Assholes

by Aaron James

  Our model here is the asshole as defined in chapter 1. He expects and demands entitlements to special advantages that he does not in fact have and yet is immunized against others who try to point this out. It is generally for morality to decide what one is or is not entitled to, and people of course disagree about what morality allows or requires. But for present purposes, we will assume, if only for the sake of argument, that one’s moral entitlements are not expansive in the present sense. They are instead sensitive to what is required for capitalism to fulfill its social promises. Thus the culture of entitlement capitalism tells people they have entitlements that they do not in fact have.

  Now, as we understand entitlement capitalism, the encouraged sense of entitlement is not limited to proper assholes. They do readily take to the message, since it confirms what they already believe about themselves. More important is that others who would not otherwise think like assholes are also swayed, especially as the entitlement message catches on. They, too, begin to aggressively and indignantly defend laws and institutions that give them an ever-greater slice of the pie, regardless of its social rationale and even at great cost to others. That doesn’t mean assholery pervades all areas of life. The thinking may be limited to work or to politics, or generally to the economic system. (A society won’t degrade even if asshole surfers proliferate out of control.) No one person need be very “systematic” across various areas of his or her life, and no one person need be particularly “entrenched” in this mentality. When the winds of culture blow in a different, perhaps more cooperative direction, many would go with the flow and perhaps later feel puzzled about how they could have previously thought so much like an asshole.

  At issue, then, is a kind of culturally induced asshole moral reasoning. The reasoning may be expressed as a general refusal to think from behind John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.” In asking what major social institutions would be just, Rawls suggests that we are to consider what kind of society we would be willing to live in, assuming that we are ignorant of our particular social position, including such things as our race, gender, class, or talents. The just society is the one we would each accept from this impartial point of view.17 But because asshole reasoning tells a person that he or she is fundamentally special, this impartial perspective is either rejected or readily qualified. It is rejected or qualified on the basis of further specific entitlement claims that one wouldn’t invoke without knowing what one’s actual positions and prospects were like.

  Since accepting the entitlement message is mainly a way of thinking, notice that it does not matter that not everyone can actually have ever more—except in a fantasy world of infinite economic growth and unlimited natural resources. For it is possible to have a fully general message of special entitlement in which each presumes that others will rightly bear the cost of one’s benefit. In theory, everyone can presume that they have special status, even if not everyone can, in reality, receive presumed special benefits. All that follows is that some will be sorely disappointed and probably deeply upset.

  Still, asshole reasoning will have some sense of limits. Even proper assholes will not knowingly push things into complete collapse. Where cooperation doesn’t exist, as in Hobbes’s state of nature, there are no special advantages for the asshole to take. Yet the asshole is perhaps not as careful as Hobbes’s Foole, the cunning cheater who sees his share as optimized by keeping his cheating quiet so that he won’t be caught and so it won’t catch on.18 The asshole is out in the open about allowing himself special advantages because he feels morally entitled to them. If collapse occurs as a result of assholes, it is only because assholes have mistakenly presumed that cooperative people would not become fed up and completely withdraw from cooperative life in any of the several ways we will explain. Still, because assholes do feel entitled to more, they are more likely to push it, and so are more systemically dangerous than the cautious egotist.

  For purposes of our overall argument, the crucial feature of entitlement capitalism is that it magnifies the motivational power of the incentives that already powerfully motivate people in a capitalist system. Things such as personal enrichment come to be seen as not simply attractive but as among one’s basic rights. One comes to own those benefits as one’s own in an absolutist sense, quite aside from what fairness requires in the system of cooperation through which those benefits are created. It is this that gives entitlement capitalism an especially strong tendency to undo itself. Society becomes awash with people who are defensively unwilling to accept the burdens of cooperative life, out of a righteous sense that they deserve ever more. The entitlement style of capitalism is thus especially in need of strong correctives against asshole profusion. And yet that very entitlement ethos undermines the dampening systems that would otherwise keep assholes at bay.

  OPENING THE FLOODGATES

  We should consider in detail how this works. Let us assume for the moment that the encouraged sense of entitlement goes unchecked by any asshole-dampening system. The first question to ask is how assholes, unimpeded, might swamp cooperative life.

  We said earlier that capitalism could fulfill its social promises only by way of various enabling social practices and institutions. But any such cooperative relations will be maintained in a population only because enough people each do enough to uphold the set of practices or institutions, at some cost to themselves. Enough citizens mostly abide by the law, pay their taxes, contribute to public goods, and so on. But, as we now explain, for any of several reasons, the spread of asshole culture in a system of entitlement capitalism can readily mean that not enough people are any longer willing or able to uphold social institutions and practices, including the institutions and practices needed for the capitalist system to live up to its own values. This may come to pass for any or all of a number of reasons, which we consider in turn.

  SWITCHING. It may be that enough cooperators see assholes are doing better than they are. So they switch sides. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” they say. Moreover, the payoff for switching sides can increase as more and more people switch, much as the benefit of social networking increases as more and more people join a network. In that case, a switching trend will accelerate once it takes hold.

