BY JAMES HOFF
I was watching one of our high school tennis matches the other day. Our best guy was playing the best guy from Wilson. The first thing I noticed was that beneath the tennis competition was a separate competition of who could be the biggest asshole.
The match was very entertaining. There was complaining, whining, arguing. Racquets were thrown. Balls were kicked. I was glad the players were indulging their assholic tendencies. Assholes are more fun to watch than people who keep their cool. Assholes are more fun in general, as long as they’re not being assholes to you.
In our society, we teach young people to be modest and humble, to respect authority. The people who absorb this message tend to be the people who are humble anyway: the dorks, the losers, people who wear glasses. These people nod knowingly when adults explain that assholism hurts others and leads to personal unhappiness. They agree. They think being quiet and meek is the better way to go. That is convenient since that is how they are anyway.
Meanwhile, the assholes hear this message and laugh. They already know the reality of American life: Assholes rule! Being meek gets you nothing! Get out there and grab whatever you can, fight for it, kill for it! If one of these assholes happens to meet another asshole trying to get the same thing, well, now things get interesting. Now we have free market competition! Everyone loves a good fight. Even the dorks and losers can be roused from their video games to watch the assholes duke it out.
The tennis players spat a lot. They stalked around the court scowling at each other. They didn’t just want to win, they wanted to screw the other guy over. People could feel the assholism and soon a large crowd gathered. Both these tennis players probably get millions of girls.
We are taught the greatness of the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King. But who do we really stand in awe of? Not those people. We prefer winners, conquerors, the rich, the famous. We love athletes who crush their opponents. We like companies who strangle their competition. When our politicians steal elections, we stand in awe, unable to act, we’re so mesmerized by this extreme and fascinating assholity. We respect people with the cojones to screw other people over. We love the victorious. We don’t care how they did it. The more ruthless the better.
“But what does this mean in our current situation as we stand at the brink of ecological disaster?” you ask.
As long as there were relatively few of us and we didn’t have the technology to do serious harm to our surroundings, we could pretty much do whatever we wanted to each other. Cheat, murder, blackmail, behead. If this was our idea of fun, whatever. We were only hurting ourselves.
Now, though, our love of assholism has consequences. Certain people will make billions of dollars from the oil that is still in the ground. We could possibly save the planet if we left it there and found other forms of energy. But those people don’t want that to happen. They want their billions, and they don’t mind screwing us over to get it.
Meanwhile we stand in awe, as usual. We think: They’re not really going to ruin the earth for all future generations, are they? Just for a little more money? They would endanger all living things? They wouldn’t do that. Nobody is that much of an asshole.
But they would do it. And they will.
Which is why, fellow dorks, losers, and people who wear glasses, this might be a good time to pry yourself away from the computer games…