The Asshole Window: A New Theory Of Societal Collapse

I tell my kids that the most amazing thing about the world we live in is that this ramshackle system works at all.

Much less that it works well enough to support 8 billion people.

It really shouldn’t.

It probably should have collapsed years ago.

The information security on almost everything is a sloppy mess, from financial transactions to basic identity documentation. The ease with which almost every part of the modern world can be fraudulently manipulated is frankly shocking.

But it shambles on, working just barely well enough to keep goods in transit and people fed.

It really is amazing.

And it keeps going for one, very simple, reason: the vast majority of people aren’t actually complete assholes.

A lot of them are, and the news is full of them, but not enough to push this crumbling edifice off the cliff.

Yet,

All it would take to tip the balance from “barely functioning” to “complete collapse” could be just a few more assholes.

We don’t know exactly what percentage of absolute assholes a modern technological society can survive having, but we do know it’s at least slightly less than what we have now.

Or at least slightly less than what we had last year?

But the percentage does seem to be going up.

There are certainly more (and more extreme) assholes in the news these days, and I certainly seem to run into more in my daily life than I did say 20 years ago.

And, correspondingly, everything does seem to be functioning worse every year.

This is pretty predictable.

Whether a particular child will grow up to be an asshole must be determined by both intrinsic and external factors, though we don’t need to know what any of them are to work through the basic logic on this.

We can’t really do anything about how many children are born or grow up with an intrinsic tendency to be an asshole without turning into eugenics-assholes ourselves. So set that aside.

But, like the Overton window concept in political discourse there is an “Asshole window” in society that delineates what level of overt assholery is considered publicly acceptable and beyond which someone would experience significant social consequences. Children internalize that window from the levels of assholery they see on display around them.

So we can probably influence the social factors increasing or reinforcing that tendency .

And at the moment, obviously, that window is widening.

And we need to do something about that, because we’re likely approaching the limit for what percentage of a population can be total assholes before everything just comes crashing down.

Yes, we’re aproaching “peak Asshole”.