Have you tried not being an asshole?

I’ve been watching a conservative video about how evil socialism is to try to parse out all the different factual errors that form the basis of the conservative worldview, and it sure is complicated and confusing. Maybe socialism and other leftist ideas are pretty confusing to conservatives — I’m pretty sure they are, because they’re pretty confusing to me sometimes. It really strikes me that maybe we should all drop these various details of our different ideologies and break everything down into something far more simple. So here it is:

Have you tried not being an asshole?

That to me is the most bare-bones way to describe the way of life that we all ought to aspire to. Just try not to be an asshole — do that all the time, every day, with everyone. It certainly isn’t easy in practice, but the point isn’t to succeed, but to just keep trying to be a better person, and the best way to put that is that I’m going to try not to be an asshole.

But have you tried not being an asshole?

I realize what you might be thinking: Everyone else is an asshole, so if I’m trying not to be an asshole, won’t that put me at a disadvantage?

Honestly, it might! Especially if you are participating in the Asshole Olympics. But the point is that the world can’t be a better place if we’re all being assholes, and we know all about personal responsibility, right? You are personally responsible for your own actions. If the world is a bad place, and you’re living in that world being an asshole, well, that means you are personally responsible for the world being a bad place.

I do realize that there are a lot of questions about what we have to do when someone continues to be an asshole. How do we fight against the assholes without being assholes ourselves? It’s an incredibly good question. But the first step — quite clearly — is for me and you to stop being assholes. And then when someone is being an asshole, we should try to come up with a way to address that without being an asshole.

One thing we can do about assholes — without being assholes ourselves — is to not promote, endorse, or support assholes. Because only an asshole promotes, endorses, and supports assholes. That’s pretty simple. We don’t have to “cancel” the asshole to do this; we just have to stop helping them. Now, I’m not going to name names, but think back over the last 5 years or so — did you maybe help some assholes? Well, I’m not going to be an asshole about it, but I will say that to stop being an asshole, you’re going to have to stop helping those assholes.

Assholes are the reason why societies go to hell. First some asshole does some asshole thing, and then next thing you know there’s a law created by some other asshole, and then yet another asshole is using that law to be an asshole to people who would never had done that first thing that set this machine of assholery in motion.

If you are still balking at this very simple idea at this point, I have to ask: Is it because you want to be an asshole? Are you the person who can’t let go of being an asshole? Are you the one that is the cause of all this? Maybe you actually like living in a world full of assholes. Maybe this hell is something that you’re really enjoying and so you’re resisting my call to stop being an asshole. Maybe you don’t even know how to stop being an asshole.

I certainly hope not. And I do believe you can stop being an asshole.

I hope you will join me in moving the world closer to a non-asshole utopia by simply taking that first step toward it: Trying not to be an asshole. It won’t fix the world, but it sure will make things better.