by Robert Evans
Usenet, and the Internet entire, would never be the same. The veteran users referred to this new era as “Eternal September.” And when you lay it all out that way, it sounds like the story of some great sunken Atlantean empire, tragically lost to time in the throes of a terrific cataclysm.
But if the Internet’s early architects and advocates had studied their history and anthropology better, they wouldn’t have been so surprised. Eternal September was inevitable. The bad behaviors that have turned so much of the modern Internet into a cesspool aren’t just a product of upbringing and education. Narcissism, aggression, casual sexism, reflexive sarcasm—the panoply of douchebaggery—are quite literally written into our DNA.
Some of us were born to be dicks, because there have been times in the deep past of our species when those douchebag behaviors saved us.
How Evolution Rewards Narcissism
Social media is like a perpetual motion machine for fueling human egos. Sure, plenty of artists and creators use the Internet to share their work. But the legitimate contributions to human culture are buried under an avalanche of selfies. Go to any article on the Internet about a mass shooting, a natural disaster, or some other sort of calamity that kills a bunch of innocent people. You’ll find user after user giving some variation of the “If I’d been there . . .” post. For illustration, here’s one comment from a 2015 Cracked article about a survivor of the Utoya massacre in Norway. The article posed a rhetorical question, to illustrate how difficult it is to react effectively to sudden violence: “What will you do if a guy with a knife suddenly bursts into the room as you’re reading this? Did you have a plan before you finished reading the last sentence? Of course you didn’t.”
And here’s how a commenter named Jackmeioff chose to respond to that rhetorical question:
Plan?
I guess I’d just grab the 357 magnum from the handgun safe that’s within my reach without even leaving my chair, put six hollow points into his chest, and try to keep myself from getting stabbed until he loses consciousness. Then reload in case there are two guys.
That would pretty much cover the first 15–20 seconds.
I read a post like that, and I picture a very specific sort of person: dangerously unfit, pale from a lack of sunlight, and hiding in a man cave with at least one Scarface poster and several decorative swords on the walls. Somewhere on his home is a sign that shows the profile of a revolver and states BEWARE OF OWNER. Yes, this is a stereotype, but one that describes an unfortunate number of people who both
1. wildly overestimate their own abilities; and
2. just cannot wait to tell everyone how awesome they are.
You don’t imagine these folks lasting very long in a rougher time and place. Overconfidence is a flaw in our cushy modern world, with its antibiotics and relatively infrequent bear attacks. It must have been even deadlier in a less settled age. But this strain of delusional narcissism has been with us for a while, and there’s a reason it persists: Sometimes, the overconfident assholes are right.
Most people who take big, dumb chances based on an unrealistic appraisal of their abilities die. But some of them get lucky, rise to the occasion, and change the world. Christopher Columbus was a cocky asshole who failed at finding India, got lucky, and found Europe two whole continents to plunder. Columbus was rewarded for taking stupid risks with fortune and fame. He had two sons, who had children of their own and passed their reckless genes down through the ages.
Scientists can actually trace the genetic legacy of history’s luckiest risk takers. There’s a gene, called DRD4, that helps your body decide when and how to give you dopamine. About 20 percent of us have a variant of DRD4 called DRD4-7R. Some studies have shown that people with the variant are more open to taking risks. That one gene isn’t the only thing separating the guy who’ll drunkenly hop a fence to help his friends break into a hot tub from the friends who mostly just hope he doesn’t get them arrested. But it does suggest that overconfidence and risk taking have paid off with alarming regularity down through the ages.
As best as science can tell, the DRD4-7R gene first showed up in a big way about forty to fifty thousand years ago, when the first humans decided to leave the safety of their homes and see if there might be better stuff across the sea.
The Ancient Wisdom of Overconfidence
Dr. David Dunning, of Cornell University, apparently had many run-ins with Jackmeioffs of his own. In 1999, he paired up with a graduate student named Justin Kruger to study the baffling phenomenon of human overconfidence. He explained to me:
I was fascinated by the number of people I saw in . . . everyday life who were making mistakes, and I wondered, how could they have not foreseen making these mistakes?
Dr. Dunning’s work was motivated by many of the same irritants we’ve all faced. He saw overconfidence lead to disaster in “faculty meetings, on C-SPAN, reading dumb criminal stories and the Darwin Awards and so forth.” He and Kruger tested students in a variety of ways and quizzed each on how well they thought they’d done. They found that the students who’d done worst on a given test were, invariably, the ones who had “grossly overestimated” their performance on the quiz. The people who’d done well had a much more accurate idea of their performance. This study wound up being one of those landmark findings that gives scientists something to put their names on. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that the least competent people tend to assume they’re much better at a given task than they really are.
Dunning and Kruger’s work suggests that Jackmeioff behavior is something endemic to human beings. Dr. Dunning agreed that the behavior he observed was exacerbated by the anonymity of the Internet. “I think people are much more likely to be circumspect among their friends and families than they are in an anonymous Internet comments section.”
But just why is this kind of behavior so prevalent in humankind? Narcissism and overconfidence have blighted us with war and stock market crashes and the last twenty years of reality TV. When has it helped us?