  WITHDRAWAL. Many people will be resolutely antiasshole, however the cultural winds blow and regardless of the potential upside. Yet they may nevertheless find themselves unable or unwilling to maintain full cooperation. Instead of switching, they simply withdraw, being unable or unwilling any longer to do the things people need to do if cooperation is to continue as before. Withdrawal may take any or all of the following forms.

  Exhaustion. Try as they might, in seeing assholes flourish, some cooperators will simply lose the motivational steam to carry on as before, perhaps while continuing to sincerely believe in the organizing values.19 Steady, ongoing motivation may require a certain felt esprit de corps that was once there but has since fizzled out (whether by neglect or by sabotage).

  Underassurance. It may instead be that everyone would easily and happily continue to do his or her full part, but only as long as each one can be assured that enough others are doing their parts as well. As each increasingly senses that others aren’t pulling their weight, it will increasingly seem pointless to continue to do one’s own part. Indeed, even if most people are in fact pulling their weight, the general perception that enough aren’t can mean that not enough people will maintain cooperation going forward. The (mistaken) perception might result from seeing so many assholes on TV, from so many honest but unfortunate mistakes, from confusion or misinformation, or from a disinformation campaign led by assholes who profit when cooperative people withdraw.

  Rising costs. In other cases, while the values advanced by cooperation previously seemed worth the personal cost to each of the cooperators involved, many have come to feel that the personal cost is becoming too high relative to the values advanced. Commitment might be strained or simply seem too high in principled terms (either because cost
s dramatically spike or because lesser value is assigned to the general values advanced). If enough people withdraw, then others who are willing to accept the higher costs may nevertheless find it pointless to be fully engaged for lack of assurance that enough others are doing likewise.

  Unfair burdens. In other cases, increasing costs seem unfair. Even when everyone regards the overall costs of cooperation as justified by the values advanced, most will insist that the burdens of upholding cooperation be more or less fairly distributed if they or others are to be expected to continue to do their parts. If for some reason an unfair burden is placed upon enough people, they may become unwilling to carry on as before. When enough people feel so aggrieved and withdraw, others who feel more or less fairly treated may no longer see the point in picking up the cooperative slack or may feel that the new burdens are unfair to them.20

  So there are various ways cooperative life might deteriorate in the absence of a reliable curb on asshole profusion. How quickly this occurs depends to a large extent on prevailing social circumstances. An “external shock” to the system (e.g., a natural disaster, a war, a bond market crisis) can rally the cooperative troops and stave off or postpone deterioration. It may also mean only that the process of degradation takes a bit more time. (The process could be ineluctable precisely because each further degraded stage becomes the “new normal” and so fails to rally cooperative people.) Decline can also proceed relatively quickly, if not over a mere few years, then perhaps over a couple of decades. How quickly and in exactly what ways again depend upon circumstantial factors. The pace will increase when there is much to be gained from being an asshole or switching to asshole ways (e.g., when millions of dollars in pay are in the cards, as with big banks in recent years) or when cooperators are easily discouraged. An especially patriotic society might put up a long fight, while a society sharply divided in political outlooks might easily give up.

  WHEN DAMPENING SYSTEMS FAIL

  Now, even if a system creates powerful forces of asshole production, all is not necessarily lost: a reliable asshole-dampening system could in theory keep cooperative people assured that the proportion of assholes in the population is under some modicum of control. Enough cooperative people could then keep faith that enough other people are doing their parts so that the larger system of cooperation can be sustained. Not so in a system of entitlement capitalism. In this kind of system, as we are characterizing it, the powerful incentives equally undermine even the best mechanisms of asshole population control. These institutions, too, are eroded by the powerful incentives that entitlement capitalism feeds on.

  Our remaining task in this chapter is to see how this might happen. We consider several of the main dampening systems in turn.

  The Family. Loving family life encourages personal and civic virtue and therefore places some limits on net asshole output. In this the family is arguably indispensable. Yet that is not to say that it is sufficient by itself for asshole control. For the family is itself subject to the powerful tendencies generated within an entitlement capitalist system, and it needn’t be entirely eroded to become ineffective as a bulwark against decline.

  Consider how parents themselves might choose to raise their children in an asshole capitalist system. For one thing, asshole parents will tend to beget asshole children, compounding the problem. Even if they are merely assholes at work, this may still influence their parenting style; asshole bosses may be more likely to beget asshole children.21 And among parents who are not in any sense assholes, they, too, may in effect be co-opted by the entitlement system. Parents often worry most about helping their kids make it in the system as it is, rather than raising them for a society that ought to be but might not materialize in the child’s lifetime. So if there are powerful economic incentives for developing competitive dispositions (e.g., for jobs, degrees, or marriage partners), even well-meaning parents will often go along with or encourage this, perhaps without appreciating that their children are more disposed to become assholes, or act like assholes, only after they leave the nest. If the rewards are great enough, many will seize the opportunity—perhaps in order to impress their parents with a large paycheck.

