A Selfish Reason to Not Be a Prick

By the time I got around to writing this, another crisis has since happened in the US (and the world). It’s one a day, practically. Imagine voting for this kind of chaos instead of normalcy.

There are people who believe - I would say naively - that professed belief in religion and, therefore, fear of the consequences of one’s actions in an afterlife is enough to cause most people behave morally.

I call bullshit on that. As evidence I give you:

• The entirety of the history of organized religion but specifically

• The literal “Wars of Religion”

• The history of the Catholic Church (Crusades, Inquisition, child molesting, etc.)

• Every president of United States and every Christian monarch of England/the United Kingdom until they lost their power (and every head of state of any remotely significant polity who professed serious faith)

• Suicide bombers

• Abortion doctor assassins

• And on and on and on and on and on.

I don’t, for a second, believe that professed belief in a god or gods automatically causes people to be moral. To the extent that people act morally, I suspect there is a cocktail of things including but not limited to

• The circumstances of the moment

• The current moral and ethical environment

• The environment the person was raised in

• Genes.

For example, in the past American political elites used to (mostly) behave publicly with some level of decorum. Now they (or, well, some of them) don’t.

Putting aside Republicans’ inability (and unwillingness) to define Marxism, this is the kind of thing that probably wouldn’t have been said about the assassination of an American politician in the past. Mike Lee is a Mormon. (Mormons usually being among the least problematic American Christians in terms of their behaviour, if not their professed beliefs.)

Now, I strongly believe this isn’t the first time a sitting member of Congress has said something like this about a dead colleague. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time a sitting member of Congress said something like this in public. Some of those were probably not reported by media particularly quickly because that’s how political media used to work. Other statements were from people mostly perceived as extremist cranks.

But social media is different. You say something on social media as a public figure and everyone knows immediately. Moreover, newsrooms (and regular people) cover social media posts as if they are news.

I am pretty aware of what Mike Lee is trying to say in his tweets no matter how wrong he is. I am far less sure what Jenni Byrne was trying to say here. The Oilers lost because Carney is a fan? She was rooting for the Florida Panthers, one of the least likable Champions since the 2011 Bruins, because Carney is an Oilers fan? Not only is she being a dick, as Lee was, she’s doing for no perceivable purpose beyond the cheers of her immediate (incredibly small) bubble.

People have been dicks on social media since it has existed. People were dicks on the internet before social media. The theory used to be that the internet tricks us into thinking we’re anonymous. But, of course, most of us - many of us? - know we’re not anonymous. I think the internet actually tricks us into thinking other people aren’t real.

Years ago - a half decade or more - I read a great confessional piece by a guy who might have been called a “Twitter Warrior” or something. (I don’t have the link. If you know the one, please comment or send it to me.) He spent too much of his time fighting with others on Twitter. One day, he insulted a bar tender for no reason. He caught himself a few minutes later wondering why he had insulted the bartender for doing his job. He saw his Twitter behaviour starting to infect his normal life.

At this point, many of us have seen the picture of Mike Lee being confronted for what he said. It seems to have genuinely never occurred to him that a real person would find him and take him to task for saying that stuff.

I think that if there is anything new here it’s public figures embracing traditional social media/internet dickishness. More than ever it feels like public figures are trying to use anything and everything - the Oilers losing, political assassinations - to dunk on their opponents. And they don’t seem to be able to stop themselves.

I say to you that I don’t think organized religion is doing much to stop this at the moment. Certainly, somewhere there are true people of faith telling their flocks to lead truly devout lives. But most of the powerful do not listen. (Think about Trump and that Bishop. Trump is an exception, sure, but he’s far from the only one who behaves badly in public.)

It feels like the social media norm for pseudonymous posters being a dick and it’s (mostly) fine (unless you get “cancelled”) has been adopted by many elites. The internet allows them to other the other side more than ever, to think of them as less than human and who cares if you hurt their feelings or you are completely wrong. All that matters is the point-scoring.

