This is Sam Harris.
I recently appeared on several other podcasts and was asked what I thought about a few prominent people in our culture. Some are prominent only at the fringe, or should only be there, but of course the fringe is now everywhere, courtesy of social media. Every part of culture, science, public health, war, economics, the lives of famous people, conspiracy theories about everything and nothing, all information is in the process of being macerated by billions of tiny mouths and then spit back again and lapped up by others.
So what is in fact mostly digital vomit at this point is being spread everywhere and celebrated as some new form of nutrition. So there are people who we probably shouldn’t know about, but do, and there are people who should have no influence at all, but their influence is enormous. One of these people is Andrew Tate and another is Donald Trump. Both of these men are assholes and I said as much on these other podcasts. However, many people appear confused about what it means to be an asshole. The fact that many of these confused people are themselves assholes is perhaps unsurprising.
Many people believe that calling someone like Tate or Trump an asshole says very little about them and all too much about the person making the allegation. Such a person is believed just doesn’t like Tate or Trump’s style. He finds their brashness offensive and taking offense at brashness is just a sign of weakness. Only someone who doesn’t feel strong himself could find another’s arrogance or bombast threatening. There’s a word for such a person. Wading deep into the vomitorium now right of center where Tate and Trump are truly kings, such a person is very likely to be called a cuck. If this word is unknown to you, well then congratulations. But this rests on a fundamental misunderstanding.
Being an asshole is not just a matter of style. It’s a matter of substance because to be an asshole is to care about the wrong things. It is to not have one’s priorities straight. Of course, many of us don’t have our priorities quite straight, but only an assholeis inclined to celebrate this failure in public.
To be an asshole is to mistake one’s vices for virtues. It is to fundamentally misunderstand what it means to live a good life and to encourage this misunderstanding in others. It’s to mistake shamelessness for integrity and a furious self-absorption for strength. An asshole is not just someone who lacks civility or tact. In fact, assholes can be superficially charming and probably must be to succeed. The problem is never just on the surface. Whatever can be seen there. It’s at the core.
The problem with assholes is that though they might occasionally appear to care about other things and other people, they only truly care about themselves. Whatever causes they attach to just inflate the self. Whatever love they express is instrumental.
Of course, we are all assholes some of the time. We all have our moments of pettiness and vanity and duplicity and callousness. But the task of living an examined life is to notice these moral failures as failures and to transcend their logic. The purpose of becoming a student of human wisdom and an honest observer of one’s own mind is to become less of an asshole more of the time. So I’m reserving the term asshole for the sort of person who simply doesn’t care that this project exists. The committed asshole. The unrepentant one. The one who wears his lack of wisdom like a crown. This is the sort of asshole I’m talking about.
It seems strange to say it but even the worst assholes never seem to lack for admirers. What do people admire about them? Above all, it’s their shamelessness. Many people struggle with feelings of shame. Shame is among the least pleasant of human emotions and it might be the most disempowering. Shame is generally surmounted not by growing insensitive to it but by living in such a way that it has few causes to arise. But assholes are proof that another strategy is possible. One can simply declare the offending organ vestigial and tear it out and then one can live however one wants and never feel shame again.
The gospel of the asshole is simple. There is nothing in your selfishness that you need to overcome. There’s nothing to judge and no place from which to be judged by others. No one is better than you and those who pretend to be better are actually worse. Everyone is a selfish asshole. It’s just that some of us are courageous enough to be honest about it. You can hear the cynicism at the core of this self-worship and assholes who become the center of a movement manage to communicate this quasi-religious absolution of shame and the celebration of cynicism more or less continuously by their living example. In his way every asshole beckons us to return to childhood where any appeal to the ongoing project of moral improvement can be shirked and derided as mere pretense.
