— On Assholes

Despite a deep pool of qualified candidates, the coveted Asshole of the Year Award applies to this fine example of a public figure who was driven into pseudo-science in order to maintain his entrenched (and perverse) moral outlook.  (If you worry that there are better candidates for 2012, further explanation is to come.)

That is how this piece puts the argument that Glenn Hubbard, Romney’s go-to economist, hasn’t been improperly influenced by hedge funds that have paid him in lavish sums: he truly believes in the policies (e.g., cuts to capital gains and income taxes) that he’s helped both Bush and Romney advance, even if, yes, it turns out that he’s also been well remunerated.

For this he was portrayed as personally corrupt in the award-winning documentary “Inside Job,” and he can easily be seen as a major cog in the

A timely (longish) passage from Rousseau’s Second Discourse (sec. 27):

Here are all natural inequalities set in action, every man’s rank and fate set, not only as to the amount of their goods and the power to help or hurt, but also as to mind, beauty, strength or skill, as to merit or talents, and, since these are the only qualities that could attract consideration, one soon had to have to affect

Two hallmarks of the asshole are (i) his capacity to rationalize a position to which he’s independently committed and (ii) his disposition to brazenly defend it in the face of what should be seen as legitimate counter-arguments.  The rationalizations are often the source of his boldness: he’s so convinced by what he tells himself that he’s shameless about going public with what is plainly specious reasoning.

I have no idea what the NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre is like privately, but he beautifully displayed these traits in his press conference on school violence

The task of selecting a single person who is supremely deserving of the name “asshole” poses an extraordinary challenge. Among the vast sea of exemplars, we can hardly compare candidate assholes by any simple metric. We risk comparing apples to oranges. To carry out our unsavory task in good faith, we therefore compare assholes under three subheadings: Sports Assholes (the NBA, in particular); Hollywood Assholes; and Assholes of Worldly Consequence, in society or politics. … Continue reading here.

Says Robert Heinlein, who adds  “Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”  So openly carrying arms is a proposal for asshole management, except also radically misguided, for all the reasons Thomas Hobbes so vividly explained in Leviathan.  Even if civility doesn’t require an absolute sovereign, as Hobbes claimed, it surely requires great assurances against mortal threats, lest we all take the cautious course of preventive action–“‘Anticipation,” to use Hobbes’s word–and quickly descend into a war of all against all.  There is no civility without peace.  (For related discussion of Hobbes, see this post.)

In the beginning was the word, used as a mere metaphor.  A World War II soldier called his superior officer, Sargent Pug, “an asshole,” thereby inviting his fellow soldiers to imaginatively engage Pug in a certain unflattering light.  He and his fellows were to not simply to liken Pug to a foul and hidden part of his own body, as though Pug had similar physical and aromatic features.  They were also  to see or experience Pug as an asshole, and to further interpret Pug and his actions from

As according to Immanuel Kant, who is closely following J.J. Rousseau, in a nice (albeit longish) passage:

The predisposition to humanity can be brought under the general title of self-love which is physical and yet compares…  that is to say, we judge ourselves happy or unhappy only by making comparison with others. …

Here I mean not only “honkey,” but any pejorative term directed toward a particular group of people (“honkey” and whites; “wop” and Italians; “kike” and Jews; “chink” and Chinese people; “limeys” and Irish people; “n—-r” and Afro-Americans).  There’s interesting philosophical question here: What, in general, is the difference between calling someone an asshole and calling someone one of these racist names?