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Gonna riff off Visa's point here to talk about something I've been thinking about recently. https://t.co/PvD5B51OYS
Rudeness and arrogance are fascinatingly context-dependent. Sometimes you’ll get called rude and arrogant for plainly speaking the truth. (Of course, then you get belligerent assholes who use “I’m just telling the truth” as an excuse for being dicks. There’s layers to this stuff) https://t.co/EeqnKZhYoE
I read the book "Assholes: A Theory" recently, and I thought it was OK. One of those books that could have made a great paper but where expanding it to book length revealed the weaknesses of the author's conception of the world and the theory as applied to it.
(This is distinct from the problem of the book that would have made a great blog post but was padded out so it could be sold as a book. There's plenty of content outside of the great paper in this book, it's just that that content is not great and misses important things)
The highlight of the great paper is the author's definition of "Asshole" which goes as follows. An asshole is someone who: 1. Systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages. 2. Does this out of a sense of entitlement. 3. Is immunised against complaint by this sense.
The thing that I consider the book and theory's profound failure (as opposed to the many incidental and fixable failures) is that it misses out (while repeatedly accidentally highlighting) the fact that this definition while very good also means that assholes mostly don't exist.
What do I mean "assholes don't exist"? Well, I don't mean that nobody is an asshole, but whether someone is an asshole is entirely viewpoint-dependent, because it depends on whether you consider the advantage they are enjoying special and whether you think they're entitled to it.
You can see this in a huge number of his examples - he tends to use a lot of political examples (with uh lets say varying degrees of accuracy. Please don't use people who committed genocide as examples of good behaviour thx) and often prefaces with "You might disagree!"
And yes, you might indeed! But this isn't an incidental thing and is in fact an intrinsic feature of his theory, because according to his definition the judgement of whether someone is an asshole is fundamentally about the disagreement between judger and judged.
Criticism of his understanding of this aside, I think this is actually a positive feature of the theory and tracks usage of the term well. Consider how e.g. Americans visiting Europe - they're often considered assholes because of how loud they are and how much space they take up.
But that's actually precisely a disagreement over entitlement. The Americans think they're entitled to be that loud and take up too much space, the Europeans thin they're not. The only reason the advantage is "special" is because the other people don't want to take it!
You might say "Well they're in Europe so they should behave like Europeans want them to" but that doesn't generalise well. Consider e.g. the loud minority member failing to conform to the dominant culture. Should they conform more or are they pointing out actual problems?
The minority example is interesting particularly as a lens on "entrenched sense of entitlement". Yeah, they probably do have an entrenched sense that they're entitled to point out all the problems that you're ignoring! Good for them.
Even in the American example it's unclear to what degree they should attempt to conform. Unlearning an entire way of being is hard. The Americans may well rightly judge the Europeans for being assholes for feeling entitled to ask them to do that.