Assholes (16 page)

We have said that an asshole can be beyond moral correction and yet still be the appropriate object of blame. That is not yet to say how he is best handled. How, aside from merely placing blame, should we respond to the annoying man who has just interrupted, or woven across three traffic lanes, or created a giant political mess?

Much of the rest of this book is about asshole management, or, more accurately, why asshole management is unavoidably difficult. In
chapter 6
, we look at the difficulty of limiting the profusion of assholes throughout society. In this chapter, our topic is personal asshole management and the special way assholes destabilize small groups.

When it comes to personal asshole management, there is unfortunately very little useful to say by way of self-help—certainly nothing like an eleven-step guide to an asshole-free life. The asshole is deeply bothersome because we find it difficult to even
understand
what a good, constructive response would be, let alone to actually produce it on the spot. Despite many hard lessons about what did not work, and perhaps even the odd success, it takes only a fresh kind of asshole—or just the same old sort of asshole, encountered at a bad time—to
catch one unawares, throw one off balance, and spoil one’s whole day.

One’s day is spoiled because one feels forced into either of two unpalatable responses: a demeaning acquiescence or a personally disappointing and ineffectual fit of rage. That is, on the one hand, we have the option of
resignation:
we give in to what is plainly mistreatment, allow ourselves to be taken advantage of, and find reasons to somehow make this feel okay. On the other hand, we have the option of
resistance:
we stand up for ourselves and fight to be morally recognized. But fighting back can seem an exercise in futility. No amount of angry protest will get a true asshole to listen. As we explained in
chapter 1
, he is
entrenched
in his outlook; he is exceedingly good at walling out complaints, and, in this, he will most likely never change. Although neither resignation nor all-out resistance seems finally acceptable, we often have only the faintest sense of an ever-elusive better way.

Our best hope for finding that better way is to better understand ourselves. Why do we find both resignation and all-out resistance ultimately acceptable? The answer lies in the importance we attach to the kind of treatment the asshole deprives us of—that is, the importance of being morally recognized as an equal in the eyes of others. As we will now see, this explains why neither resignation nor all-out resistance is the best course, and in a way that points us toward more productive ways of seeking to be recognized.

To begin, we might ask, What was so bad about resignation? To someone frustrated, one might offer the following counsel:
“Take it easy. The guy is just an asshole. Why be so worried about what an
asshole
thinks?” One might elaborate with counsels of productivity: “And in any case, you’ve got better things to do with your time. Just give the asshole what he wants, what he thinks he deserves, and be done with it. It helps in this to temporarily buy his view of the world. Throw in an ego stroke, just for good measure. An asshole who feels that you completely understand him is much more likely to leave you alone.”

Unless of course he doesn’t leave you alone, which he often won’t. (Perhaps he now feels he can take more and more of what he was anyway after.) There is good advice in these counsels of productivity, yet the stated version cannot be entirely right. For one thing, in the face of a persistent, wearing asshole, the advice is exceedingly difficult to follow. Our feelings of revulsion, of anger, and of a thirst for retribution are not consciously chosen or readily set to one side. They come unbidden. Reactive feelings do not simply arise in the moment of confrontation. They can intrude upon a pleasant sunny day, in a flashing image of the man in question suddenly breaking out in a rash, of his losing bladder control in a public place, of his convulsing from having eaten poisoned food, of his being mowed down by a truck, of his being crushed by a meteor, or of fluids spraying spontaneously out of all his orifices (onto his friends standing nearby).
¹
Until of course one realizes, on second thought, that a person staring into the abyss may not be reflecting on his lack of concern for others, which may in turn prompt either a more elaborate scheme of revenge or, instead, a natural understanding
of how a Day of Judgment in the afterlife should have such enduring human appeal and, relatedly, of how there could be a moral basis to most religious metaphysics. We don’t have to believe that the asshole will actually get his in the end to find ourselves, passively and disappointingly, wrapped up a fantasized vengeful plot. Perhaps that isn’t so bad, because we of course would never go through with the fantasy. Or would we?

Being overtaken by obsessive rumination can seem like a personal flaw or, in the extreme, a psychological disorder. Yet it isn’t. The retributive feelings are a natural if extreme way of affirming one’s right to better treatment, a way of reassuring oneself of one’s equal moral status. Ultimately, reactive feelings reflect good and proper self-respect. We do well to tutor how they are expressed, perhaps by reminding ourselves that there is nothing good, as such, in human suffering, even an asshole’s human suffering. But there is nothing regrettable or reproachable in a natural affirmation of basic self-worth. If we
could
somehow ease ourselves out of that affirmative disposition—whether through years of patient mediation, a brutal process of cognitive psychotherapy, or by rewiring the limbic brain and basal ganglia—we’d be well advised not to go through with it. We’d be carving away at something not all too human, but only human, and therefore something properly respected or even cherished.

