Seven Easy Steps To An Asshole-Free Life
If only there were such steps, and a self-help book that laid the steps out. We could all read that book, follow those steps and, presto, assholes would all wind up somewhere else. (I’m not sure where. Some island? Or Newport Beach? Or maybe they’d de-materialize.)
So assuming there aren’t seven easy steps (or eight or eleven or…), we might find a little bit of help in considering how a seven-step self-help book might oversimplify. (If my comments also oversimplify, take that as proof of my main point.)
“Just steer clear”
Sure, if you could easily quit your job, and then quit again when you find you’ve got a new asshole colleague or boss. You’d also better stay home, inside. Will you storm out of a restaurant, deserting your dinner guests, when an asshole waiter acts as though it is your privilege to be served by him? Dictators and billionaires may be the only ones in a position to micro-manage their associations so as to avoid assholes entirely. (Though they may of course have to deal with themselves.) The rest of us are stuck with assholes, with learning to cope.
“Fight fire with fire”
An exercise in futility. If you’re not already an asshole, you’ll never out-asshole an asshole. He’s good at it already. You’ve got a steep learning curve. You surely won’t master the asshole arts in time.
“Don’t let it get to you”
Easier said than done. Even if you carry on as before, it won’t be easy to keep yourself from spontaneous ruminations and flashes of rage. At least not without an unhealthy kind of mind control. A zen-master can follow this advice, but you can’t, and in any case a zen-master doesn’t need the advice.
“Try to sympathize”
That might help clam you down. It could keep you from becoming consumed. Yet here you court the opposite danger: sympathy can become demeaning, because you are failing to affirm your rights to better treatment. To be sure, if anger assumes that wrong has been done, a way out is to question whether the way you were treated was so wrong. Maybe the asshole is right! While it is certainly worth not being inflexibly confident and self-righteous, it is a worse mistake to rationalize what is in fact unjustifiable. After all, calling a wrong a wrong is itself a basic way of standing up for yourself, even if you do nothing else about it.
“Don’t waste your time”
This would be good advice if the *only* response to the asshole was “fighting fire with fire.” Being an exercise in futility, one of course shouldn’t waste one’s time. Fortunately, there usually are other options for affirming one’s self-respect, such as stony silence or a quick cutting remark or joke. If the act of small protest takes little time, the time spent won’t have gone to waste.
“It doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things”
Well, affirming one’s right to better treatment does matter, and I’m not sure what the “bigger scheme of things” is or why something would have to matter in that scheme just be worthwhile.
Compare a kind word. It probably won’t “matter” whether or not I have kindly complemented a friend when the universe finally spreads into a cold nothingness; the end of the world won’t make any more or less sense. But if I am asking myself whether I should compliment a friend, the plain answer is “yes.” Should I also ask whether this *would* somehow help make the total history of humanity or the universe finally make sense? No, this plainly isn’t required; the answer, one way or the other, is beside the point. Giving the compliment will be worth doing, here and now.
The same goes for the the small protest: it will matter in the only way it would have to matter to be worth doing, when you can muster it: it affirms your right to better treatment, here and now, manifesting a basic kind of self-respect.
