asshole management just aren’t worth it. But as long as the group remains persistently confused, the asshole can exert considerable influence over what the group does.

  When a group does manage to arrive at a mutual understanding about asshole management, this will happen only because it has been graced with circumstances favorable for mutual understanding, which just as easily might not have happened. While success will usually have required a concerted joint effort, that is not to say that practice makes perfect, as it can in personal asshole management. Success is not a matter of personal devotion and time, since many different people must converge upon and work out a common way of getting on together.

  Suppose, for example, that a group has finally hit upon a solution to its asshole problem. The conviviality of regular work parties (which the asshole does not attend) has restored a sense of common cause and created a way for the group to find shared solutions (a good idea circulates through the room). Consider why this might have happened. A few got into party planning and a few others came up with a few good, widely acceptable ideas. Yet that effort might easily have failed. The parties might not have caught on, or the asshole might have decided to attend, or the discussions might have reinforced or deepe
ned the existing divisions.

  Nor can it be generally assumed that, for each group afflicted by an asshole, there is some organizational strategy or other that will catch on if a few people just do a few of the right things. Asshole management is not prone to happen by itself, and it can be squelched despite great efforts. When success is a real possibility, this is so only because the stars align. Circumstances favorable for the group to work out their differences just emerge. Effort is not the better part of collective virtue, or even the half of it. Virtuous joint asshole management is in large part for fortune and fate to decide.

  This needn’t be reason to despair. It is, rather, all the more reason to uphold tolerance when it is, perchance, in our power, in cooperative good faith. It is all the more reason to stand ready to seek possibilities of cooperation when they present themselves, not to tolerate and appease the asshole but to tolerate one another and more forcefully resist him. Although there will usually be no “silver bullet” measure that keeps the wily asshole in line, and cooperative people will disagree about why a given management strategy fails and what to try next, tolerance will at least offer significant help in how cooperative people work out those differences and, in time, land upon an effective response.

  Still, for all of our efforts, the asshole will in all likelihood never change. Should we despair in that fact? We argued in chapter 4 that he can be morally incorrigible and yet rightly blamed. Yet it is a further question how we should feel about and respond to the fact that even good management cannot be expected to bring him around, that we can at most expect him to be manageable, if even that. Are we then to ultimately write him off? The question raises the large issue of whether we can accept the givens of life that feel unacceptable, which we return to in chapter 7. Our answer will be this: we can at least still hope for the asshole’s moral reform. That does not require expecting change as at all likely, and it is consistent with efforts at reform that do not fall into fruitless striving. The problem of the asshole is in this respect the problem of the human social condition generally. Reasonable hope is the key to acceptance, not only of the given asshole but of a social world in which assholes potentially flourish and abound.

  This suggests that the problem of asshole management arises not simply in interpersonal relationships and in small groups but on a large scale. We now turn to develop that point in detail. As we will see, assholes threaten to destabilize whole societies, especially capitalist societies of the particular sort that we increasingly have.

  * * *

  1. Likewise, in many murder mysteries the victim is portrayed as an asshole. We thus feel he “had it coming,” as, e.g., with Dickens’s character Tulkinghorn in Bleak House.

  2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 13.

  3. The Bush doctrine reads that “America will act against … emerging threats before they are fully formed” (p. 4 of Bush’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America). This does address real questions about how the requirement in international law of a “credible and imminent” threat of attack (is a terrorism plot ten years in the making “imminent”?). But it also rejects, or at least fails to admit, even minimal moral expectations, for instance, that there should at least be solid evidence of a threat. According to the doctrine, an “emerging threat” that isn’t “fully formed” needn’t even be especially “credible” before preventive strikes are launched. In effect, then, there is no real limit on the use of violence at all.

  4. Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 2007), 366–67 (including the list of response cries given earlier). Pinker cites Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

  5. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 366. Oddly, although one wouldn’t cry “asshole” in kicking a step, one might say “son of a bitch,” even though that term seems to refer to a type of person.

  6. Epictetus, A Manual for Living, trans. Sharon Lebell (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 12.

  7. Epictetus, A Manual for Living, 9–10, my italics.

  8. Epictetus, A Manual for Living, 34–35.

  9. Epictetus, A Manual for Living, 78.

  10. Epictetus, A Manual for Living, 80.

  11. For an account of how forgiveness is possible without loss of self-respect, see Pamela Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (May 2001): 529–55.

