Ask A Genius 975: Obnoxiousness and Crappiness, No Surprise
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/27
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This one’s from my friend Shana. She says, “Maybe how you don’t get surprised by anyone because you’ve seen many bad things in the world?” What do you think about that? What do you think about many bad things happening and being less surprised as you age?
Rick Rosner: When I was 20, I started working in bars and probably met about three-quarters of a million people. It’s a huge sample. In places where clubs are, people can be nice or jerks. I got a sense that most people are, by default, civil and reasonably nice because why be an asshole all the time? But people are also fallible. People’s niceness and jerkiness lie along a continuum. On average, people are nice in common situations. Rarely you’ll run into a saint or a complete piece of shit. That’s the dimension of people in normal circumstances.
When people are in a situation that encourages them to be shitty, they have varying amounts of resistance to being shitty in a circumstance that might reward them for being a dickhead. So, people are fallible in most situations but aren’t shitty. I had a model for most people’s range of behaviour. It wasn’t complete because I worked in nice places in Colorado, New Mexico, and California. This was before I quit working in bars, before 2010. The behaviour, obnoxiousness, and crappiness of people have increased during the Trump and social media years. As I was quitting working in bars, smartphones came in around 2008, so people being on social media plus smartphones plus corrosive propaganda and increasing political polarization.
People taking political stances, not for the benefit of the country but to make their political opponents feel bad, has made people shittier since at least 2015, and likely before that, but it’s gotten really bad. Since Trump appeared on the scene, he’s not the only cause, but he accelerated and amplified it. So, I wasn’t surprised by people before 2015. My model seemed reasonable, but now I’ve been surprised again by people’s shittiness and stupidity. Also, COVID made us socially isolated and was one more thing for people to get pissed off about. Probably three-quarters of Americans have had at least one case of COVID. There’s evidence that it degrades your brain. So, there’s a chance that people are organically crappier since COVID.
When you look at world history, I bring this up a lot. After the Spanish flu epidemic that started in 1918 and degraded people’s brains, the whole world got super shitty. There was an economic boom until 1929, and then there was a crash. Fascism began in Italy in 1922 and in many other countries, most notably Germany, in the early ’30s. Japan had its brand of fascist imperialism when it kicked in, but you had a worldwide depression starting in 1929 and then a world war starting in 1939. So, you could make a case that, yeah, when people’s brains get a little cooked, it makes the world vulnerable to crappier behaviour.
Normally, people develop a more complete model of how people are and tend to be less surprised by others over time. If you’re 60, you’ll be less surprised by people than when you’re 25. But these aren’t normal times.
Jacobsen: Well, from my side, I mean, I interviewed many people, and in at least a few countries now, in extreme contexts. A stable, gender-equal, wealthy country like Iceland versus a war zone under economic hardship like Ukraine, that’s a pretty wide range.
I’ve interviewed many people worldwide to bring in very distinguished individuals to people no one will ever hear about but should, in my opinion. Probably in my late 20s or early 30s, I began not to be surprised by pretty much anyone because I kind of got the gamut of people when you switch the dials on particular personality characteristics. But maybe your quarter million experiences with three-quarters of a million people… My apologies; people don’t surprise me anymore. And so my question to you, based on my experience and yours, is it simply a basic principle of having a widersample of humanity and experience?
Rosner: I mean, my wife and I went to visit our kid in England, and we wanted to take a side trip, so we tried Belgium, which is very close to England. We were each a little surprised by how chill and self-contained the people in Belgium seemed to be. It made us think that it’s not that they’re particularly chill and self-contained but that Americans might be big and loud. Americans, as tourists at least, have a reputation for being big and loud and having to proclaim ourselves in the world, which we certainly do more now. The whole world does this via social media. But my wife and I haven’t visited that many countries.
Jacobsen: So, do you think that your experience with Americans, having met three-quarters of a million people, makes you not surprised by Americans as much despite the current polarization? Except for the recent surprises.
Rosner: Except for the recent surprises where I encounter dozens of new jackasses every day on Twitter.
Jacobsen: Do you think people are made or always there and have just come out of the woodwork?
Rosner: Both. In the ’50s, if you were a lunatic or a jackass, it was much harder for you to find your tribe. Most people’s interactions with others were face-to-face via conversation. If you wanted to be a lunatic and join the John Birch Society or the KKK, you couldn’t be doing KKK stuff 24 hours a day and receiving messaging from them 24 hours a day. If you wanted to join the John Birch Society, your correspondence would be via letters.
You couldn’t be getting and sending letters all day, every day. You didn’t get on the phone with your lunatic friends because long distances cost money that you didn’t have. So, there were limits. Hillary Clinton said that it takes a village to raise a child, meaning everybody was in a village. People surrounded you, and you had to talk to them. If you were saying asshole stuff, they would let you know. Now, the balance has shifted. Most of our interactions with others are electronic, and you can find people who share your gross ideas and constantly reinforce each other. So, many people tend to veer in horrible directions, but that would get tamped down by the community in the ’50s. People have the same tendencies now; there’s less to tamp them down and more to amplify them. Technology always hopes to get out of that kind of more asinine fighting within a country where people can disagree.
Jacobsen: How do you get out of that context where, in healthier circumstances, people can disagree on politics and social life and organization? Even on humour in the United States.
Rosner: Because lots of people on Twitter, on my side, like to point out that once a country falls into fascism, it’s hard to haul it out. We haven’t become a fascist country yet, but if Trump gets re-elected, that would bring the country that much farther into fascism. If Fox News disappeared, Trump might lose 15 to 18% of his support. Fox News pumps out bullshit most of the day. They’re the most widely absorbed reinforcement source, a mass reinforcement source. There are all sorts of smaller-scale reinforcement via social media. But Fox News makes a ton of money and doesn’t seem to be a radical bubble. The way Fox News operates now, I don’t understand why, besides economic freedom, but Fox News is not dependent on advertisers.
Fox News charges cable providers a ton of money per subscriber. So if you sign up for Spectrum, out of your 80 or 100 buck-a-month bill, probably two or three bucks go to Fox News. With millions of cable subscribers nationwide, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Maybe if we had a political movement to force cable providers to let you specifically opt out of Fox News, that would bring about some change. But also, maybe not. So yeah, instead of making $800 million a year, Fox News would only make $550 million. How would that make a difference? Because the people who want Fox News are not going to drop Fox News. So, with the constant propaganda, it’s hard to see how you easilyget out of it. The propagandists make a ton of money. Alex Jones was fined a billion dollars for lying and hurting the Sandy Hook families.
Sean Hannity on Fox makes about $35 million annually and owns about a thousand rental properties, condos, and apartments. There’s a ton of money to be made in espousing conservative stuff, which now means espousing dishonest stuff that’s not true.
Jacobsen: Let’s end this session and do another on some notes.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 