You’re going to tell me all the rational reasons that what I say to you is stupid and I’m going to stand here and continue to call you an asshole and you are going to continue to be assholes. . . . It’s not that you’re weak or not trying hard enough. It’s just that you’re assholes, that’s all . . . WIPE THAT STUPID SMILE OFF YOUR FACE YOU ASSHOLE!
Now the people who signed up for the est sessions were hardly assholes by ordinary standards—or at least not just for showing up; at the worst, that made them schmucks. They may have been conflicted about their “belief systems” and self-deluded about their identities; who isn’t? But as most people understand the word, being an asshole isn’t simply a question of being inauthentic but being perniciously so. Feeling like a victim or a fraud can be a way of making yourself unhappy, but if it doesn’t lead you to hurt or disrespect someone else, you’re off the moral hook—no harm, no foul. But as est used the word, asshole left one’s effect on others out of the picture. If “getting it” meant accepting responsibility for oneself (even for one’s hereditary diseases, as est told the story), it also meant release from fretfulness about whether one was doing the right thing. Even the effort to cease self-excusing and rationalizing was self-defeating; as Erhard put it, “An asshole is someone resisting being an asshole.” If you felt guilty, ashamed, or remorseful, you hadn’t gotten it. As Frank Zappa put it in a 1979 song, with maybe just a touch of irony, “You probably likes a lot of misery, but think a while and you will see / Broken hearts are for assholes.”
In his 1978 book, Growing (Up) at 37, Jerry Rubin spoke of his involvement with est and the realization it brought him to: “Though I had rebelled against my parents, I had in fact reproduced their psychic structures within me.” Addressing his parents, he said:You taught me to hate myself, to feel guilty, to drive myself crazy . . . I have your self-righteous right-wrong should—should-not programming . . . with that stupid JUDGE inside me that I got from you. . . You taught me to compete and compare, to fear and outdo. I became a ferocious achievement-oriented, compulsive, obsessive, live-in-my-head asshole.
It was a confession of assholism typical of est, dwelling on Rubin’s hang-ups rather than on the way he treated others. But for est, assholism was a purely solipsistic vice—you could be an asshole on a desert island.
Needless to say, the est trainers’ liberal use of asshole turned them into rather monstrous assholes themselves—“monstrous” because unlike the anti-asshole personified by Dirty Harry or Bluto Blutarsky, whose asshole foils were real if overdrawn, the “assholes” that legitimated the abusive response of the est trainers were merely a factitious pretext for it. In a preemptive move, Erhard’s acolytes half-acknowledged the point by calling themselves “estholes.” But that term rapidly became a disparaging label for those who had undergone the process and insistently trumpeted its singular powers of transformation. As one disillusioned former follower put it, “Est turns introverted insecure people into extroverted insecure people.” By the end of the decade, the movement had lost most of its cachet, dogged by charges of improprieties and charlatanism. (“There Is Nothing to Get,” Time headed its article about the program.) The spectacle of people paying a couple of hundred dollars for the privilege of spending hours enduring a mix of vituperation and Kmart epistemology was irresistible to satirists, who made est risible in movies like Semi-Tough, The Big Fix, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, not to mention a 1979 Mork and Mindy episode in which David Letterman played the mercenary founder of Ellsworth Revitalization Konditioning, or erk (for network TV, “you’re all assholes” was sanitized to “you’re all dipsticks”).
That was the fate of most of the more outre self-discovery programs of the seventies: either they were relegated to the cultural margins or absorbed in more low-impact versions in corporate training programs and motivational seminars. But the period left its mark on both the language and the ambient worldview. Much of the New Age language that Cyra McFadden satirized her 1977 bestseller, The Serial, is now unremarkable: nobody bats an eye at once-risible expressions like “I’ve got to get my act together,” “I’m not into that,” “It blew me away,” and “Are you okay with that?” which inverted the psychological perspective of “Is that okay with you?”
