The Thing About Assholes
Do you know someone who is an asshole? Someone who blusters and shoulders their way through to get what they want? Someone who always has a biting remark loaded in the chamber? Someone you feel like you have to impress?
Assholes use nastiness to achieve their ends.
They busy themselves with studying the weaknesses in the person they think is standing in their way and when the time is right, they exploit those weaknesses.
Assholes are commonly cruel or icy with defenseless children and animals when they think no one else is watching.
Assholes can be charismatic, to draw people in, and then go through bouts of rage where they shake off those connections by withdrawing into isolation.
Know anyone like this?
The thing to remember about assholes is that they’re this way to the degree that they have a bad conscience.
Since they have turned away from universals, their conscience becomes a predator that torments them. To get relief, they have to act this out - whether it is on someone else or themselves. Usually it is both. They take up strange diets or exercise regimens. They badger themselves. They get cosmetic surgeries.
Assholes suffer from a lot of hot and cold. One minute they’re charming you and making witty remarks, the next they’re ice cold, brooding, calculating, watchful, etc.
Assholes are not worth their charismatic moments.
Charisma is just there to hollow you out - to attract your attention (a precious resource).
The way to not be an asshole is to get right by your conscience.
This involves full, heartfelt, vulnerable apologies to the people you’ve wronged.
The predatorial conscience, on some level, is attempting to tear down all the nasty habits you’ve built up - all those tendencies to do others a wrong turn. This is why it puts you into isolation sometimes: so that you will calm down enough to regain your composure and began to tangle with your trespasses the why beneath them.
The way to not be an asshole to is give up the status you gained through your wrongdoing. This is extremely difficult for men. Women are asked to give up the vanity they’ve puffed up. This is their difficulty.
Assholes think they’re clever when they isolate their trespasses to just their private life. But a philosopher with enough self-knowledge will always see the private tyrant, the man who domineers his family (usually by telling himself he is God’s regent or that the zeitgeist is anti-male, etc.)
Truth can be bent and distorted to serve personal dysfunction. Do this and truth becomes scarcer.
Since the advent of social media, there are now clever predators, those who have studied philosophy some, who proudly proclaim they are assholes. For them, this has become ideological. They do this as a kind of demonic seal. They seal themselves into their wrongdoing by reveling in it. They think this gives them power but it is just a sad statement of the sadism they endured as children. Parental persecution runs deep and must be reenacted until the lessons are learned.
Assholes lose their grip on the truth as they get older. Those tender mercies of youth, where they bumped up against philosophy when it was formerly available to them as a teaching tool, dry up as they serve their appetites and their corrupt parents.
The best way to get away from the sinking ship of an asshole is to mind the undertow, if you perceive it, and to keep working to understand the truth in a humble manner.
Yes, there is a grand stage of drama and excitement available to anyone who plays the asshole. We live in a fundamentally evil society.