The Age of Assholes

Manifesto(es)

I had a phrase come to me recently, like an epiphany. The phrase was: “The thing that you assume to be true is the thing that makes you an asshole.” 

I had been thinking specifically about a mother who made her daughter feel terrible about being overweight because, well, the world is mean to overweight people; about a father beating a child to ‘toughen them up.’ I was thinking about it too in the context of trying to understand Putin’s otherwise incomprehensible Ukraine invasion - the best sense I got was that he really was very paranoiac, he believed that the West was out to get him and so the invasion fit perfectly well into, and was no morally worse than, the world as he saw it. 

What I’m describing isn’t a very complicated concept. It’s projection, everybody carries around their vision of the-world-as-it-is and have no comprehension that so much of what they take for reality is - as everybody else can see but they can’t - really just their own neuroses or traumas imprinted on everything in their field of perception. 

But that seemed like a useful framework to apply to the world around me. And, as a quick survey, here were a few things that we all seemed to take for granted - and it was our assuming these things to be true that made us assholes. 

- The assumption that money confers value;

- The assumption that the worth of a human being is their status and/or achievement; 

- The assumption that certain kinds of work - what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to as ‘bare existence’ - are essentially a sort of punishment for not ‘having done more with your life’;

- The assumption that the commodity is the model of all products and that the logic of the commodity dictates the rules of the marketplace;

- The assumption that hierarchy is the most effective approach if you want ‘to get anything done’;

- The assumption that youth is in competition with age and young people must surpass the old;

- The assumption that the past is in a state of constant eradication by the present - that there is a kind of obligation to ‘plow over the bones of the dead’;

- The assumption that sex abides by different rules from conventional morality - that ‘all is fair in love and war’;

The response to all of these points would likely be - duh, that’s the way it is. And maybe I agree with that. Each of these ideas is so baked into hard-earned experience of the world that it seems hard to argue with any one of them. But it is possible for the sort of ground of common assumptions to shift on a seismic, civilizational level, and as a thought experiment I’d like to imagine which of these assumptions can be dispensed with. The most obvious, and startling, example of a that’s-just-the-way-it-is assumption is racism, the belief that racial differences, above all skin color, correlated with some sort of inherent superiority and inferiority. This idea, passed down for generations and bolstered by ‘scientific’ findings, tended to be articulated as an unfortunate but hard truth, in the category of ‘that’s just the way it is.’ For the little that our current civilization can at the moment congratulate itself for, it at least gets credit for this - a very gradual and painstaking transition from a mindset in which racial superiority/inferiority was taken to be ‘reality’ to one in which it was understood to be projection, a cast of mind. 

The underlying belief of the Left for the last couple of centuries is that other mental categories could fall just as the doctrine of racism collapsed. But those other categories have been more elusive. The great momentum of the Left has been a frontal assault on the logic of the commodity, on the logic of money-as-worth, on the logic of menial work-as-failure-rather-than-as-vital-contribution-to-society and, in the more radical iterations of leftist philosophy, on the logic of hierarchy itself. 

And the general consensus from that long experiment is that it was an epic failure - capitalism’s triumph has been total and the usual justification for that is some sort of biological determinism, that kinks in our nature simply do not allow for the kind of social amelioration that the Left was constantly proposing, even if those ideas were ‘good in theory.’ 

Again, it’s difficult for me to argue with that verdict. Human nature does seem to be so twisted, so biased towards status games, the logic of hierarchy and of reward/punishment, that it’s become difficult even to imagine another dispensation - and the heavy lift of the mental near-eradication of racism (at least the eradication of racism-as-doctrine if not racism-as-bias) seems unlikely to be repeated within the domains of class or of power. 

But with the abject collapse of the idealistic Left, the society has completely tilted in a different direction, in which rampant inequality is taken not so much as a misfortune but as a given and the toxic assumptions listed above understood to be the ground of human experience. In the conservative strain of the 19th century - in Social Darwinism, Ultramontanism, Taylorism, etc - these sorts of assumptions tended to be spelled out doctrinally, articulated as a positive good. At the current moment - the new Gilded Age, as it’s unfortunately but accurately dubbed - these assumptions are entered as judgment by default. The Left couldn’t come up with a more viable alternative despite strenuous and often violent effort, and the shrugging attitude of Churchill, or pseudo-Churchill, that capitalism is the worst system except for all the others, is taken as the height of economic wisdom.