Critics frequently depict those self-discovery movements and the rise of therapy in general to a culture of entitlement created in that period. In How We Got Here, his history of the 1970s, David Frum discerns the linguistic legacy of est whenever people tell a friend who has gotten into trouble, “I support you” or when we acknowledge a problem that has occurred on our watch with, “I take responsibility for that.” According to Frum, the essence of est-speak is “its clever packaging of moral evasion as moral responsibility”:What, after all, does it mean to “take responsibility”—as Attorney General Janet Reno ostensibly did after the conflagration of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that left eighty-six dead? She was not defending her action as right or proper under the circumstances but neither was she apologizing or expressing remorse . . . What she was saying, evidently, was that the action she took was taken by her.
These critiques of cultural effects of the era very often take off from Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism or Phillip Rieff’s 1965 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff’s title is usually taken as implying that society is so absorbed with individual fulfillment that it crowds out concern for others. As one legal scholar has put it, “In the therapeutic culture, the self is the moral order.” As the indictment goes, that view of moral values made itself known in, among other things, the culture of Oprah and Dr. Phil (whose book titled Self Matters seems to say it all), speech-codes aimed at protecting people against hurt feelings, an artistic aesthetic that prizes self-expression over significance, schools more concerned with instilling self-esteem than teaching math or English, the spectacular growth of what Ronald Dworkin calls “the caring industry,” and a pervasive horror of making judgments of good and bad.
There’s no question that these shifts in cultural attitudes had far-reaching consequences in law, education, health care, and business, for both better and worse. But the critique misses the real moral significance of the period’s preoccupation with the self, in part because it draws too heavily on the public pronouncements of therapists, educators, and advocates. That makes for poor ethnography; when it comes to understanding everyday moral reasoning, it’s a good idea not to believe everything you hear on Oprah. So it’s worth coming back to the rise of asshole, the one cultural development of the period that we can feel confident wasn’t motivated by anybody’s higher ideals. There’s no question that the adoption of the word reflected the period’s psychological turn. As we saw, asshole is different from heel and phony in focusing on the perpetrator’s self-deluded inner life rather than simply on his behavior. That’s one reason why calling someone an asshole cuts both differently and deeper than those other words do: it’s harder to live with being told you’re pathetic and contemptible than with merely being told you’re bad.
But being an asshole is anything but a purely psychological state. Jerry Rubin and the other votaries of est may have used the word for someone with an arrested self-realization, without reference to his behavior towards others. But asshole wasn’t theirs to redefine. Then and now, when someone says, “I was an asshole,” he’s apologizing for what he did to someone else, not just for his own delusions or hang-ups. This is a far cry from believing that “the self is the moral order” or from defining away deviance as maladjustment or a social malady—“I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived,” as one of the Jets explains to Officer Krupke in West Side Story. And it cuts much closer to the way people of that era actually talked and thought about their lives. The age that adopted Asshole! as its signature reproach for rudeness and insensitivity wasn’t one that had bailed out on an external moral order.
Asshole and Narcissist, Separated at Birth?
The rise of asshole is the key to a much more general point about the period.
The psychological preoccupations of the 1970s may have induced revisions in our moral vocabulary, but not in a way that cancelled or negated the moral significance of our actions. On the contrary, it was the vocabulary of psychology itself that underwent the most important transformation. Take the rise of the narcissist in the popular imagination,which closely paralleled that of the asshole, as Figure 6-1 indicates.
FIGURE 6-1. Asshole v. Narcissist
The words draw their authority from opposite poles, of course, the one from clinical expertise, the other from the horse sense of ordinary folk. But they’re the products of the same transformation of cultural attitudes and they serve many of the same purposes, even if they drive to work in different neighborhoods. Before the 1970s, narcissism was found only in psychoanalytic writing or Freudian criticism (which is what accounts for all of its usage before 1970 in Figure 6-1). Its entry into popular speech was mediated by self-help books and pop psychology, with a big boost from Lasch, who depicted modern culture as suffering from a pathological narcissism that made itself known in everything from the popularity of streaking and jogging to cults of “pseudo self-awareness” and a fascination with oral sex. By the 1980s narcissist was appearing in Parents magazine, stories about Joe Namath, and the astrology column of Mademoiselle (“Libra beauty profile: A bit of a narcissist, you love to be pampered, massaged, and manicured”) .
