Making Sense with Sam Harris - #331 — A Golden Age for Assholes

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

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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 asshole is 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. 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 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 this 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 if 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 you need to answer. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free

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