Again, Trump is the asshole avatar of our age. Say whatever you want about him. The man is simply impossible to shame. He cannot be held to any standard of decency or moral seriousness because he holds himself to none. Anything that can be noticed about him, which you’ve noticed about another person would destroy their reputation within the hour, can be neatly parried by the childish phrase, so what? May imagine discovering that Trump had plagiarized one of his speeches. So what? Or had committed a long string of business frauds. So what? Or was friendly with members of organized crime. Again, so what? Absolutely no one who admires him would care. There is no disconfirming instance of his being a good person that matters because he’s not even pretending to be a good person. He’s a total asshole and everybody knows it. His fans don’t love him in spite of the fact that he’s an asshole, but because he is.
Trump gives his fans permission to go on a moral holiday and to live there if they choose. Whatever else he may communicate, hatred of elites, casual bigotry, scientific ignorance, disdain for norms and institutions, the subtext is always the same, delivering a thrill to everyone sensitive to its frequency, and the subtext is this. It’s okay, and in fact far more honest, even noble really, to just be an asshole, body and soul. And there’s almost a kernel of truth to this, because whatever their faults, there is one common moral failing of which all true assholes are perpetually innocent, hypocrisy.
You can’t be a hypocrite if you have no standards by which you can be discovered to have fallen short. If you are content to be selfish and dishonest and uncharitable and to be seen to be this way by others, you achieve a kind of malignant Buddhahood. You are free in some deep sense to just be who you are, and that degree of comfort in one’s own skin is darkly charismatic.
Again, the crucial thing to understand is that being an asshole is not just a matter of style. The problem is substance. It is in what one cares about and fails to care about, and in what one encourages others to care about and fail to care about. And granted, style also matters, and it does reach some way below the surface. Good manners, for instance, are not just frippery. Rather, they’re a perpetual bulwark against violence, particularly among men. Dispensing with good manners, as many assholes do, brings the possibility of violence much closer. This is true for individuals, and it can become true for whole societies. But it’s the real intentions of a person that truly matter.
A person who is just in it for themselves, who considers all encounters to be zero-sum, who views other people as props to be used or obstacles to be overcome, who looks down upon and even despises those who are in every way his moral superiors. Such a person is bound to create a lot of harm, eventually.
Social media appears to have ushered in a golden age for assholes. We’re living at a time where literally anyone, however craven or malicious, stands a chance of building a large following of people eager to celebrate a newfound freedom from conscience. It remains to be seen whether a platform can be built that will successfully discourage this, where people will reliably become better rather than worse for having spent so much precious time engaging with one another online.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is unlikely to become such a place. In fact, it has turned its owner, Elon Musk, into one of the world’s most prominent assholes. The truth is I feel like a bit of an asshole myself for even saying this, because Elon used to be a friend. I really don’t know how much concern for a former friend should constrain what one says about him in public. Anyway, suffice it to say that if I had never known Elon, I’d probably have much more to say about him now.
Unlike Tate and Trump and so many other famous assholes, Elon has been doing immensely interesting and useful things for a very long time. Perhaps I didn’t know him as well as I imagined, but he appears to have turned into an asshole through his addictive engagement with social media, and he’s now being followed by many millions of fans who assure him he can do no wrong there. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. He can cause, and I would say he has caused, significant harm, both to individual people and to our culture generally. He’s joined the ranks of assholes who are in the process of convincing millions of people that it is safe and profitable, and even quite commendable, really, to be morally reckless and unserious about serious things, and brazenly selfish, and petty, and cynical, and dishonest, astoundingly dishonest, all while the world is in desperate need of wisdom, and gratitude, and compassion, and real integrity.
Of course, every asshole has a perfect retort to any such appeal to moral high ground, and is to allege without sense or evidence or even a veneer of plausibility that everyone is equally debased, equally egotistical, equally blind, equally compromised, and all protests and pretensions, to the contrary, are just more self-serving lies. It’s not true, of course. It has never been true, and it never will be. But if we continue to reward assholes for pretending otherwise, if we continue to give them money and attention, if we continue to let them drive the public conversation, I fear the truth won’t matter much in the end.