  Nor is there an easy fix to this parenting predicament. The current trend of catering to a child’s self-esteem by sharply limiting the experience of criticism or setback may encourage narcissism and only worsen net asshole production. Yet more traditional parenting methods may fare scarcely better. According to the spanking theory of virtue, for example, spanking is essential for teaching kids respect, and it is the turn against spanking that explains why there are more assholes than there used to be.22 Quite aside from the morality of beating a child, however, spanking could well undermine a child’s sense of fairness and personal integrity, in a way that facilitates his or her mistreatment of others, and thus provides little or no help as a dampening system. Even if it can in principle be done in the right way, we can hardly expect that at a societal level. Nor would homeschooling, say, underwrite the spread of civic virtue. It is clearly not feasible for a whole society, especially for families with working parents, and in any case everything will depend on the parents in question. If they gauge what is best for their child according to the powerful incentives of larger societal life, they may reinforce rather than correct assholish dispositions, as already suggested.

  Religion. One might suggest that all this only shows that the family must work in conjunction with the socializing role of a religious community. That is no doubt helpful. But, again, the question is whether even the family and religion could provide a reliable bulwark against assholery when the larger economic system is creating powerful competing incentives. Family and religious institutions need only be substantially shaped by those incentives for assholes to gradually prevail. This can readily occur. Evangelical Christianity, for example, is one of the fastest-growing religions but also especially amenable to capitalism in an entitlement style. There’s no reason to think that asshole capitalists do not regularly attend church. If a relatively few churches are uncomfortable for them, they can easily shop around for a church where their prowess in the market is prized and indeed regarded as a sign of God’s blessing.23

  Punishment. Even if we set spanking aside, threats of punishment do in some cases stabilize cooperation. Hobbes famously explained that the general threat of coercion by the sovereign gives each of us needed assurance that enough others will comply with the law. Even in some smaller-scale social relationships, cooperation can break down unless a threat of punishment is in the cards.24 Could some system of punishment then be the key to asshole control?

  Probably not. What is distinctive about the asshole, in contrast with the outlaw, is that he is most effective in the gray areas, where violations of a social rule are difficult to establish in the public way needed to support unified efforts at social sanction. As we have seen in chapter 5, assholes often effectively turn cooperative people against one another precisely when agreement in such efforts is most needed. And even if sanctions could be established in some cases, it is not clear that any sanctions could apply in the general way that would be needed to keep the asshole population from getting out of hand. Indeed, in some cases punishment has the opposite effect of inducing vice. In some experimental “trust games,” for instance, the threat of a fine imposed upon a player who does not sufficiently reciprocate a benefit received reduced the players’ willingness to participate. Much as with the Haifa day care center, the fine put people in a self-interested frame of mind.25

  Shame. An exception might be shame culture, which does seem to stably suppress assholery on a large scale in places such as Japan. Where that culture is not established, however, it is not clear what form of shaming could have a similarly general suppressing role. The media could potentially do so, and in some times and places they perhaps have. Yet the media is readily co-opted, perhaps more so than the family and religion. Consider Mussolini’s or Berlusconi’s Italy. Or witness the United States today, where an a
sshole parade in politics, cable news, and reality TV mainly reinforces a culture of shamelessness.

  Liberal society. We might instead look to the institutions of liberal society (in the broad sense of “liberal” that contrasts with authoritarian styles of rule). Institutions such as the market and the rule of law do apparently have a positive influence on civic culture.26 Much as with the family and religion, however, the positive influence of such institutions can equally be undermined by the strong tendencies of entitlement capitalism. To the extent the rule of law involves effective threats of punishment, we have already suggested how it might be eroded as assholes avoid social sanction. And any positive influence on virtue induced by market relations might cease or be swamped by a more powerful sense of entitlement. Nor do the institutions of democracy provide a safe harbor. Electoral politics, as we all know, is all too easily corrupted. Even after the election, parliamentary rules are easily subverted for short-term political advantage.27

  Perceived fairness. People reared in what they see as a fair system of cooperation arguably will do what it takes to support it. This may genuinely stabilize cooperation over time, from one generation to the next, if we assume a fair society has already been established.28 Even a capitalist society that is not seen as perfectly fair might garner its own support to the extent that each feels better off for it and is treated fairly enough. Still, this won’t clearly help an entitlement system of capitalism. It loses support among cooperative people precisely because it is perceived as insufficiently beneficial and fair. At most, the sense of fairness might slow the process of decline.

  Cooperative faith. A further possibility is that enough of us place our trust not in any particular dampening system but in our fellow cooperators as such. Despite perhaps yawning differences, we hold faith that they, like us, will do what it takes to keep things from completely falling apart. Yet, if this may well work under favorable circumstances, it surely has its limits. When circumstances turn unfavorable, even generalized trust can be shaken, for any of the reasons noted above (e.g., exhaustion, underassurance, rising costs, or unfair burdens). Societies once marked by trust do, after all, fall apart.