Not long ago, I read a book called Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back.
In it, the former cardiac anaesthesiologist Dr Rajiv Parti recalls the incredibly unusual events of 23 December 2010.
Rushed to UCLA Hospital suffering from a severe infection, Parti found himself in dire need of emergency surgery and was immediately put under.
Not long after, Dr Rajiv Parti died.
The surgeons acted swiftly. They did what surgeons do. They brought him back.
But just before they did, he says, some very strange things happened to him.
First, his world was plunged into complete darkness, and moments after that he found himself travelling to another realm entirely.
When he looked up, Dr Parti says he was shocked to see a big black cloud, flashing in the distance from lightning. There followed loud and terrifying rolls of thunder.
And then came the screams.
Loud, piercing screams of anguish and torture. Dr Parti realised he was surrounded by burning, tormented souls that began to writhe around him, engulfed in a fierce and unstoppable fire that now raged all around.
Then someone made him lie on a bed of nails, he says, which really hurt.
He was confused; disoriented; poked with needles. And then he was made to walk towards a fiery canyon, he says, thick smoke coating his nostrils and scratching at his lungs.
From there, high up on the edge of some kind of precipice, in a world that smelled of burning meat, he was made to survey all the many horrors that lay beneath.
Dr Rajiv Parti was amazed to find himself, in his own words, at the lip of hell.
In subsequent press interviews about his day in hell, there’s even been talk of strange horned demons with crooked teeth scurrying around, seemingly threatening him with an eternity of pain, though oddly these didn’t make the book.
However, here’s the point.
Despite all that – despite the horned demons and the terrifying screams of anguish and the beds of nails – do you know what was the first thing that occurred to Dr Rajiv Parti?
The very first thought he had, as he surveyed vast, endless burning fields of agonised bodies and human suffering and soul-scarring screams?
He says he thought about how rude he’d been to a woman who’d come to see him about her arthritis recently.
That’s what he thought about. He thought about how rude he’d been.
He’d been really dismissive, and he shouldn’t have been. He hadn’t paid attention to her at all as she talked. He just wanted to get on with his day. He’d really been ever so brusque.
And as he stood at the very lip of hell, and as Satan himself must have been warming up his sulphuric fork and wonky-teethed demons began circling around him, Dr Rajiv Parti stared into the raging heart of hellfire and thought about all the other times he’d been a bit rude to people.
Answer this: when was someone last rude to you?
I bet you remember very well, and I bet you told other people about it. No one wants to hear about a great holiday you had, where your flights were upgraded and the hotel gave you a suite and the weather was beautiful and the drinks were free and you got to know your favourite rock band who were staying at the same place and they invited you to New York to sing on their next album.
But if some guy on a train spilled your coffee and just went back to reading his newspaper without apologising – that’s a story.
‘What did you do?’ your friends will ask, wide-eyed. ‘Did you say something?’
Each of us can recall with startling accuracy minor rudenesses thrust our way by strangers in the past. Perhaps we cringe when we think of times we know for sure we were needlessly rude to someone else. But a story about rudeness has the power to muscle its way to the front of any conversation. Imagine a scientist arriving at a TV studio in order to announce a cure for all known diseases. I am absolutely certain that as they got their notes together and prepared for the most important speech of their life, they’d still take a moment to tell the bloke who took their jacket what an absolute tit their taxi driver was.
Sharing stories is a fundamental part of the human experience, and no day-to-day stories are more powerful or relatable than stories of injustice and rudeness, because when a stranger is suddenly and inexplicably rude, they break the rules and burn a bad memory onto your hard drive.
We are fascinated by rude behaviour. We listen to our friends recount their tales of bad service or angry commuters with glee. We clap our hands on the table and shout ‘GOOD!’ when we hear they stood up for themselves. We clap our hands on the table and shout ‘NO!’ when we find out they did nothing.
When the Hotdog Incident occurred, I found myself talking about it a lot. I needed to offload. It was an experience that didn’t just stay with me; it pretty much moved in.
And can I tell you something? Within 24 hours, I had done something absolutely insane.
As I drove past the diner again – and even though it was now empty and dark and closed – I gave it the finger.
I flipped off a building.
Instinctively.
A 38-year-old man.
This was not normal.
And what must the building have thought? ‘For 60 years I have stood proud on this corner, serving the community, never saying a word, never once a complaint – and then I get flipped off by an early middle-aged man in a Volvo.’
It doesn’t stop there.
