Assholes (7 page)

This moral sensibility makes all the difference for how assholes could emerge in boardrooms and grow in numbers over time. Psychopaths are not typically guided by social expectations. They see expectations not as potential moral commands but as mere regular patterns of behavior, as among so many billiard balls shifting around, that provide obstacles or opportunities for self-interested action. People are, in effect, regarded as mere things. Because psychopaths are unresponsive to expectations,
a culture of expectations, as it evolves over time, will probably fail to affect the overall population of psychopaths. As we will see further in
chapter 6
, however, the asshole’s reasoning is shaped by the moral justifications his surrounding culture makes available to him. And so corporate culture can influence both net asshole production and the quality of whatever assholes get made.

Depending on the culture, then, an asshole can be better behaved or worse behaved than a psychopath. A healthy culture of corporate responsibility—to employee, consumer, and investor alike—can significantly limit how far an asshole will go in, say, firing workers to maximize both quarterly returns for investors and his personal compensation. In such a culture, even a proper asshole might not ruthlessly institute mass layoffs, let alone take pleasure in the exercise of power. At the same time, a different, perhaps ultracompetitive culture might unleash the asshole within. That would, for example, explain a recent study at the Swiss University of St. Gallen that tested egotism and the readiness to cooperate of stock traders as compared to psychopaths. In computer simulations and intelligence tests, the share traders behaved more recklessly and were more manipulative than the psychopaths. They showed a special concern for competitive dominance. As study coauthor Thomas Noll explained, “It was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents.… They spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents.” As Noll elaborates, it was as though their neighbor had the same car, and “they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves.”
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The ultracompetitive
stock trading ethos, it seems, was carried over into how the traders played laboratory games. And would anyone be surprised to see it crop up elsewhere?

Accordingly, once the right (or the wrong) culture settles in, the asshole population can expand. Consider, for instance, the expectation that corporations are required to maximize shareholder value, because they have a “fiduciary duty to investors.” If this is really a
duty
only to
investors
, it follows that there is a duty to
minimize
benefits, overall, to consumers and workers—that is to say, a
duty
to offer the bare minimum incentive required to get them to buy a product or show up to work. Many corporate heads will pull back from this, sensing that something is amiss. (Perhaps they ask: Isn’t the rising tide of capitalism supposed to lift all boats and not just investor yachts?) The asshole CEO will embrace his duty with moral gusto, sensing an otherwise forbidden rush of power and profits lying ahead. (Thus even Chainsaw Al might not be a psychopath but simply a raging asshole.) Others who are not already assholes will nevertheless get comfortable with this behavior, trying to keep up with or beat the pack. As this is repeated across thousands of boardrooms and CEO offices, being steadily reinforced with oft-repeated suggestions of how all this works to the “greater good,” assholes grow and flower. The way of the asshole can thus become the normal way.

But might this mean that, eventually, the asshole concept does not apply? Once enough people are doing something, it becomes a form of cooperation with the established way of doing things, not a
breach
of cooperative expectations. Should we say, then, that bankers, for example, are not assholes but simply good businessmen? Not necessarily. We suggest why when we examine the delusional asshole in
chapter 3
.

While many assholes shaped by their enabling cultures will push their entitlements only so far, others go a long way in the direction of the psychopath in terms of their lack of concern for great injury to life and limb and yet without wholly abandoning moral concern. An asshole in power may be reckless in the face of obviously grave risks precisely because he finds easy comfort in a sense of entitlement afforded by his larger moral cause. He may be culpably overconfident in his judgment about when his cause is best served, and so not especially circumspect about risks being imposed upon others. The neoconservative warriors, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, arguably so qualify, for having undertaken the Iraq invasion in the name of spreading liberty throughout the world but without a lot of attention to how this was supposed to work and so without a plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Cheney, in particular, might be viewed in these terms from an older-style conservative’s perspective. According to many conservatives, his policies were a frontal assault on institutions that embody the wisdom of the ages. His doctrine of unlimited presidential power threatened to destabilize the delicate balance among coequal branches of government, while the doctrine of preventive war and the suspension of due process upended standing international treaty and customary law. Even so, he felt entitled to set aside the wisdom of the ages without fear and trembling, without the humble knowledge, well taught by Edmund Burke, that sweeping policy change may easily have unintended consequences that make the cure worse than the
disease—for instance, anarchy in the wake of a quick invasion in Iraq.
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We find a more specific example of reckless disregard in the summer of 2002, while President Bush was only considering the decision to go to war with Iraq. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vice President Cheney made a strong case for war against Saddam Hussein, which allies of the United States took as a definitive indication that Bush had already decided to go to war without consulting them. This in effect undermined U.S. efforts to make a case for war at the U.N. a few months later; the United States naturally seemed to be just going through the motions. Perhaps most strikingly, Cheney gave the speech after circumventing the usual procedures for “clearing” a speech with the president, the CIA, and other parties within the government, so that all are comfortable with its content. Cheney clearly decided that he was exempt from basic institutional obligations, and with great consequence for his president, his country, and for the world.

One could qualify as a reckless asshole simply for gross negligence. As this last example suggests, Dick Cheney is also
self-aggrandizing, in the sense that he acted to enhance his own power, even to the point of usurping Bush’s office. The self-aggrandizing asshole invokes moral cause, but his cause is ultimately, on balance, himself.