Taylorism in action

As usual, art turns out to be a wonderful guide in naming the deeper, and unspoken, truths of an era. And the two wildly popular, bring-everybody-together works of art of the moment, Game of Thrones and Succession, are both meditations from different vantage-points on this question. Game of Thrones deals with a society suffused with violence, in which a zero-sum power structure, bolstered by sociopathic violence, is taken for granted as reality, and the central, and subtle, dramatic trajectory is for different characters to point tentatively towards some sort of new dispensation, Ned Stark towards a politics governed by “the madness of mercy,” Tyrion and Varys towards a statecraft of intelligence and decency rather than brute force, Jon Snow towards an ethic of collective action, Daenerys most controversially towards a messianic utopian vision, etc. And each of these reforms turns out, as the course of the show demonstrates, to be very much a heavy lift - these wonderfully far-sighted reformers are constantly running into more practically-minded adversaries, the feudal lord controlling the Twins crossing, the flaying northern lord Ramsay Bolton, and so on. The show is very much set in an Age of Assholes - or an age of violent sociopaths - and the overall arc is a kind of fictional recapitulation of Huizinga’s idea of the era of civility, a turn, after immense bloodshed, to a different mentality, with people like Tyrion and Bran in charge, and an ethic of diplomacy at long last prevailing. 

Succession, its counterpart, starts in a different Age of Assholes - an ostensibly modern, democratic society but in which, as it transpires, the exact same zero-sum politics prevails as in Game of Thrones. Force and greed turn out to be the only qualities that matter - and, interestingly, in Succession, less light is let in from outside than in Game of Thrones. There is no waiting spirit of the Renaissance. There is never any real possibility that Kendall will cash out his inheritance and do something else with his life, that Shiv will be truly part of a power-to-the-people political campaign. It’s assumed that everybody’s root mentality is the mentality of the courtier - of Stewy “following around money like a poodle,” of the various hangers-on assured by Logan that “you’ll get your nut” - and that the whole system is held in place by the silverbacked charisma of somebody like Logan, completely ruthless and completely sure of himself and as impossible to get rid of, everybody’s complaints notwithstanding, as Tywin Lannister.

Shiv Roy brings the power to the people

And it’s interesting that both shows, and this is again astute to our moment, scrutinize the figure of the ‘weak man.’ That’s Kendall in Succession and that’s an array of figures in Game of Thrones, Viserys, Theon, Samwell, who are weak men, who are fundamentally gentle and well-meaning and are treated terribly within the world of the show. “You’re smart and you’re good but you’re not a killer and you have to be a killer” is Logan’s fatherly advice to Kendall, and that really does encapsulate an era. The civility of Huizinga and the Renaissance, the shift to the age of finer feelings as promoted by somebody like Steven Pinker, turn out to be illusions. The value is placed on strength, and strength proves to be a reality distortion field, establishing hierarchies, generating a free-flowing power that is easy to mistake for base-level reality. 

Various aspects of this reality are easier to discard than others. I find the deep injustice of the sexual marketplace - which results from our biology and is algorithmically reified in the Tinder age - to be almost impossible to move beyond. As Michel Houellebecq writes, “Sexuality has to be an absolutely evil force” - and two millennia of extreme Christian repression and prudism did nothing to create any sort of principle of equality running through the sexual marketplace. But power I find to be somehow easier to evade. In the ever-astute Game of Thrones, the counselor Varys poses a riddle. “In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. So tell me - who lives and who dies?” The answer to the riddle is that there is no answer - “power resides where men believe it resides.” 

I find that to be a very useful thread to follow out of the Age of Assholes. It’s not some new economic system - the idealistic Left hasn’t reconstituted itself from the failure of socialism - just a simple mental shift, an ethic of non-participation. I just came across the extremely beautiful Tolstoy line that “People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing - refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.” And that seems to me the sort of breath that’s missing from the discourse - the way that Varys’ shrewd common sense was such a rare commodity in the sociopathic Middle Ages. Just a way of saying that you may sometimes need to play by the laws of power in order to survive, but - other than that - it’s important to not take them too seriously.