Back in 2011, two scientists, Dominic Johnson and James Fowler, from the universities of Oxford and California, had this same question. Being huge nerds, they decided to try and answer it by creating a mathematical model. In a letter to the journal Nature in 2011, “The Evolution of Overconfidence,” they proposed a situational model involving two individuals, of uncertain strength, competing for the same resource. Because it’s a good situational model, the actual details of the conflict could vary from two people staring each other down over a lone apple to two nations deciding whether or not to go to war over an island full of gold.
If those parties fight, whichever one winds up being stronger takes the resource. But if only one of them makes a move for the resource, he/she/it winds up winning everything without a fight.
Neither side can know for sure if it’ll win or lose in the event of a struggle. But the side that assumes it’ll win any fight because look at these biceps, bro has the best odds of winning the unclaimed resource. That side also has the highest odds of getting into a fight, but hey, statistically it’ll win some of those, too. As the study’s authors put it:
Overconfidence is advantageous because it encourages individuals to claim resources they could not otherwise win if it came to a conflict . . . it keeps them from walking away from conflicts they would surely win.
It’s worth noting that this is true only up to a point. Dr. Dunning cautioned me against assuming overconfidence was always a positive:
Let’s say after a while you’re overconfident, you come out with injuries, disabilities, and sooner or later you wind up in a conflict that ends your life. The problem with risk is that you lose.
Johnson and Fowler also noted that overconfidence gets less and less valuable in riskier situations. When the risks are small, you don’t suffer much from your failures, and the windfalls of success are well worth it. This is why Jackmeioffs will brag about their f
ighting prowess all day long on the Internet, without ever actually winding up in a fight in their entire lives.
It’s easy to make fun of that endlessly confident, reckless, ab-sharing young bro type, but in more primitive times the people who grabbed at what they wanted and just assumed they could take it won a lot of easy victories. Those easy victories kept them well fed, and their overconfidence synergized with another asshole behavior that also served our primitive, infuriating ancestors well in ancient conflicts:
The Wisdom of Shit Talking and Lying
The birth of the Internet led to a renaissance in talking smack. There’s a risk in doing that kind of thing face-to-face, faces being notoriously vulnerable to face punches. Online, though, distance and anonymity are our shields, and the insults can flow as freely as the amateur pornography and pirated films. It’s easy to hear some thirteen-year-old screaming death threats to you over XBox Live, or scroll through the river of hate that is a YouTube comments section, and lay all the blame on anonymity. The truth is more complex. We’ve been hardwired to talk shit for thousands of years—and there’s a damn good reason why.
Human beings are coded for aggression. It’s one of the “human universals,” to shamelessly steal a term coined by anthropologist Donald Brown in his 1991 book of the same name. Human universals are behaviors we engage in so regularly that, if aliens exist, they’ll be the basis for their stereotypes of our species.
But aggression doesn’t have to end with violence. In fact, as Johnson and Fowler pointed out, the best result in any confrontation is that the other side backs down without a fight, leaving you to reap the spoils without bleeding for the privilege.
So how can you be aggressive without necessarily being violent? The answer is bluster, shit talking, braggadocio, or one of dozens of other names for word-based aggression. Obviously, impugning someone’s honor, courage, and/or parentage is the kind of thing that can end in a fight, but more often than not it happens instead of one. Shit talking is the human equivalent of a dog baring its teeth at another dog. He’s not trying to start a fight; he’s trying to avoid one by letting the other dog know he’ll open up a mouthful of murder if pushed too far.
That’s where overconfidence enters into it again: Boasting about what a dangerous badass you are and how everyone else had better step off works best if you believe you can back it up. The Jackmeioffs of the world might be full of shit (read: They are ABSOLUTELY full of shit), but many of them believe everything they say and type. Johnson and Fowler suspect that one reason we’ve evolved to be so good at lying to ourselves is because it makes those lies more believable to others.
Let’s not understate the evolutionary value of lying, though. Evolutionary biologist Peter Caryl noted in “Escalated Fighting and the War of Nerves: Game Theory and Animal Combat” that, unlike overconfidence, straight-up bluffing works better the higher the stakes get. (Maynard Smith & Parker made similar observations in a 1976 paper for Animal Behaviour.) In a life-and-death situation, calling someone’s bluff might cost you your life. It’s the same basic idea behind the “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War. Both the United States and Russia claimed to be able to wipe each other (and everyone else on the planet) out. Maybe one side was lying about the effectiveness of its missiles or the readiness of its armed forces, but no one was willing to risk finding out.
Conflicts between humans are more dangerous than conflicts between members of any other species. As a result, we value elaborate bluffs more than any other species. We’ve created whole art forms for just that purpose. The most public modern example would have to be the ongoing conflicts between different gangster rap artists. Those rivalries do end in bloodshed sometimes (this would be an appropriate time to pause and pour one out to Biggie), but that’s the exception, not the rule.