The rise of narcissism was one of the linguistic reflexes of Rieff’s “triumph of the therapeutic,” which contributed a spate of words to everyday speech—alienation, conformist, identity crisis, antisocial, repressed hostility, and sibling rivalry. At first glance, the process seems to mirror the medicalization of other social values, as the old, morally charged categories are replaced by scientific ones that suspend subjective judgment. When drunk gives way to alcoholic, we pass “from badness to sickness,” in the words of the subtitle of a classic text on deviance (itself a word that became dramatically more frequent in the postwar period).
But the colloquialization of terms from clinical psychology didn’t always signal the moral evisceration of the concepts they stood for. Words like narcissism aren’t doing the same thing as alcoholic or PTSD. Rather, they’re aimed at blurring the line between the psychological and the moral, so that a diagnosis of a mental disorder provides a proof of moral rot. When Bernard Madoff was exposed as a swindler, Forbes’ Susan Lee contacted several psychoanalysts with reputations for being “extremely penetrating” to find out what made Madoff do it. She reported that “their diagnosis was immediate and unanimous: narcissistic personality disorder—someone who displays grandiosity, needs admiration and lacks empathy.” Therapists consulted by other journalists explained Madoff’s behavior as a symptom of psychopathy or addictive dysfunction. But whatever the diagnosis, it wasn’t offered to mitigate Madoff’s crimes, much less recommend a course of treatment. This wasn’t an occasion for “depraved on account of he’s deprived” extenuations or for speculating on what in Madoff’s past might have brought about the disorder (an early narcissistic injury? schlocky genes?). The diagnoses were meant to establish that Madoff was officially and clinically aberrant, twisted, morally deformed. It was really just a matter of giving a medical stamp of approval to the judgment given by the actress Kyra Sedgwick, one of Madoff’s victims: “He’s a sick man.”
In ordinary usage narcissism is mostly just “a loose synonym for bloated self-esteem,” as Peter Gay described it in his biography of Freud. The list of commentators and columnists who have diagnosed the president as a narcissist ranges from George Will and Charles Krauthammer to Stanley Fish and Lyndon Larouche. The charge isn’t different from the charges of self-importance that were leveled at Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, though in Obama’s case it can translate either as cocky, which is fair, or as uppity, which is a bit more problematic. But now it comes wearing a lab coat and accompanied by counts of first-person pronouns to invest it with a specious empirical sheen. Others have discerned the condition in Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich, to name a few, consulting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as if it were Peterson’s Birds of North America. Some of those people may indeed manifest the symptoms of pathological narcissism as listed in the “any five of the following” definition in the DSM (or at least until the appearance of DSM5, which will eliminate any reference to the disorder)— they’re people who need admiration, are arrogant or haughty, have a sense of entitlement, and so on. But you could say all that about them in English.
In their social connotations, the distance between narcissist and asshole is vast. Semantically, though, they’re close twins. When somebody is described as “a narcissistic asshole”—a phrase that gets thousands of hits on Google—the narcissistic isn’t there to distinguish one type of asshole from another (as in “. . . as opposed to an obsessive compulsive one”). It’s just an idiomatic intensifier like the adjectives in blithering idiot and unmitigated gall. For that matter, people sometimes talk about being an asshole as if that were a clinically defined disorder as well. According to an article in Psychology Today (“Do Girls Really Love Assholes?”):In terms of psychology, the “asshole” consists of the following traits: High Extraversion, Low Neuroticism (perhaps), Low Conscientiousness, Low Agreeableness, High Openness to Experience, and a bit of a dip into the dark triad traits (those with an extreme dark triad profile aren’t considered sexually attractive). The dark triad refers to three personality deficiencies: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
This feels like therapeutic overreach, as if assholism was just the vulgar name for some region in the map of personality disorders. But actually, it tells us less about asshole than it does about how therapeutic language has been co-opted to express our disgust and indignation. It isn’t that asshole has become a synonym for narcissist, but that as most people use the word, narcissist has become a synonym for a certain kind of asshole.
What Makes Assholes Assholes?
