The nature of assholeness

The modern psychology has diagnoses for many personality types and traits, but it’s missing probably one of the most common types which is an asshole. The obvious problem of diagnosis is that we would figure out the majority of population to be more or less assholes and based on my experiences this is true. The root cause of assholeness is strongly tied to the lack of self-reflection. If you can’t understand you are an asshole it’s difficult to change and become a better person.

What has always interested me is the “reason” for being an asshole. Is it just the lack of self-reflection or more complex than that, because if people find out you are an asshole it’s not exactly an advantage of any kind I guess. Then again, animal behavior is based on focusing completely on yourself with the detriment of others. However it seems often that it’s even bad for yourself to be an asshole, because it rarely helps you to achieve anything positive.

Usually assholes try to hide their nature and one of the tactics they use is to blame someone else for being an asshole. First they do something annoying and when you react to it they act as if it was you who is annoying them. This reverse psychology actually does work, because it is like a shield that protects the asshole’s mind from thinking about what he did. Sometimes just getting a reaction seems to be the thing and this behavior, also known as bullying, is something assholes do more often when they are young.

So why some people are not assholes? It’s possible that self-reflection is a new feature and people didn’t have it earlier which means once we all were assholes. It could be a plausible theory if you think about human history and how fast we have developed from stone age to this level. When you read books written only few hundred years ago it’s difficult to see any hints of self-reflection, people just didn’t understand what they did and why. Becoming self-reflective could be the next major step in the evolution, but we certainly live in a phase that has both kinds of people.

Maybe self-reflection has nothing to do with how good person you are and being an asshole could be some kind of genetic feature, like having blue eyes rather than brown. Yet if you understand your own thoughts and actions it’s easier to avoid being an asshole even if you had an urge to hurt other people. Everyone could be someone’s asshole, but I think a real asshole is always trying to hurt someone in some way, because they externalize their problems to others without trying to understand their own actions.

It’s probably good that we can’t (or wont) measure self-reflection or diagnose assholeness. Knowing us it would possibly lead to a two-tier society where self-reflective people would be the new elite. Something like this actually did happen in the east, where a guy called Buddha made a claim that he became enlightened. This then created a number of religions with enlightened people as a kind of elite. Even today there are “gurus”, or “true” teachers who hold their lineage above others and get rich by giving wise advices to troubled people.

When I was young I thought people were mean because they chose to be. I didn’t realize until later that some people can’t understand what they are doing. If you are self-reflective it can be difficult to live in a world full of assholes. It’s difficult or even impossible to confront assholes, because without self-reflection they can’t change or understand how they hurt other people. This is evident in a lot of court cases where the criminal is not happy about going into jail, as if he is the victim who suffers from an unfair conviction.

I think assholes are a big problem, because they can drag down people around them for years and even longer than that. It’s an emotional distress which is often dismissed. In today’s world there is actually more “understanding” for assholes than before, because we no longer have rigid social structures to keep people in their place. It’s also easier to hide behind some kind of “minority” status and be an asshole even openly like modern feminists. Though women are a special case, because they have advantages that outweigh their assholeness.