A staggering amount of human creativity has been wasted on bluffing about just how badass we are. Flyting, a form of vocal dueling in which combatants insult, deride, and assert their superiority over an opponent, was the medieval European equivalent of gangster rap. We find evidence of flyting as far back as Beowulf (between 800 and 1100 CE). I think the writer Alta Cools Halama (“Flytes of Fancy,” in Essays in Medieval Studies 13, 1996) was the first to draw a direct connection between gangster rap and the flyting between Beowulf and Unferth.
During the banquet that takes place at the poem’s beginning, a Thane named Unferth, envious of Beowulf, makes the loud claim that Beowulf lost a swimming competition to a guy named Breca, who was willing to swim for seven straight nights. Unferth intimates that, if Beowulf’s afraid of a little night swimming, he’s sure to get his ass kicked in a fight with the chief badass of the book, Grendel.
“So ween I for thee a worse adventure—though in buffet of battle thou brave hast been, in struggle grim—if Grendel’s approach thou darst await through the watch of night!”
Beowulf counters by admitting that, sure, he lost a swimming contest. But only because he provoked the “wrath of the sea-fish.” Yes, the ol’ “I only lost that swimming contest because I had to murder nine sea monsters” excuse. There’s a weird similarity between the way boasts are made in flyting and gangster rap, priding signs of physical dominance and power above all else. Here’s how Beowulf starts his boast of whale murder:
Now the wrath of the sea-fish rose apace; yet me ’gainst the monsters my mail coat, hard and hand-linked, help afforded—battle-sark braided my breast to ward, garnished with gold.
Whereas Body Count’s controversial 1992 hit “Cop Killer” starts with the singer bragging about his shirt, gloves, and ski mask. Both the flyting in this millennium-old epic poem and the rap hit started with protagonists bragging about their gear, and then moving on to brag about how they do their killing. In Beowulf’s case he pierced the monsters “with point of sword, with blade of battle,” “whelming” the sea beast “by the hurly through hand of mine.” In Body Count’s case, it was a “twelve gauge sawed-off” and a car with its “lights turned off.”
The most famous literary example of flyting is probably “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” from the early 1500s. Dunbar and Kennedy were two Scottish poets and nobles who got into a disagreement in front of the king and decided to settle it by literally shit talking each other. Here’s my favorite line:
Thou callst thee rhetor with thy golden lips. Nay, glowering gaping fool, thou art beguiled. Thou art but gluntoch, with thy giltin hips.
That all sounds like old-timey nonsense, so you should probably know that gluntoch means “dirty knees” and gilten hips means “shitty ass.” That line was Dunbar’s way of claiming his flyting was so good, Kennedy was literally going to shit himself.
A lot’s changed in five hundred years. But overconfidence, bragging, and shit talking, both literal and figurative, seem to be eternal. In fact:
Filthy Insults and Mass Sarcasm Built Society
I don’t want you to walk away from this thinking that flyting and rap battles are particularly novel developments in the history of human language. Ritual insults go back further than medieval Scotsmen, or even Beowulf. The very evolution of human language owes a debt to shit talking, according to the linguists Ljiljana Progovac and John L. Locke. In their 2009 paper, “The Urge to Merge: Ritual Insult and the Evolution of Syntax,” they point out that the ability to form compound words is one of the earliest stages of language development in children. It’s also very often used to craft insults. Words like “dare-devil, kill-joy, pick-pocket, scatter-brain, turn-coat” and, I’ll add because they didn’t, mother-fucker, are what’s known as “exogenic VN compounds.”
These exogenic compounds are found all across human language, and that tendency to combine two words (the “merge”) is one of the basic pillars of all human syntax, from ssum-sitan (“suck-cow”) in Tashelhit Berber, to my favorite, jebi-vitar, or “fuck-wind,” in Serbian. The sheer frequency of such compounds in human language suggests that insulting riv
als in an elaborate, humorous, profane, but non-violent way is enough of an adaptive benefit that the guys (this kind of behavior is much more common among men) who were good at it left permanent marks in the foundations of human language.
While young men were busy forming the basis of human language out of boasts about their penises/insults about the penises of others, another type of ritual insult was helping kick off the genesis of all civil order. The “shaming of the meat” is a ritual most famously observed among the !Kung people by the anthropologist Richard Lee. In his 1969 essay “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,” he recalled trying to reward a tribe who’d helped him by buying “the largest, meatiest ox” he could find as a gift. When he proudly presented the animal, the !Kung responded by mocking his gift for being insultingly shitty. The quality of the animal had nothing to do with it. The shaming of the meat was an old tradition among the !Kung, and other hunter-gatherers, designed to keep the egos of young male hunters in check.
The !Kung knew just as well as we do that young adult males are by far the most dangerous section of society. The male ego can do disastrous things, left to its own devices, and hunter-gatherers live on thin margins. They can’t afford many fights and violent displays of dominance. There’s food to be gathered. So whenever they notice a young hunter putting on airs because of all the meat he managed to bag, the !Kung respond with sarcasm: “Is that all you caught? You think there’s even enough for anyone else?”
Mass public displays of sarcasm are how the !Kung choose to “cool” the hearts of their prideful young hunters. The !Kung kept up their meat shaming with Lee until the day of the slaughter. When the ox was cut open and the mass of fat and meat was immediately apparent to all, Lee cried: