Assholes (20 page)

Now compare asshole capitalism. It involves a kind of
deterioration
rather than complete collapse. The (perhaps gradual) process of deterioration results from
dysfunction
in the way things are set up or not adjusted and reformed. But this needn’t be the result of a “cultural contradiction” with
traditional
values and the institutions and culture that instill them, such as the family or religion. As we will see, any and all dampening systems, traditional or otherwise, can be overwhelmed by the powerful incentives created by asshole capitalism’s entitlement message.
¹²

Our claim, specifically, is not that asshole capitalism leads to the end of capitalism or of society, but that it causes capitalism to take a degraded form, a form that is worse by
capitalism’s own standards of value
than what came before. Does capitalism have standards of value?

Perhaps not, if you ask John D. Rockefeller. He’d presumably say that the point of capitalism is for him to get rich (or for God to have a way of giving him his riches).
¹³
Or perhaps he’d add something about the hardworking, risk-taking, exceedingly talented, ever-deserving, heroic entrepreneur. But we shouldn’t ask an asshole what the point of capitalism is, since we can safely
presume he’ll simply advocate for asshole capitalism—at least assuming he’s feeling sure he’s in a good position to take advantage of it (and perhaps not otherwise). The value of capitalism is better settled by people who are not assholes, who have to do the work of upholding the practices and institutions needed for a functioning society, often at a cost to themselves. Why should they be willing to adopt capitalism instead of some other way of organizing economic and social life? The answer offered to us over the past two hundred or so years is that capitalism promises various desirable things, including freedom, opportunity, and general prosperity. It is supposed to advance the “general welfare” and create a “rising standard of living” in which “a rising tide lifts all boats,” the yacht and dinghy alike. Capitalism, we have been told, advances these values as well as or better than alternative social forms.

Now, assuming for the sake of argument that this is right, it is extremely important that those grand promises can’t be fulfilled without supportive social practices and institutions. The idea of a large-scale, self-sustaining, self-organizing “perfectly competitive” and “efficient” market is an intellectual fiction; it bears little relation to any actual real markets.
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Large-scale exchange is possible, for example, only within a system of property that demarcates different things as “mine” and “thine.” That will in turn require any institutions of security, law, contract, adjudication, taxation, and politics needed for the system of property
to generally not fall apart (because of rampant theft or corruption or constant endemic conflict and so forth). If those practices and institutions aren’t upheld, because cooperative people aren’t willing to bear the cost of sustaining them, then the social promises of capitalism will not be fulfilled.

How might that failure look? In general, it might mean that living standards increasingly rise only for a fortunate few, that the “rising tide” of capitalism lifts the yacht but swamps the dinghy. The growth of gross domestic product year after year may increasingly become like everyone in a bar getting “richer,” on average, because Bill Gates just walked in; average per capita wealth spikes, but most aren’t personally richer for it. In more concrete terms, this might show up in various ways: maybe people become increasingly uncertain about their prospects for stable employment and eventual retirement, even though they have “worked hard and played by the rules” their whole lives; or perhaps people are increasingly unable to afford to stay in school, try as they may, because their increasingly vulnerable family needs them to work to pay urgent bills; or it could be that average people are increasingly unable to get the basic protections of law in an increasingly cash-strapped police or judicial system, even as the well heeled get the best justice money can buy; and maybe any or all of these trends result from political power being increasingly concentrated in the hands of an influential few, who steadily change the rules to further entrench that influence. In short, in one way or another, people increasingly see “liberty,” “opportunity,” or “prosperity”
in name only
, in a form that isn’t especially valuable for them, that doesn’t make good on the promise of capitalism in their eyes.

Here we should emphasize that we are not necessarily assuming deeper egalitarian ideas of social justice about how the outcomes of capitalism should be organized. I myself am
a progressive in the style of John Rawls, which calls (roughly) for (1) equal basic liberties; (2) fair equality of opportunity in access to positions of greater reward and power, which dramatically mitigates the effects of fortunate birth; and (3) limits on the inequalities in income and wealth we allow in order to create incentives for hard work, risk taking, and so on, so that they must work out, over time, to the greatest advantage of the least well off social class.
¹⁵
But for present purposes, we can assume that no such requirements of justice apply. We assume
only
capitalism’s own basic social promises. These do require advancing the
general
good but may not place any basic limits on the size of the gap between rich and poor. A yawning gap in wealth between richer and poorer might be problematic but for different reasons, say, because it means that too few are seeing real gains, because wealth is not being generally spread around, or because growth is not “broad based.” Here we assume certain values but only
conservative
values. We assume only that we have reason to value the capitalist societies we have and so we have reason to prevent them from sliding into a degraded form.

Our remaining question, then, is how asshole capitalism makes things worse according to the values just described. Why, more specifically, would asshole capitalism devolve?

Any capitalist system will create powerful incentives for personal enrichment. This is how it gets people to do things that
otherwise wouldn’t be done. But the argument for a capitalist system needn’t say anything more about such incentives, except that they do indeed work in getting people to do things that fulfill capitalism’s larger social promises. Yet capitalist systems only work within a larger framework of social cooperation. So we should say some further things about the moral status of incentives and the conduct they induce. We should add, for instance, that people who respond to such incentives are potentially making a contribution, doing their part, and as a result do indeed have certain entitlements, for instance, to be paid what they were promised for services rendered or work done.

