Vaccinating Societies To Prevent Total Jerks From Dominating

Jeremy Sherman, PhD facebook.com/Psychoproctology Imagine a free society immune to total jerks, everyone clear on the lifestyle that can’t be tolerated because it undermines the free society. For everyone to defend against total jerks, we would need a simple, objective and accurate way to identify them. That’s a challenge because we’re all jerks sometimes. We jerk people around, lie, cheat, engage in hypocrisy, selfishness, and greed, indeed, often claiming others are jerks as though we aren’t. What then is the difference between our occasional jerk behavior and being a total jerk? Being a jerk only tends to corrupt. It doesn’t always corrupt. There are times to lie and be a hypocrite. In contrast, total jerks corrupt absolutely by means of a trick so simple any idiot can employ it. The trick to being a total jerk is proudly unapologetic, indiscriminate outrage, the ability to get instantly theatrically indignant without limit or any real concern over what you're outraged about. Once someone has mastered that trick, they can play God, master of the universe, eternally right and righteous, a hero or martyr, but always the last word on what’s true and good. Around total jerks, softies back off, realists get disoriented and the gullible fall into line. That’s how total jerks prevail, often with adoring fans, goon squad cults, people who maybe came for the total jerk’s cause but stayed for the simple trick’s self-deifying advantages. We all play God in fantasy, for example, identifying with fictional superheroes. Total jerks pretend they really are gods, absolute genius saints, freely playing their outrage card, indignance that fuels their unconstrained self-righteousness, always on their fake high horse, always out-shunning all challengers, they pretend they can do no wrong which frees them to do all the wrong they want. Total jerks come in all flavors. It’s not about what they believe but how they strut it with that boundless self-deifying righteous indignation. They pretend that their outrage proves that they care. They don’t care. The freedom they demand is freedom from ever having to adapt. They’re especially toxic in a society that is scrambling to adapt to accelerating change. If we all guarded against total jerks, big and small from any quarter we could get on with our adaptive lives and continue to play god in fantasy without being dragged down by total jerks and their cults pretending they’re entitled to rule reality instead of having to adapt to it.