In 2016, the Mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte, was elected as the 16th President of the Philippines.
He understood that this office carried with it a special burden, and it was one he was prepared for.
‘I am trying to enjoy the last days of my rudeness,’ he told a midnight press conference, who didn’t look like they believed him.
This was the man who just a year before got so annoyed by a five-hour traffic jam caused by the Pope’s visit to Manila that he used an official campaign speech to call the infallible Holy Father a ‘son of a whore’.
The Pope was totally cool with it and sent him a note saying he’d pray for him.
But, Duterte insisted, calling the Pope a son of a whore for unwittingly creating excess traffic was the old him. This mayor, sometimes pictured in newspapers showing the world his middle finger, and known for his rudeness, sarcastic jibes and often foul mouth, assured the country he was ready to change.
Except even as he said it he seemed a little annoyed about it.
‘Why would you criticise my cursing?’ he complained to the journalists. ‘If I don’t do that, I’m already dead. My language is like that because that is my universal identity given by God.’
The Pope probably had a few things to say about that.
But yes, okay, fine, Duterte would try. Things would be different.
‘I can no longer be foolish when I’m President. I swear to God.’
But like a lot of rude people, he saw abundant rudeness in others.
When a journalist innocently asked the next President about the state of his health, Duterte shot back: ‘Let’s go to my house and I’ll do the treadmill for one hour plus. I’ll do the treadmill for one hour and thirty minutes. I will even do it longer than that. If I falter, I’ll resign. If I do it for two hours, you resign. I challenge you. I am not the type of person who is almost begging for a position. Bullshit.’
The more research I did into rudeness – and the more people I spoke to – the more I realised there was one theory I hadn’t explored yet.
I mean, the drivers in Moscow – where did that sense of self-entitlement come from? Did it develop, in the way a lack of rules in Bogotá helped the city descend into chaos? Had it evolved? Or was it somehow ingrained?
It was a theory so simple that I genuinely couldn’t quite believe it hadn’t occurred to me before.
It was this:
What if Madam Hotdog was just a dick?
Looking back on that day, some part of me still blames myself for it. It escalated. I played my part in that. But I rigorously assert, also, that she started it.
Aaron James is a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, with a PhD from Harvard under his belt.
I tell him all about my encounter with my hotdog nemesis and, based on the preliminary anecdotal evidence, he immediately feels confident enough to assert a theory: ‘It sounds like she was an asshole. It sounds like she definitely was.’
James knows all about assholes. He is the author of Assholes: A Theory. He spots assholes everywhere he goes. He works out what makes them assholes. Consequently, he says ‘assholes’ a lot.
‘The basic definition of an asshole is someone who takes special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement,’ he tells me when we speak. ‘That could be breaking rules of courtesy, maybe, or just being rude. But an asshole is immunised against the complaints of other people.’
By cooperative life, James means normal, everyday events, in which we do all the little things that make it all a bit easier for one another. We ask permission. We say please, we say thank you. We hold a door open, we don’t try and screw each other over.
The asshole has no time for that, and what’s more, they absolutely don’t care.
In the most basic form of capitalism, someone trades goods (hotdogs) and services (cooking those hotdogs) in a system of exchange and reward. If they do it fairly and well, they generate goodwill, and we pay them not just in money but in repeat trade and loyalty. But ‘assholery’, says James, leads the person providing the hotdogs to act precisely as they feel like acting regardless of the actual value of their processed meat products and whether or not they were cooked to order. This behaviour threatens the cooperative nature of capitalism which is so vital to its survival.
Yes. I am now saying that this woman was acting in a way that could come to bring down the entire capitalist structure of life on Earth.
He also seems very sure indeed that Madam Hotdog was an asshole, which I find a great relief and extraordinarily satisfying, although I must point out for legal reasons this is entirely his opinion and absolutely not mine.
‘Buying a hotdog … that should have been a trivial occurrence that took just a few minutes of your day,’ he says. ‘But the display of disrespect … that was something you thought was worth fighting.’
‘It was!’ I say, delighted to have found a kindred spirit.
‘That’s something we find really important: how we’re seen in the eyes of others. Whether we’re seen as an equal. Or whether we’re seen as beneath the other person.’
This was, once more, exactly why I fought to win her respect. Though James posits I wasn’t trying to win her respect.
‘You were trying to exact respect.’
He has hit the nail on the head. I now realise I was trying to compel her to respect me. To force her to. When I stood up to her, just as we have all stood up to rudeness in the past, I was asserting my right to be respected and I knew it was something for which I would have to fight her. On some subconscious level, it was to be gladiatorial. Here I was, standing on her territory, taking on the Queen of the diner, an outsider with no power other than a voice and a shaky grasp of consumer rights, observed by an audience of strangers baying for blood. She was in control. She was entitled to behave exactly as she pleased.
