Our vocabulary word for the day is...Assholes!

The Not 100% Complete FAQs for the Pretty Fucked Up Person in a Pretty Fucked Up World

Assholes!

You notice them, you interact with them, you wonder why they exist, you hate them, you get screwed over by them, you work for them, you get pissed off by them, you have them in your family, you see them getting rich, you see them getting all the hot chicks, you observe that they seem to be taking over the earth, and yet....not once in your life have you productively wasted your time by perusing an entire web page devoted to this common yet fascinating social phenomenon. This is an incredibly serious oversight on your part but you have a chance to rectify it now.

All right. Assholes are a complex phenomenon and have many features so we are going to tackle this topic in a completely random and disorganized way. Because we are tired today and just don't feel like being very organized.

Random Disorganized Asshole Feature No. 1: Assholes Defined.

An asshole is someone with a low tolerance for their own pain and a high tolerance for everyone else's.

This little feature pretty much explains a whole lot of observable asshole behavior. Your asshole Dad (and you may have one, they tend to reproduce) will decide that he needs to completely control your teenage life down to the tiniest detail and pitch an absolute fucking fit if he doesn't get his way in every single little goddamn thing as if the world is going to fucking end and he is absolutely going to die in an incredible implosion of rage and pathetic contemptible helplessness just because someone dared to disagree with him the tiniest little bit -- and yet he simply will not give a shit that he is ruining your life, your mother's life, your sister's life, and actually had your dog put down earlier this year because he thought it couldn't 'hold its weight' in the family anymore.

If it hurts his feelings a little bit to think that anyone in your family doesn't think he is absolute god - he will lash out with as much fury as if he was being stung by a million killer bees. Meanwhile, your sister could end up trying to jump off a mental institution chair with a bedsheet tied around her neck and it wouldn't have the slightest effect on him. They are ruthless in pursuit of their own survival and pretty dismissive of anyone else's.

This is the kind of thing that's going to piss you off big time in your dealings with your Asshole Dad or your Asshole Boss or your Asshole Mother-in-Law or your Asshole Whoever and it's going to be bad for you chemically in the long run. But at least now you know what the problem is.

Assholes are insensitive to everyone and everything else while highly sensitive to themselves. This poses 2 problems for you. Problem No. 1 - you don't understand it. Problem No. 2 - you have no leverage with someone who doesn't give a shit about other people. The entire social system by which humanity conducts its affairs is basically overturned by the asshole - to everyone else's disadvantage.

So now, to understand and deal with the Asshole Phenomenon we have to understand The Entire Social System By Which Humanity Conducts Its Affairs. Which sounds like a big job. But isn't. Because it's pretty simple actually.

The vast ebb and sweep of all humanity's complicated little dealings with each other is actually governed by a pretty simple little rule, which is that your tolerance for your own pain will be approximately equal to your tolerance for other people's. This is nature's checks and balances system. Sort of like how you get an incredibly big complicated American government out of the checks and balances of Congress, the court system, and the presidency - you get an incredibly big complicated set of social interactions out of the fact that you don't really like being in pain, but then you're also not all that crazy about other people being in pain either.

This is the Tiny Drowning Kittens element of human social interaction. If someone forced you to watch a film of someone ruthlessly drowning tiny little squeaking kittens who were utterly helpless and had no idea why they were being drowned while their frantic mother lunged savagely but unsuccessfully at the Ruthless Kitten Drowner - you would be uncomfortable and upset. Even if you didn't say anything, your heart would start beating in an alarmed fashion, various chemicals would be getting perturbed and racing around your body gasping 'oh my god, that's horrible' and wishing the Kitten Drowning Situation would go away and your body would want to sweat and to grimace and force you to sigh and move restlessly in your chair until hopefully the kittens were saved. Because it would cause your body pain to see someone else's - even if it's only kittens. You don't do this on purpose. It's just the way your body reacts. That Terrible Meowing Sound of beings in distress would burn its way into your chemicals. That frantic desperate hopeless clawing for life would affect it profoundly. Because your body just absoutely fucking hates Terrible Signs of Distress in anyone. It's torture! It hates it!

An asshole's body doesn't react the same way. An asshole that was so inclined could drown a bunch of kittens. Not necessarily for pleasure, but simply because they could tolerate all those signs of distress without much reaction. It simply wouldn't register.