  12. The large percentage of the human population who claim to be Christians might seem to be in an especially difficult position. Christian love requires making asshole reform an organizing life cause. Indeed, one is to hope for every asshole’s ultimate reform. In that case, Stoic wisdom counsels in favor of not trying to do what only an all-powerful God can get done. One can lend God a hand but rightly resist adopting changing the asshole as one’s own final plan. Lending a hand might involve extraordinary vigilance and much prayer or simply leaving the asshole alone, perhaps in hope that God has some kind of plan.

  [6] ASSHOLE CAPITALISM

  Certain styles of capitalism are inherently prone to decline or, more specifically, to degrade, due to the proliferation of assholes. Asshole capitalism, as we hereby define the term, is the name of this kind of unstable social system.

  Every kind of society requires a reliable asshole-dampening system—that is, a set of social institutions, such as the family, religion, public education, or the rule of law—that keeps the asshole population from getting out of hand. For if the proportion of assholes in the population becomes too large (i.e., the non-asshole to asshole ratio takes a dive), cooperative people will become increasingly unable or unwilling or just too few in number to uphold the practices and institutions needed for a society to stave off decline. If this is possible in any kind of society, asshole capitalism, as we will understand it, is especially prone to undoing itself in this way.

  This is not necessarily to say that there is something about the very nature of capitalism that encourages people to be, become, or act like assholes.1 That may well be true, and it does seem telling that quintessential capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller or Gordon Gekko are assholes.2 But there are certainly assholes in totalitarian or socialist societies as well, such as Napoleon or any of the ruling pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm (recall the final commandment that “All animals are equal; but some animals are more equal than others”). Our argument in this chapter applies narrowly: it is addressed to capitalism in a particular, increasingly prevalent entitlement-oriented style. We will consider several ways a capitalist society might avoid this particular kind of entitlement culture and so avoid the asshole capitalism road to decline.

  The asshole, as we defined him in chapter 1, feels entitled to special advantages of cooperative life to which he in fact has no moral claim. The culture of an asshole capitalist system, as we will understand it, sends just this kind of strong entitlement message. Roughly, the message is that you can rightly get something for nothing or get rich without having to worry about the costs to others. This message creates powerful incentives for asshole-style reasoning and action, not just among those who are already assholes but among many who would otherwise be content to cooperate as equals in society. The result is a profusion of assholery throughout social and economic life that overwhelms the dampening systems that might otherwise keep the asshole population from exploding out of control. As assholes grow in numbers, or are simply perceived to grow in numbers, cooperative people gradually withdraw from upholding the practices and institutions needed for capitalism to function by its own standards of value. The capitalist system thus degrades: it becomes increasingly unable to fulfill its own promises of freedom, opportunity, and general prosperity, the very reasons cooperative people were supposed to want capitalism over other forms of society in the first place. In a word, asshole capitalism defeats capitalism’s main point.

  That is the main idea.
To be more specific, asshole capitalism has three essential features:

  (1) incentives: it affirms expansive entitlements (e.g., to unbounded personal enrichment, even at a social cost) that create powerful incentives for thinking like an asshole;

  (2) undermanagement: it lacks a reliable system for dampening asshole profusion (e.g., the family or the rule of law is overpowered by the entitlement-based incentives); and

  (3) destabilization: the resulting profusion of assholes undermines the cooperation needed for a capitalist system’s healthy functioning, according to its own founding values (of freedom, opportunity, and general prosperity). The system, in that sense, deteriorates or degrades.

  A helpful way to think about how this works is to start by imagining a capitalist society that more or less fulfills capitalism’s social promises.3 This means that cooperative people are, despite the usual assholes, mostly upholding the various practices and institutions needed for almost everyone to have things like real freedom, real opportunity, and a goodly share in general prosperity. But now suppose the society switches to an entitlement system (perhaps as the Entitlement Party rises to power). The system is now sending a powerful entitlement message, for instance, that having ever more is one’s moral right, even when it comes at a cost to others. As asshole thinking and culture spread and take hold, the asshole-dampening systems that used to keep assholery in check become overwhelmed. Parents start preparing their kids for an asshole economy, the law is increasingly compromised, the political system is increasingly captured, and so on. As some switch sides while others mainly withdraw, cooperative people find it more difficult to uphold the practices and institutions needed for capitalism to do right by its own values. Although the society won’t necessarily collapse—even assholes won’t prosper if they take it that far—the practices and institutions that fulfilled capitalism’s promises increasingly break down. The capitalist system, as we are putting it, degrades.