What's Up With Assholes?

The one unchanging rule in nature is adapt or die. Local reality changes. To survive, try things out. Diversify. By trial and error, find adaptive solutions and when reality changes again, re-adapt. The opposite of adapting is absolutism – pretending you have the unchangeable, eternal last word on the right way to live. As the opposite of adaptivity, absolutism is death. Deadly though it is, absolutism has always felt safe and tempting. It frees you from all self-doubt. Just play God, eternally righty righteous and mighty. It makes you feel invulnerable, invincible, permanently safe atop your high-horse. Absolutism is the creed common to all assholes, cults and tyrannies. Assolutism corrupts absolutely. My approach to morality focuses not on what everyone must do – that’s absolutism – but on what no one should get away with doing. I’m a psychoproctologist. I study how to diagnose treat and prevent assholery’s assolutism. I think assolutism is the problem beneath all our other big problems and that if we can’t get better at humbly humbling assolutists, humanity won’t make it. That’s what this playlist is about. What’s up with assholes? How to spot and stop them without