I don’t think I’m a total asshole. At least I hope I’m not. But I do think I’m a partial asshole. And I think everyone else is too. Humans are programmed to be partial assholes, by which I mean we are programmed to have an us-versus-them mindset, to feel hostility toward the Other – whether that Other is an ethnicity, a country, a business rival, or the fans of a sports team in a neighboring city. I think this bias was evolution’s way of helping humans bond with our own tribe members. But I also think it can be dangerous and counterproductive.
How deeply rooted is this bias in my brain? Let me give you a trivial but telling example: Last weekend I visited a friend’s house by the lake. In the morning, I went for a run. Every time a bike rider whizzed past me, I got annoyed. Those contraptions are so dangerous! They’re going to mow me down one day. Why can’t these people exercise like Nature intended, with their own two feet? What a bunch of entitled jerks, these bikers.
Several hours later – on that very same day – I went for a bike ride. Every time I saw a runner coming toward me on the road, I got equally annoyed. Runners are the worst. They’re on the wrong side of the damn road! They’re taking up way too much room. They’re going to make me crash. Team Bicycle all the way!*
On one level, I realized I was being ridiculous. I knew I’d been Team Runner only hours before. But my brain had trouble making that mental leap to see the world from the point of view of that earlier me. So petty. Now consider how much stronger this bias is for more deep-seated parts of my identity: My nationality, my ethnicity, my political tribe.
I try to make a conscious effort to reduce my asshole-ism when I can. It’s not easy, but I think it’s important. First, it makes my life better. I find it exhausting to be permanently angry, to assume the worst in others, to see life as a zero-sum game in which I only win if the other guy loses. Second, if we want to find productive solutions between groups, it helps to get out of our mental bubbles and see the world from another perspective.
Here are three strategies I’ve found helpful.
STRATEGY 1: MENTAL FREAKY FRIDAY-ING
I do love a good body-swap movie. In a couple of weeks, Disney is releasing the sequel Freakier Friday, where presumably Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan once again magically switch bodies, and once again gain a better understanding of each other. It’s a common trope – check out Wikipedia’s massive list of body-swap books and films, including one of the first, an 1888 British novel called Vice Versa.
These movies usually require a magic emerald or a mysterious insect bite, which I don’t have access to. So I do my best imitation. I stay in my body, but attempt a mental switch. I try to adopt the point of view of the Jamie Lee Curtises in my life – whether they are a biker, a runner, a Southerner, a college student, a barista, you name it.
The writer David Foster Wallace gave a famous graduation speech in which he urged his audience to give people the benefit of the doubt: “The Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way..
In other words, Foster Wallace was suggesting we engage in mental Freaky-Fridaying. The tricky part is, it’s impossible to know for sure what the other person is experiencing. Which is why I like Foster Wallace’s suggestion to be creative. Come up with scenarios. It’s sort of like fan fiction, but instead of creating plots for Harry Potter characters, you create stories about strangers.
The guy sitting next to me at the movie theater rolled his eyes and sighed when he had to let me through, as if this were a huge ordeal, as if I was asking him to spend his Saturday helping me move my mattress and box spring. But you know what? Maybe he’d had a terrible day. Maybe his boss that morning told him to comb his hair. I mean, he’s 42 years old, and his douchey boss is making him comb his hair like a third grader? No wonder he’s pissed.
It's kind of entertaining, this creative exercise. It stretches my brain and lowers my anger. My imagined backstories for strangers are almost certainly not true, but something similar probably happened. We all suffer little humiliations throughout the day. In the words of Plato or Robin Williams or the Scottish minister Ian Maclaren (it’s attributed to all of them, depending on the source): “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”
STRATEGY 2: ADVENTUROUS READING
As a writer, I’m biased toward believing that reading can help save the world. But maybe it can. I find reading can introduce me to the inner minds of people very different from me and give my compassion muscles a vigorous workout.
When I was researching my book on the Constitution, I read plenty of political books, but I also read diaries of regular people living in the eighteenth century. I read the memoir of an American soldier in which he talks about everything from fevers to gunshots to how the chirping of whippoorwills kept him up all night. It’s those details that give me a taste of another person’s life.
I once edited a book called What it Feels Like, where writers interviewed people who had experienced something extraordinary, such as being struck by lightning or swimming the English Channel. I remember reading the interview with a man who was 7 feet 8 inches tall. He talked about how he lived in a dirty world. The tops of refrigerators are rarely cleaned. The jambs above doorways are coated with dust. I’ve never forgotten that.
More recently, I read John Green’s book Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. His interview with a teenage boy in Sierra Leone – and how painful he finds it to swallow his daily pills – helped me momentarily escape my bubble.
STRATEGY 3: CONVERSATIONAL CURIOSITY
Another strategy I’ve found useful: Talking to people very different from myself. And when I say “talking,” I mean “talking and listening,” not debating.
As I’ve written before, when I disagree with someone over politics, my default mode is to see the conversation as a battle. I’ll beat them down with my superior facts! After which the scales will fall from their eyes, they’ll feel ashamed of their ignorance, and admit their shameful mistakes!
In reality, this happens approximately zero percent of the time.
Here’s what I’ve found to be a far more productive method: Treat the conversation as if it’s a puzzle. Why do they believe what they believe? Why do I believe what I believe? What evidence would change their mind or my mind? What do we agree on? Is there anything productive we can do together, even if we don’t agree on every issue? Imagine you are on an epistemic adventure together, not a battle. It’s related to a method called deep canvassing, which studies have shown has a higher chance of changing people’s minds.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who is much more libertarian than I am. I tried to resist my knee-jerk thoughts (libertarians are just selfish and immature and don’t want to sacrifice for the greater good) to ask him why he was a libertarian. He explained that onerous government regulations are making it impossible to run his small business. And, he said, these regulations are irrational. They don’t make the world better, they just make his life more complicated.
So that’s the puzzle: Are the regulations really irrational? And if so, can we improve them and reduce their burden while still keeping the public safe?
Now I’m trying to do some mental Freaky Friday-ing with you, the reader, and remind myself that you’ve got a busy day. So I’ll end it there. But I’d love to hear your anger-lowering strategies in the comments.
*I don’t usually bike and run on the same day. I don’t usually do either, in fact. I usually walk briskly on my treadmill. But my son and I pledged to do a sprint triathlon together (the shortest kind), so I needed to train. And to be totally truthful, I pledged to do a biathlon. I skipped the swimming because (a) I have an injured arm and (b) I don’t like swimming. Okay, now you have all the facts.
“If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
— novelist Elmore Leonard
This is all so great and I expect I will be quoting and sharing this a good deal. I love your running/biking comparison - been-there-done-that, as it were.
Your ideas remind me of a very dear friend (long-departed) who often shocked her students and colleagues when she described her practice of keeping "a couple of assholes around." dian was a visual artist, environmental studies professor, and a former student of Corita Kent. If you're familiar with some of Corita's work (which was wild and loud and full of joy), then you could think of dian as an irreverent and mildly scandalous version of Corita. When dian passed away, i co-edited a collection of her writings (Wild Garden: art, education, and the culture of resistance) in which we wrote: "Dian often described the hard work of critical education in the context of social struggle, often in coalitions of interests, as being about "keeping difficult company." She said, "I always try to keep some difficult company." Another time she put this less delicately as needing to have "at least two assholes around."
Her notion of "keeping difficult company" is one that has guided my with others (especially in social justice coalitions) for decades.
Your Freaky-Friday thoughts also remind me, perhaps enigmatically, of Longfellow's thought: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." (1857 in Table-Talk/Drift-wood, p. 405).