But I think there is a selfish case for the vast majority of people, including these public figures, to think twice before they are pricks for no reason.

You know I believe that this is not the worst time to be alive, regardless of what is currently happening in the Middle East or the US. But I do understand why some people feel that way, especially anyone who either watches too much 24 hour news or spends too much time online. The bad things that happen in the world - and the bad takes in reaction to those bad things - are closer to us than ever before and harder to escape. ?You don’t even have to look at world events to despair. You can just look at the “discourse,” and it can be about any old thing.

Many years ago I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. The thing that has stayed with me for decades now is this rather awkward phrase: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" Even though I had never experienced anything remotely like the horror Frankl experienced during the Holocaust this spoke to me.

It spoke to me because much of my life to that point had been dominated by regret. Now, if I told you what I regretted you would dismiss it. But I strongly believe that the vast majority of us - outside of the sociopaths and psychopaths and people cognitively incapable (and Trump) - want desperately to be viewed by others as “good." No matter what is going on in the world at the moment, I think this is true.

Now, we all tell ourselves stories about how each of us is the hero in our own grand epic. And I think social media makes it easier for us to not understand the consequences of things we say and do that contradict our self-congratulatory visions of ourselves. But the people on the other side of the internet from us are still real. They still feel just as strongly if they are hurt offline as online.

Frankl’s quote has guided my life since I have read it. I don’t live up to that standard most of the time but I do try to live by it. I do think I am a better person than I used to be in part because of Viktor Frankl’s book.

Before I go on, I also want to note that spontaneity isn’t always a bad thing. I could definitely use to be more spontaneous and one reason why liked this quote so much at the time is that it appealed to my deliberateness. Avoiding regrets can be a prison much like giving in to every impulse can be.

I’d like to think that I try to think about Frankl’s quote more often when it comes to things I could do that could hurt or harm someone else. And that’s why I am bringing it up now.

If you don’t already know, deathbed confessions are a thing. So many people carry regrets to the point where they are almost dead and then blurt them out to someone, often someone who doesn’t know them or care for them. Others carry their regrets to the grave which is sadder. One way I take Frankl’s maxim is to not have any deathbed confessions when I die.

Because we lie to ourselves, I do think it’s easier to forget the words we say than the things we do. Maybe it isn’t, but it feels like constant dickishness on social media is a pretty strong argument that people are not wracked with guilt every time they say something terrible about someone else.

But deathbed confessions attest to something else: that it sometimes takes us a long time to realize how awful we’ve been. Some of the “bad” things I’ve done have hit me in the moment - like, I knew immediately I shouldn’t have done them. But others snuck up on me over time. I can’t even remember all the faces of all the homeless people I’ve failed to give money to throughout my life. (That’s both a good thing for me personally - if I can’t remember how can I regret? - and a bad thing - how can I be such a bad person to not even remember those I could have helped but chose not to?)

If you live your life thinking about how you want to be remembered, or how you want to feel when you are about to die, it’s hard to justify being a dick, especially being a dick when someone else has died. Now you actually have to feel this, not just think it, but still: you can choose not to be an asshole at any time. It is one of the few things in our own power.

And I believe that most of us - those of us who do actually think about the things we’ve said and done to others and the effects of those things - do not actually want to be remembered as assholes. Moreover, we don’t want to think “God, what an asshole I’ve been!” when we’re about to die.

That, I believe, is a really good reason not to be a prick. It might be the best reason, given that god doesn’t exist and there’s no afterlife. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

I wish more of us would recognize this, especially when something tragic has happened. I know people have always been cruel and nothing under the sun is new. But it does feel like our public figures are embracing “being a dick on social media” more than ever. And I think every single one of them needs to take multiple steps back and think “What am I even doing here? What is the point of all this cruelty? Who does it serve?” If they don’t, they are going to be absolutely miserable. (Well, my guess is most of them are already.)

People tell stories about themselves, mostly lies

Man’s Search for Meaning

Death bed regrets