In Cheney’s defense, we can at least say that he is a long-serving public official, who can offer a raft of sincere moral arguments for his policy views. Those are arguments we can seriously engage, quite aside from Cheney’s political tactics. The wild-eyed arguments of Chavez and Ahmadinejad are harder to take seriously and difficult to even grasp. This makes them self-aggrandizing assholes of a purer style. Yet there is a general similarity (even if we finally judge such cases quite differently). Chavez and Ahmadinejad presumably do have some intelligible grievances, even if they are inconclusive in the final analysis (after all, the major powers hardly have a spotless history in Latin American and Middle Eastern relations). In general, then, self-aggrandizing assholes seem to come in a broad spectrum of pure and less pure styles, depending on how motives of enhancing their own power mix with other moral concerns.

Perhaps an especially pure case is Huey Long, the early 1930s’ Louisiana governor and U.S. senator. Though he shared President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s progressive outlook, albeit from Roosevelt’s left, Roosevelt regarded him as one of the two most dangerous men in America (the other being Douglas MacArthur) for his corrupt and demagogic politics.
³³
Long claimed to be moved by moral concern, as when he condemned the inequalities of his day (“Not a single thin dime of concentrated, bloated, pompous wealth, massed in the hands
of a few people, has been raked down to relieve the masses”),
³⁴
and indeed he criticized the U.S. political system in terms that resonate today (“They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen”).
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As for political tactics, however, Long felt entitled to take any means, without being especially concerned about whether they really were necessary for his ends, or whether they were appropriate in a democracy. As he put it, “I’d rather violate every one of the damn conventions and see my bills passed, than sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch ’em die.”
³⁶
“I used to try to get things done by saying ‘please.’ … Now … I dynamite ’em out of my path.”
³⁷
When he was accused of demagoguery, he in effect ignored the moral issue of
how
power is exercised in a democratic society with this convenient definition: “I would describe a demagogue as a politician who don’t keep his promises.”
³⁸
In effect, Long justified his political machine by defining corruption out of existence.

On the left in our own day, a less extreme example of moralized self-aggrandizing might be U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader, whose spoiler role helped to usher in what other progressives regard as the disastrous years of George W. Bush. Or one might think of former U.S. senator John Edwards, who
seemed to feel that his purported concern for American poverty itself justified his presidential run. Did it somehow make up for his secret unfaithfulness to his cancer-afflicted wife and the risk that a successful bid would eventually be undermined when news of the secret affair surfaced, at a huge loss to the political left? Or was he mainly concerned to augment his own power? The answer seems at best unclear. Similarly, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange invokes high principles of transparency in letting the public know what governments are up to. But the unprincipled and reckless way he exposes diplomatic confidences suggests that he is equally if not mainly concerned with being in a position to do a lot of damage. If he does have moral motives, his smug sense of being above accountability tips the scales of self-aggrandizement the other way.

Still more complicated are British imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, and General Gordon of Khartoum. They operated within a political culture that supplied ready moral justifications for promoting Britain’s power around the world. Even John Stuart Mill, one of the great progressives of the era, infamously approved of the colonial subjugation of “barbarians.”
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Only after being properly civilized, presumably in good English style, could they become fit for self-rule. Mill genuinely believed this was for the barbarians’ own good (and he was not an asshole). But a culture in which paternalistic colonialism was widely accepted of course made it easy for others to seize the opportunities for power from less pure motives.

Cecil Rhodes is a notorious exemplar. Even in his own day, Rhodes was apparently “revered by his intimates, who regarded him as a towering colossus,” but also “reviled by those who saw
him as an unprincipled and unscrupulous adventurer.”
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He was ruthless, corrupt, and immensely greedy in opening up diamond mines in South Africa, acting from a sense of both impunity and imperial license. Rhodes also had a tremendous sense of mission. He dreamed of a railroad spanning Africa from Cape Town to Cairo and ultimately hoped the Anglo-Saxon race would dominate the whole earth, with rebellious America eventually returning to the empire (and with America’s best and brightest coming on Rhodes Scholarships to England in the meanwhile).

This turned out to be somewhat overly optimistic. Entitlement born of cosmic grandiosity caught on well in America. Oil baron John D. Rockefeller was apparently enriched not because Wild West American capitalism gave him free rein but because, as he put it without apology, “God gave me my money.”
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An earlier generation was similarly moved by the asshole doctrine of Manifest Destiny, through the westward expansion and beyond, to sweep aside native peoples in their path. Although America was a late comer in the global competition for subjugation rights over foreign peoples, it did have a crack at Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Though the stakes were relatively small, Albert J. Beveridge, in a campaign for the Indiana Senate, saw in the United States “a greater England with a nobler destiny.” In particular, the United States was, he said:

Beveridge of course then naturally pressed the question: “Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world?” To answer “no,” he went on to explain, would make one “an infidel to American power and practical sense.” It would be to withhold the gift of our talents from the world, “to rot in our own selfishness.” Nor would there be a point in asking for consent from a people now incapable of self-government; we already know they would gladly accept: “Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, human, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them?” (meaning colonial rule by Spain).