Crucially, this is not to say the entitlements are absolute. What one is entitled to, we may assume, is fair treatment by the system of social cooperation overall. Any specific entitlements one has are then subject to adjustment as needed for cooperation to be fair to all. So if the social promises of capitalism require increasing teacher or trash collector pay, then teachers and trash collectors will have a moral entitlement to a pay increase. And if those same promises include things like well-maintained roads and schools and refuse services, where this requires things like capping or heavily taxing banker or CEO bonuses, then bankers and CEOs have no moral entitlement against this change in the rules. All is fair if needed for capitalism to actually do what it is supposed to.

Now compare what we might call an
entitlement capitalist
system. Its very different message is of
basic expansive entitlements
, for instance, to an ever-greater share of the fruits of cooperation (e.g., parking spots, usable air, wealth), regardless of social rationale and regardless of what may be a significant social cost to others. Here we might think of bankers who profit from huge risks, knowing that their firms are “too big to fail” and that they will be bailed out in a crisis at the taxpayer’s
expense. Or, more pointedly, recall the dark fall days of 2008, when the U.S. and world economy was about to fall off a cliff, and U.S. treasury secretary Hank Paulson gathered the top bankers together to tell them that they were being forced to accept $125 billion, with no strings attached, in order to shore up their troubled balance sheets and buoy market confidence. To which John Thain, Merrill Lynch CEO, piped up and asked, “What kind of protections can you give us on changes in compensation policy?” This is a stunningly clueless asshole move. The taxpayers were in effect being forced, for the good of the country and the world, to protect the bankers from their own recklessness, at a huge cost. And yet the bankers’ main concern was their
bonuses
.
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As this example suggests, the message of entitlement capitalism is of
expansive
entitlement (the bonuses are enormous). The message doesn’t tell one to claim some specifiable share of goods, but rather that one can rightfully demand the
most
one can get, or at least
more
than others are getting, and certainly as much as or more than one got last time. One can’t be expected to take a loss or even simply gain less for the sake of others. The message, moreover, is of
basic
entitlement, in the sense that one is entitled to ever more even when this has no further justification in terms of larger social purpose and perhaps despite significant costs for others. Because the entitlement is basic, no further such justification is required. Those who accept the entitlement message will of course cite platitudes that look a lot like further justifications—for instance, about the special role of people in their position (e.g., as “job creators,” the “best and
the brightest,” “savvy businessmen,” or “tops in their field”). But these are invoked more to bolster their moral confidence and silence those who complain rather than to open an honest discussion about whether the proposed benefits really are justified. Here moral confidence derives not from the merits of particular arguments but from the basic sense of entitlement itself. The sense of entitlement explains why those who have it are disposed to indignantly and aggressively defend it ever more as their right.

Our model here is the asshole as defined in
chapter 1
. He expects and demands entitlements to special advantages that he does not in fact have and yet is immunized against others who try to point this out. It is generally for morality to decide what one is or is not entitled to, and people of course disagree about what morality allows or requires. But for present purposes, we will assume, if only for the sake of argument, that one’s moral entitlements are not expansive in the present sense. They are instead sensitive to what is required for capitalism to fulfill its social promises. Thus the culture of entitlement capitalism tells people they have entitlements that they do not in fact have.

Now, as we understand entitlement capitalism, the encouraged sense of entitlement is not limited to proper assholes. They do readily take to the message, since it confirms what they already believe about themselves. More important is that others who would not otherwise think like assholes are also swayed, especially as the entitlement message catches on. They, too, begin to
aggressively and indignantly
defend laws and institutions that give them an ever-greater slice of the pie, regardless of its social rationale and even at great cost to others. That doesn’t mean assholery pervades all areas of life. The thinking may
be limited to work or to politics, or generally to the economic system. (A society won’t degrade even if asshole surfers proliferate out of control.) No one person need be very “systematic” across various areas of his or her life, and no one person need be particularly “entrenched” in this mentality. When the winds of culture blow in a different, perhaps more cooperative direction, many would go with the flow and perhaps later feel puzzled about how they could have previously thought so much like an asshole.

At issue, then, is a kind of culturally induced asshole moral
reasoning
. The reasoning may be expressed as a general
refusal
to think from behind John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.” In asking what major social institutions would be just, Rawls suggests that we are to consider what kind of society we would be willing to live in, assuming that we are ignorant of our particular social position, including such things as our race, gender, class, or talents. The just society is the one we would each accept from this impartial point of view.
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But because asshole reasoning tells a person that he or she is fundamentally special, this impartial perspective is either rejected or readily qualified. It is rejected or qualified on the basis of further specific entitlement claims that one wouldn’t invoke without knowing what one’s actual positions and prospects were like.

Since accepting the entitlement message is mainly
a way of thinking
, notice that it does not matter that not everyone can actually
have
ever more—except in a fantasy world of infinite economic growth and unlimited natural resources. For it is possible to have a fully
general
message of special entitlement in which each presumes that
others
will rightly bear the cost of
one’s benefit. In theory, everyone can
presume
that they have special status, even if not everyone can, in reality, receive presumed special benefits. All that follows is that some will be sorely disappointed and probably deeply upset.

Still, asshole reasoning will have some sense of limits. Even proper assholes will not knowingly push things into complete collapse. Where cooperation doesn’t exist, as in Hobbes’s state of nature, there are no special advantages for the asshole to take. Yet the asshole is perhaps not as careful as Hobbes’s Foole, the cunning cheater who sees his share as optimized by keeping his cheating quiet so that he won’t be caught and so it won’t catch on.
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The asshole is out in the open about allowing himself special advantages because he feels morally entitled to them. If collapse occurs as a result of assholes, it is only because assholes have mistakenly presumed that cooperative people would not become fed up and completely withdraw from cooperative life in any of the several ways we will explain. Still, because assholes do feel entitled to more, they are more likely to push it, and so are more systemically dangerous than the cautious egotist.