The most striking thing about the pairing of narcissist and asshole may be the empty space that’s left between them. Taken together, they signal the attenuation of the high moral language of public life. To express the full extent of your indignation over Madoff’s crimes, you can go one of two ways: you can call him a sociopath or a narcissist, or you can call him a scumbag or a piece of shit. But you can’t describe him as a scoundrel, as evil, or as a heartless wretch—or at least not without a theatricality that undercuts the genuineness of your feeling. Scoundrel is a fine-sounding word, but it isn’t the one you’ll choose to convey your genuine anger to a friend who has lost all her money in a swindle.33 That tendency to replace a moral vocabulary with its roots in literature and criticism by one with roots in science is the most dramatic linguistic effect of Reiff’s rise of the therapeutic. But what it shows is mostly how the moral mindset defeats any effort to keep it at a clinical distance. People always find a way to express their disapproval, whether the words they use are actually designed for that purpose.
Words like narcissism acquire their moral weight through a kind of semantic sleight of hand; we treat them as objective scientific categories at the same time we deploy them as subjective judgments. A blog commenter put the point deftly in a discussion of malignant narcissism: “It may be a disease, but they’re still assholes.” But asshole belongs to us, not to the compilers of the DSM, and the link it draws between personality and character is an intrinsic part of its meaning. The asshole’s delusion and inauthenticity is his own fault, not nature’s. If it weren’t, assholes wouldn’t be assholes.
Take, once last time, Norman Mailer’s Lieutenant Dove:Hearn remembered Dove’s saying to him once when he first came to the division, “You know, really, Hearn, you can appreciate this because you’re an educated man like me, but do you know there’s sort of a coarser element in the officers in the Army? The Navy’s more careful.”
Why does Dove merit the label asshole? Sure, he’s full of himself and thinks his social class makes him superior to the ot
her officers. But his condescending airs don’t actually injure anyone, and like a lot of phonies and poseurs he lacks what lawyers call mens rea, the intent to do harm. On the basis of what Mailer tells us about him, we wouldn’t be tempted to call him a prick or a shit or a bastard.
But Dove is mortally obtuse, in the sense of the word that the OED defines as “annoyingly unperceptive; stupid; insensitive.” “Annoyingly” is the key: obtuseness is a culpable failure to acknowledge what ought to be evident, particularly when it touches on the needs or interests of others. We don’t use the word for someone who turns a blind eye to realities through inattention or wishful thinking, like the terminal cancer patient who refuses to face the hopelessness of his prognosis. Assholes like Dove are obtuse in two directions at once. Their self-infatuation leads them to repress inconvenient realities at the same time they imagine that those realities aren’t obvious to anybody else, either. To use an expression that wouldn’t enter the language until some time after the book was published, Dove thinks he’s hot shit, and he’s studiously oblivious to the fact that Lieutenant Hearn and the other officers don’t agree—or indeed, that Hearn considers him a vulgarian. But then, Dove couldn’t very well delude himself if he didn’t also imagine he was fooling the others.
It’s that obtuseness that leads one to ask, “Whatever could this person be thinking?” when considering the behavior of some exemplary asshole—not a question we’re tempted to ask about somebody we’ve written off as a heel or a prick. Obtuseness requires a capacity to recognize and understand things—you can only be obtuse about something that ought to be obvious to anyone with your intelligence and experience. It’s easy to think of small children as little shits, since a predisposition to malice or cruelty can manifest itself very early on. But we rarely describe little children as assholes. You can’t be an asshole until you’re old enough to know better, and neurotic enough to sense that you ought to feel bad about it. If we weren’t vaguely aware of how unreasonable our presumptions were, we wouldn’t need to conceal them from ourselves or cook up excuses for them. To call someone an asshole is to imply he has a conscience, which is why the term is really incompatible with clinical psychopathy—why no one would use it for Hannibal Lecter, say. And it’s what leads us to think of assholes as unhappy people, whose delusions don’t quite conceal from themselves their moral deformities. They don’t know that they’re assholes, at least at the moment, but they sit uncomfortably in their skins.
Ascent of the A-Word Page 13