by Akim Reinhardt
A thought has been nagging at me lately. Are most shitty people not very bright?
Some shitty people are very smart, of course, and those are the ones you really have to worry about: the pied pipers enchanting others to dance to their shitty tunes. But is it possible that most shitty people are not Darth Vader types, brilliant but troubled and drawn to the Dark Side’s Machiavellian potential? Could it be that most of them instead discover their shittiness through ignorance and low emotional intelligence, and are not seduced into it despite their brilliance?
There’s a lot to untangle. First and foremost, I am not contending that most not very bright people are shitty. Far from it.
Beyond that, however, we must ask ourselves both: What makes a person shitty, and, What makes a person smart?
Shittiness is the easier category to tackle, but by no means simple. Indeed, everyone is a shitty person sometimes. Everybody starts out as a baby, a toddler, a little kid, and every single one of them is a shitty little brat from time to time. Me! Me! Me! No one else matters! That selfishness is at the core of both, general human shittiness, and much of childhood up to a certain point. But in most cases, families, teachers, and many others train children to leave a lot of that shittiness behind most of the time, and to become a functional member of various social groups: families, schools, houses of worship, friend groups, workplaces, and so forth.
How much of that Me! Me! Me! are people trained to leave behind? Aside from personal proclivities and experiences, it varies significantly across human cultures. For example, in many Indigenous American cultures, or in Japanese culture, historically there has been a strong emphasis on sublimating individual selfishness in favor of group function and cohesion. In U.S. culture? Yeah, not so much. But does that mean American society has a higher rate of shitty people than other countries? Who’s to say?
Well, this Brit for starters. But what even is shittiness?
Whether it comes from bad parenting, bad peer influences, the vagaries of various cultural and social influences, reactions to past trauma, genetic brain anomalies such as sociopathy or psychopathy, or any number of other factors, we might think of shittiness as actions (verbal, physical, emotional, manipulative, etc.) that favor the actor at the expense of others, and do so in a way that a reasonable and impartial observer would see as unjustified and possibly harmful or damaging.
Someone can be shitty rarely, occasionally, or frequently. And shittiness itself can be displayed with varying degrees of impact and directness. Someone can be very shitty or just sorta shitty. They can be directly shitty to you, or they can passively support the shittiness of others. They can be shitty once in a rare while, or way too often.
But regardless of frequency and depth, how much of that shittiness, in all its varied forms, might stem from low intelligence of some sort? I realize this sounds like the kind of question, albeit in modern vernacular, that might’ve been posed by a Victorian Era eugenicist advocating for the forced sterilization of criminals.
That’s absolutely not where I’m coming from. However, it would make sense that shittiness is born of a certain kind of moronicism. Not some genetic curse, but something about the universal nature within human beings. After all, we’re all morons sometimes. Most of us are shitty to some degree at least once in a while; there aren’t many saints or bodhisattvas among us.
Again, to be clear, I’m not talking about baseline intelligence. A mentally impaired person can be a very nice person; they can also be a pretty shitty person. They’re just like you and me in this respect. No rank of brainiacs has a monopoly on sadism or kindness. I’m not talking about brain computing power, but rather a kind of emotional intelligence that allows for empathy, and the self-awareness and courage to act compassionately. It’s almost definitional that people who consistently engage in direct shitty behavior, such as various forms of verbal, mental, emotional, psychological, and/or physical abus, are lacking in empathy. And a paucity of empathy is, in many cases, symptomatic of a lack of emotional intelligence.
But what about the people who, at first glance, don’t seem to lack empathy People who seem like regular people but, it turns out, are susceptible to supporting and even championing the shittiness of others, to the point that it renders them rather shitty themselves?
Could you be a strident Nazi supporter in 1930s–40s Germany or Austria and not be a shitty person? Even if you were never directly involved in any Nazi actions? Even if you were the proverbial “good” person who loved their family and was a good neighbor and friend? I argue No. Being an ardent supporter of Nazism is so shitty as to make you a shitty person, no matter how much you love your family, how good a friend you are, or how polite you are to cashiers.
If you disagree with me, and are not yourself that kind of shitty person, then you have a disturbingly high tolerance for shitty people; but that’s a different problem for a different essay.
When considering an otherwise good person who is shitty by virtue of their open and vocal support for truly shitty things and other shitty people, I think we should consider another kind of stupidty. Such a person might have great emotional intelligence in interpersonal situations. However, they might lack a certain kind of savviness that allows one to avoid being, for lack of a better word, a chump? Could being the proverbial otherwise-good-Nazi result, in part, from a lack of savviness? A type of stupidity that allows for, or even leads to, naivete? That can render someone a chump who gets conned or seduced by other shit heads and brought over to The Bad? Not that such stupidity would mandate jumping on the shitty bandwagon, but could it facilitate such a move?
These are the kinds of questions that have been nagging me of late. How to explain otherwise smart, loving people who rabidly support Trumpism? Whether it was in the early Grab ‘em by the pussy! days from nearly a decade ago, or the more recent descent into masked government thugs murdering people in the streets. What to make of someone who not only defends such things, but feels righteous indignation and even anger in doing so? Something in them must be off, right? It could be a roiling anger, a deep sadness, or some other psychological or emotional trauma that diminishes their ability to empathize (thereby making them less emotionally intelligent), and in a bid to cope, amid their desperation, makes them more naive, more gullible, more susceptible to bullshit, luring them into a quest for easy answers to complex problems.
I’ve long joked that we’re all full of shit; but an asshole is someone who dumps their shit on other people. Could it be that some shitty people are shitty because they don’t have good bullshit detectors, so they swallow lotsa bullshit and end up chock full of shit, needing to vomit it forth at some point, onto some undeserving target?
I’m not trying to paint all Trumpers as stupid. Far too many of them are clearly smart and shitty. But can you be a Trumper at this point and not be damaged? Yes, we’re all damaged to some degree, but can you be an avid Trumper and not be damaged in ways that mitigate your ability to empathize and/or understand that you’re being taken for a ride?
I’m no genius. I’ve made and continue to make my fair share of mistakes, misreads, and bad decisions that lead myself and others to suffer. I can be shitty, and I am in fact shitty sometimes. Everyone can and is. No one is perfect, no matter how hard we might try. But we’re supposed to try, and we’re supposed to get smarter as we go. It’s a real opportunity for us as humans, even if it never gets better than two steps forward and one step back. We can gain emotional intelligence, increase our capacity for empathy, and learn a thing or two from having been around the block, which allows us to see through the bullshit and to recognize shitty people for who they really are.
Perhaps the smartest thing we can do is be honest with ourselves about ourselves. If we can do that, and if we can see through our own bullshit, then maybe we can actually be nice to other people. Maybe.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com