Even as we headed back to London, I felt affected. I kept saying things to my wife about that woman. I kept using the word ‘unbelievable’ in various ways. ‘Unbelievably rude!’; ‘Unbelievable behaviour!’; ‘Unbelievable!’
I kept protesting my innocence, often completely out of the blue. ‘I did nothing wrong!’ I’d suddenly shout, as a new thought struck me or the injustice hit me again.
The long motorway drive did nothing to rid me of my frustration. In fact, now I decided that on some level other drivers were going out of their way to get in my way. We hit traffic jams that compounded my mood. I sneered at other cars. I seethed. And when I got home, and span the cap off a bottle of wine so quickly I’m surprised it didn’t set something on fire, I did something worse than flipping off a building.
I went online.
I looked at TripAdvisor for pretty much the first time in my life.
I signed up.
And I wrote a withering review.
Another way of putting this is: I was obsessing.
Rudeness had me.
But at least know this: the night I got home and wrote that review and drank wine and pressed ‘Publish’ and clicked ‘Refresh’ and ‘Refresh’ and ‘Refresh’ a few hundred times willing my harsh words to appear, I also took a good hard look at myself.
I am not, by nature, an angry man. But now I had found an anger. A snarling rage, a sense of injustice and impotence and a hunger for revenge.
I can’t blame the Hotdog Incident on its own. Looking back, perhaps it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was just one heightened rudeness too far in a city and world and civilisation I felt had become less … civil. The more I rolled the events around in my head, the more other examples started crashing in on me. Examples I’d written off as being part of a bad day or tried to ignore.
Rude people in restaurants. On the bus. That executive at that dinner in Edinburgh that time. That six-year-old in the park who swore at my son. Bitchy emails. Unnecessary insults.
All of it came tumbling down – a brief personal history of rudeness – and as my wife went to bed and I sat up late, I realised it was making me unhappy. I didn’t want to be unhappy.
Something had been smouldering. But now the idea caught fire.
Maybe I could do something about all this. Maybe I could use this anger. Maybe I could try and understand why these things happen to us all. Maybe I could start with the Hotdog Incident. I could unpack it, unpick it, look at it from every angle. And maybe by doing so I could somehow put it right. For hotdog lovers everywhere.
So yes, I took a good hard look at myself that night.
And then I decided to take a good hard look at you, too.
As the first few days passed, and I began, I had another realisation. How could I judge where we should be if I didn’t know where we already were?
So I did something that at the time felt entirely natural.
I picked up the phone and approached a leading national polling company.
In return for several thousand pounds, they told me they could conduct a countrywide survey of 2,000 people aged 18 and over on ‘Rudeness and Its Effects in Everyday Life’.
Immediately and excitedly I began writing the questions for what would soon become known in my household as ‘The Wallace Report’. This would be my own state-of-the-nation survey. Because if, as I suspected, rudeness is getting worse, then how bad is it already?
I had so much I wanted to know because I suspect in some ways I wanted to know if I was still normal.
Is it normal to want revenge? Is it normal to be so affected by something as trivial as an argument over a hotdog?
Within a week, the results were back (see the end of the book for the full Wallace Report). I threw myself into them. Immediately I discovered some worrying things.
Try this one for size.
Thirty-eight per cent of people surveyed said that they themselves had been rude to someone in the last seven days.
That is simply not good enough. Those people are letting the rest of us down.
Worse, a little over one in five (21 per cent) actually consider themselves to be a rude person. That’s how they think of themselves. ‘Rude.’ As a defining characteristic. Like a badge of honour. Fine, but I wouldn’t open your match.com profile with it.
True, that still leaves nearly 80 per cent who, like you and me, say they’re just trying to get on, stay true to our unwritten social contracts, and are therefore surprised and bewildered when rudeness is foisted upon them. But still.
I pored and pored over The Wallace Report, and found it fascinating, because it focuses not just on those big moments, but on smaller, more specific ones too. Rather than overwhelm you, I’m going to pepper the answers of the public throughout this book to give some sense of our present-day attitudes to the New Rudeness that sweeps across our world the way a drunk clown sweeps across the first row of a circus audience, throwing not delightful buckets of glitter our way, but spraying us instead with a hosepipe full of his own shit.
I’m sorry if you found that rude.
But how does rudeness sweep across the world?
Does rudeness spread?
Incidentally, I emailed Dr Rajiv Parti on a number of occasions to ask him if he’d be willing to talk with me about that evening spent at the lip of hell when he realised he would have to mend his ways, but so far he has rudely ignored me.
You have to wonder what it’s going to take with that guy.