In much the same way, and for the same reasons, people strongly, often violently resist being played for a sucker: better to fight than be someone’s lackey. The trouble, especially for men, is that resistance is easily overdone, bringing its own set of problems. Consider a man who has laser clarity that “no one fucks with me,” given an expansive definition of the “fucking with” relation, which includes such things as looking at him wrong, turning one’s head in the general direction of his woman,
or being too tall (and so in need of being taken down). This view finds sophisticated expression in the great political theorist Thomas Hobbes’s expansive right of self-defense, which includes a right of anticipatory strikes against anyone one deems a potential enemy.
²
Much the same view finds more recent expression in the Bush doctrine of preventive war and its use in justifying the invasion of Iraq, on the basis of what turned out to be whispered rumors of WMDs. Morally, these versions of the right of self-defense are a stretch.
³
Yet we can certainly appreciate their source: no one wants to be a sucker, and, from a moral point of view, we just don’t have to stand by and allow ourselves to be taken advantage of by an asshole.

When we are at risk of being exploited, we can at least take ourselves out of the asshole’s way. Which suggests a strategy of vigilant avoidance: if one plans with sufficient foresight, one can systematically avoid putting oneself in a position to encounter an asshole. One can be exceedingly careful about whom one befriends, dates, and marries; one can work for oneself and forgo business deals with anyone who might be suspect; and so on. Yet this surely goes too far. Should one avoid or leave
Italy, along with all its bounteous joys, simply because one can be pretty confident that an asshole will cut you off in traffic or drive behind an ambulance to save time in traffic? Should one pass on one’s favored career in banking or academia because one will be stuck dealing with an asshole from time to time? Surely not. We all manage our associations to some extent already. The single-minded pursuit of asshole avoidance would come at a too high a cost.

In that case, one will invariably have to cooperate within social interactions that the asshole exploits. But how can one cooperate without being a sucker? We surely don’t have to stand up to every asshole. This is, again, a good counsel of productivity: it isn’t worth it to fight every good fight; as the point is often put, “you have to pick your battles.” But to
never
stand up for oneself, to always acquiesce, also seems mistaken or, for most, even impossible. We can and should fight for our rights at
some
point. The question, then, is in what way. The question is how to fight for recognition without lashing out.

Let us turn then to our second and opposing reaction: all-out resistance. Here we immediately face a difficulty. How could fighting for moral recognition possibly be a worthy cause if the asshole
will not listen
, by his very nature, try as we might to get through? How could an
exercise in futility
be worthwhile?

It might be said that we often won’t be certain that the man in front of us is a proper asshole who will not or cannot change. He
could
be a borderline case and might be moved by one’s protest. Calling him an asshole could give him pause. It could be that he has never thought of himself in that light and, now being
forced to look at himself in a different way, feels ashamed. If there’s a chance he’ll listen, why not try?

While this is fine as far as it goes, it mainly postpones our problem. When a first effort is made and rebuffed, should you now continue to seek recognition, persisting in the good fight? Or should you simply give up? Especially when we are stuck in repeated encounters with an asshole who wears on our nerves, we presumably should stand up for our rights instead of simply letting the asshole have his way with us. But how could that be worthwhile if any quest for recognition is bound to fail? Why aren’t we left with an unacceptable choice between resigning ourselves to being a sucker and an arduous and probably futile struggle to uphold our rights?

The answer to this question is that we are not forced to choose between acquiescence and all-out resistance. One can stand up for one’s rights in many constructive and fruitful ways short of trying to do the impossible—get the asshole to listen and change.

To see this, consider why we swear out loud at the asshole in traffic. We often
know
that he cannot hear us in his car. Indeed, we are especially prone to do this while driving alone (because passengers may be disturbed or offended), knowing full well that
no one
else can hear. Is there a point to this? Is it simply that there is pleasure in venting, the gratification of a cathartic, ejaculatory burst? No, or at least not entirely. We do this, rather, in order to
recognize ourselves
, as a proxy for the recognition of others. We are reassuring ourselves that we do deserve better treatment and that this is something that any reasonable onlooker, were one present, would agree with.

The phenomenon reflects our more general need to keep ourselves intelligible to others. Consider, by comparison, “response
cries” such as
aha, bleh, eeuw, goody, hmph, oh, oops, phew, whee, yikes
, or
yuck
. Why do we spontaneously blurt out these words, often in a moment of awkwardness? As psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker explains, we do so with others in mind:

Following sociologist Erving Goffman, Pinker suggests that we do this in order to “signal our competence and shared understanding of the situation to a generic audience,” where the audience may be imagined rather than real:
⁴

The same goes for swearing out loud in the car. Pinker says cathartic swearing is a response to a “sudden challenge to our goals or well-being.” But that isn’t quite right; swearing with the term “asshole” is a response specifically to a
person
. Pinker himself notes in passing that “people shout
Asshole!
when they suffer a sudden affront from a human perpetrator, but not when they pick up a hot casserole or have a mousetrap snap on their finger.”
⁵
Our theory explains why we swear
only
at persons: the concept of an asshole is essentially keyed to states of mind that only persons can have, in particular, the attitudes and dispositions involved in conducting oneself in a way that reflects one’s appreciation of others as fellow persons and moral equals. That does not itself explain why we call an asshole an asshole when we know that he won’t care. But we now have our explanation. When the asshole has failed to give us our due in traffic, we swear out loud, not to get
him
to listen but to reassure ourselves that others, real or imagined, would hear our case and agree. We in effect tell ourselves that if he won’t uphold our status as a moral equal, everyone else will.