And while we are on the subject of assholes, let's digress into the subject of assholes and torture for a little while just to liven things up and make them even more dramatic. The most effective way to break someone's spirit or will (just in case you want to know) is to force them to endure someone else's torture while not being able to do anything about it and knowing they could be next. Armies use this all the time. It's called boot camp. Totalitarian regimes use it. It's called political interrogation. And so do asshole bosses. It's called business as usual. They fire people, they humiliate people, they drag people through the mud, they make them suffer. And they make you watch so that you will understand that you could be next. One of the worst tortures of spending a lot of time with a dedicated asshole is watching them torture everyone else. This will warp you. It may permanently scar you even.

It's actually a slightly but significantly better deal to be tortured directly by the asshole rather than watch someone else go through it. Because when you are actually being tortured (just in case you want to know), your body will produce its own Torture Buffer Chemicals, which will prevent you from experiencing the full weight of what's going on at the time. You may be being screamed at in front a room full of highly paid horrified people, but to some degree you will be in shock and not really aware of what's going on. Not so the unlucky bystanders. Their bodies will not be producing any buffer chemicals and they will be cringing and sweating and their chemicals will be helplessly and restlessly milling throughout their bodies. You know this from experience. It can almost be worse to be embarrassed for someone else than to be embarrassed yourself.

This physical response is so strong that kids who are in terrifically abusive situations will often go to great lengths to risk torture themselves simply to ensure that their little siblings will not be tortured the same way. Not only can people do incredibly brave and heroic things to prevent other people from being tortured, they actually do them. The Oh Dear Fucking God I Absoutely Fucking Hate Those Horrible Sounds of Distress chemicals are that strong. They are incredibly important little evolutionary zappers and though they may be broken by prolonged There Is Absolutely Nothing I Can Do About This Fucking Asshole Who is Torturing Other People situations, they won't actually die and they will come roaring back with a vengeance given a chance.

This is the Compassion Response and the Compassion Response is not wussy by any means. The Compassion Response kicks. You can measure this scientifically if you want, but you're not going to because it would involve a whole process of setting up an experiment, outfitting a lab, getting federal funding and so on, and that would take a long time and a lot of effort. But if you did, you'd see people's pain brains lighting up, and their nerves that conduct information to and from muscles getting all tense and freaked, and their faces getting all rigid and their stress chemicals start racing around in alarm every single fucking time you showed a group of them that Goddamn Horrible Video of The Kittens Being Drowned. You would not be a very popular scientist with your research subjects.

The Compassion Response is the difference between you and an Asshole. Like almost everyone else, you negotiate your life by avoiding the twin negative poles of Causes Me Pain and Causes Someone Else Pain. So if your kid pisses you off, you'll yell at them, and then when they look all scared and hurt, you'll back off and say I'm sorry and they'll start crying because they didn't mean to make you mad because they don't like it when you're in pain and so on and so forth, back and forth in an endless fucking negotiation between trying not to get screwed over yourself while trying not to screw over anyone else and just balancing back and forth, your interests, their interests. Etc. etc. This is exactly what makes life so various and not something you can necessarily just snooze through. You've got two big zappy electrical shock poles on either side of you at all times and you have to constantly walk the tightrope. Screw yourself over and you'll get zapped by Causes Me Pain, react too aggressively and you'll get zapped by Causes Someone Else Pain.

Life's a lot simpler for Assholes. There's only one big zappy electrical pole and that's Causes Me Pain but it's a motherfucker of a pole, more like a fence with a gajillion megawatts of power and every time they run into it they bounce away screaming their heads off 'oh my god, a gajillion fucking megawatts of zappy painful electric power!' And they race away from that fence like a startled boar.

So that when someone serves them a corned beef sandwich and it doesn't have any mustard when they said they wanted mustard they react more or less like they had a gigantic cattle prod up their ass. They start screaming at the waitress 'Did I ask for mustard?! I asked for mustard! When I ask for mustard on my sandwich I damn well expect to get it or someone's going to get fired!' And then there you are sitting at the table with them thinking - 'god, you're such an asshole.' And the waitress is frightened by the vehemence of the reaction and you just don't get it. Why the fuck does that asshole have to be such a jerk to some poor waitress who's obviously new? How much fucking pain can not getting mustard on your sandwich actually fucking cause?

The answer is a lot. It will all become simpler and more easy to see clearly if you imagine every asshole with a giant cattle prod up their ass. Which is more or less how they act all the time anyway, isn't it? It's kind of a comforting thought in a way. Any time you wish a little revenge on your least favorite asshole, just imagine that giant cattle prod and imagine yourself flicking the switch that ups the juice. You wouldn't be a very pleasant person yourself if you had a gigantic cattle prod up your ass all the time either. But you aren't an asshole so don't worry about it. Just enjoy your fantasy revenge.

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The Not 100% Complete FAQs for the Pretty Fucked Up Person in a Pretty Fucked Up World

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