The sense of entitlement that rude people have often helps them get ahead and, as we discovered earlier, it’s a proven strategy for success in business. People act badly to assert themselves, though they also choose when to act in a nice or cooperative manner in a cynical attempt to further their own cause.
And sometimes the world needs an asshole. Sometimes, in fact, you need a superasshole to bring all the other assholes into line. The head of Sports Direct, for example, or whoever runs Fox News. Without tyranny, the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, you get anarchy. And tyranny is better. Thomas Hobbes would absolutely have voted Trump.
And like Trump, often the ‘true asshole’ will have one redeeming feature about themselves which helps balance things out. James tells me that to truly succeed as a genuinely rude person, they also need to have something … likeable.
‘Unusual intelligence,’ he suggests. ‘Money. Beauty. Or … hotdogs. I mean, they better be damn good hotdogs this woman was selling for her to act that way.’
Maybe we’ll never know.
Or maybe we will …
What James says about rude people being able to choose when to be rude and when to be cooperative chimes with the work of another American, this one a psychology student at Yale.
Adam Bear doesn’t use the word ‘asshole’ at all when we speak because he prefers ‘jerk’. He attempted to develop a mathematical model to find out why some people are consistently jerks, while the rest of us are usually nice, even to people we don’t know.
What he found was that people from a supportive background learn as they grow up to see the benefits in cooperation, politeness and courtesy. They will instinctively act in a way that is good for the group.
However, if they take just a moment to think about things, they often realise that they also have the chance to act in a selfish manner. Guess what. Even for ‘nice’ people, selfishness will therefore often overrule the ‘better’ option if it turns out there’s no real benefit to them.
Even nice people are jerks, assholes or dicks when no one’s watching.
‘If no one is watching,’ he tells me, ‘or if there are no long-term repercussions for being a jerk, you’ll be a jerk. If a homeless guy is asking you for money, and you’re never going to see him again, and there’s no one else around, you know that the selfish answer is you shouldn’t give him any money.’
So while your first instinct might be to open your wallet, just a moment’s hesitation can reset the brain so that it refocuses on your own selfish wants and needs. And then it’s a straight choice. Him or me. Most people will be ashamed to say they will cast their vote in their own favour.
I have seen this in my own life, I am ashamed to say. The other day I was waiting for a lift in the lobby of a disappointing hotel. As I walked in, I noticed someone else approaching the lift, suitcases behind them, from some way down the hall. We did not make eye contact. I could have waited – and had that guy seen me, I would of course have held the doors open. But he did not see me. In a microsecond, I realised this was something I could get away with. I pressed the button, the doors closed, I was off.
But I am not a true jerk. True jerks cut straight to the chase. They don’t have that moment of thought. The wallet remains exactly where it was, opening it is never even considered – and even if they make eye contact with someone approaching ‘their’ lift, they’ll press that button because only they matter.
That’s pure, thoroughbred jerkery.
What Bear suggests is that people who grow up surrounded by idiots learn intuitively the benefits of selfish behaviour. Even when cooperating might pay off, they’ve already lost that chance because they’ve ploughed straight on with the ‘rude’ behaviour.
‘The ones with an intuition to be nice sometimes end up selfish when they take a moment to stop and think,’ he says, to be clear. ‘But the jerks who are selfish never stop and think, so will always act selfishly.’
But back to capitalism.
Had Madam Hotdog taken a second to think about our interaction, she might have realised that it wasn’t wise to be rude to a customer and that she should take the edge off whatever her instincts were that day. She was being watched by other customers for a start, and as we’ve already established, customers who witness staff rudeness tend to leave with a much worse impression of the business and are much less likely to return. She was also risking the permanent loss of a brand new customer, while also running the risk of having a whole bloody book written about her, but I think we can forgive her for not guessing that last one.
Perhaps it was because on some level, Bear and I decide, she instinctively felt that I didn’t matter. She hadn’t seen me before. I didn’t seem local. I was an outsider of very little consequence, someone she could look down upon because I’m ‘probably the sort of people who queue up for 40 minutes for fish and chips’.
By coincidence, Bear is working on a new model about just this thing.
‘A person’s intuition is sensitive to who’s in their in-group, or who you’ve seen before. Sometimes only when you stop and think do you look at an outsider and realise that it is actually in your own self-interest to be nice to them …’
So if she had paused, she might not have been rude. But she saw me, sensed I was about to complain, decided I didn’t matter and instead went on pure instinct?
