Consider this simple chart:
Given that:
- half of the population is below average intelligent by definition; and
- about half of the population is “naughty” in the broad sense (selfish, narcissistic, racist, sexist, mean, sociopathic, etc.),
… as a result, the naughty side has a structural advantage which is impossible to eliminate:
- Nice people can only convince half the country that being nice is the right thing to do (the green and yellow boxes in the chart).
- Naughty people can convince ¾ of the country that being mean is the right thing to do (the red and yellow boxes in the chart).
This is because unintelligent, nice people can be persuaded to be naughty with effective propaganda, but unintelligent, naughty people generally can’t be persuaded to be nice.
In reality I think it’s actually worse than this, because even intelligent people are vulnerable to naughty propaganda, and because when you aggregate all the different personality traits that make people naughty it’s probably actually more than half the population.
This theory of mine is probably analogous to the famous Werner Twertzog tweet:
This, in a nutshell, is my “theory of everything” for explaining why the world is the way it is, a.k.a., why we we can’t have nice things (or, at least, if we have them, we have to defend them constantly or risk them being taken from us). I abbreviate this more succinctly as follows:
jik’s two rules for life:
1. People are stupid.*
2. People are assholes.*
*Not all people.