‘Yes.’
I don’t know whether to be happy or sad about this.
I still can’t help but feel that maybe I had done something to come across as rude myself. And yet I had done everything I could not to – a polite face, both hands up in the air, using non-combative, deflective words. Even mentioning a third party – my son – to distance the complaint from myself and make it less confronting. So what goes through the head of an asshole when they behave like an asshole?
‘For one kind of asshole,’ James says, ‘the way they rationalise things in their head is “this person is mistreating me”. There is a victim complex underlying it.’
Aha!
‘They see tiny slights everywhere. And so for them, their rudeness or brusqueness is justifiable. Their sense of entitlement can be a thin layer that spontaneously produces rationalisations.’
‘So she looked at me padding towards her, and immediately sprung to a conclusion?’
‘And then they respond disproportionately, yes. It sounds like this hotdog woman was doing that. The bigger assholes act disproportionately.’fn1
Why do these disproportionate reactions happen? We see it all the time – road rage, fury erupting on the streets because someone’s blocking the pavement, insane outbursts on public transport.
James suggests something called victim-oriented narcissism. The sufferer becomes incredibly angry at the smallest perceived slight because in their heads it is far more: it is an attack on them as a human being. When I walked in and arrogantly asked how long my hotdog would be, I was not just asking how long my hotdog would be. I was launching an unwarranted and fundamentally abusive attack on her, her business, her choices, her personality. I was undermining everything she had done. I just did not appreciate it. I didn’t understand how it worked.
‘She thought, “He thinks this late hotdog is my fault and he is getting at me,”’ says James. ‘And then the real issue of where the hotdog is falls by the wayside. You have questioned her status. She can lash out.’
‘But she’s retaliating at a shot that hasn’t actually been fired,’ I say.
‘But in her world, shots are always being fired. They’re interpreted as threats to her worth. So even if you didn’t say anything but you seemed slightly angry or perturbed, she would see that as an attack on her. It’s not about the hotdog any more. It’s about you and her.’
Just look again at our favourite global rude man, Donald Trump, about whom much more in a moment. Consider the sheer amount of time he spent focusing not on the issues while campaigning, but on the attacks. How he constantly cried ‘unfair!’ every time someone criticised him. Journalists were unfair. Celebrities were unfair. Judges and fellow candidates were unfair. Look at how he responded with wild sledgehammer blows when people suggested that maybe his fingers were slightly shorter than the national average. How he whined, yelled, whinnied, moaned, swore and peacocked all the characteristics of low-self-esteem narcissistic rage.
A report in Psychology Today gives several indicators that someone might be suffering from narcissistic ragefn2, including:
An inability to apologise, or to do it sincerely. Showing or feeling no remorse for their actions.
Quick to rage if you humiliate them.
Rarely saying ‘thank you’.
Quick to becoming aggressively defensive if you call them on any deficiency, fault or responsibility.72
The insecurity a narcissist feels means they have to show strength and power to make themselves feel stable. It’s because often they’re not just insecure, but brittle. The rage, the anger, the rudeness is all unleashed when – the way a wounded animal becomes more vicious as it realises it needs to survive – the narcissist feels under attack and that the next insult may be the one to finish them off.
So they get in there first. They react in the moment. They attack.
Hey – Donald Trump is America’s Madam Hotdog!
Jack Katz got the ball rolling, but I feel closer than ever to that woman while talking to Aaron James. In the course of one conversation, I tell him, we’ve gone from thinking she’s an arsehole to realising that, actually, assholery might just be a behavioural side effect of something else entirely.
‘Well,’ he says, smiling. ‘I think she’s probably still an asshole. But she’s not just an asshole.’
There’s a line for the headstone.
Both James and Bear think assholes and jerks respectively are not born, but made.
We learn how to be rude, how far we can push it, and what we can get away with. Some of us worry about it more than others, but for James, at least, it’s getting worse.
‘In politics, for sure. But also in the media.’
‘There are no assholes in the media,’ I reassure him.
‘It’s striking to watch,’ he says, a little lost in thought. ‘A lot of TV is about getting people to misbehave. We like people who lack inhibitions. It’s attention-getting. That’s what really sets the agenda these days. There is a lot of financial pressure in the world which goes against cooperation. Certainly, in the US, there’s more of an asshole culture that’s taken hold. Success is about marketing, markets are about marketing, politics is about marketing.’
And if you can still be elected President in a predominantly Catholic country like the Philippines after calling the Pope a ‘son of a whore’, then you’ve got to say it works.
But is it any way to behave?
And what might happen to the world if – God forbid – it went too far?