Are we the assholes?
Contemplating the mystery of the self
When the Gone Girl movie adaptation was announced, having recently finished the book, I remember thinking that Rosamund Pike’s challenge was going to be playing three different characters (the following opener is riddled with spoilers but, come on, it’s been ten years):
Amy as she portrays herself in her diaries, and by extension how she’s seen by society at large (basically, a White Woman In Danger)
Amy as she sees herself (a Scorned Woman)
Amy as she is seen by her victims (a Psycho)
After watching the movie, I walked away with the impression that Pike had mostly only played the third character, which disappointed me. Her portrayal of Jane Bennet in the 2005 Pride & Prejudice was more aligned with the White Woman In Danger persona; the praise (and eventual Oscar nomination) she received, I believe, had more to do with how much of that she had been able to shed to play the Psycho. It might, therefore, have been a strategic choice to avoid familiar territory and go full Fatal Attraction throughout the whole movie (which she did beautifully, no doubt about it) — but I think it made the movie lopsided, more Foregone Girl: was there ever a doubt in the moviegoer’s mind as to who she was and what she was capable of?
The book depended on confounded expectations not solely to make us gasp at the twist (which, alone, would’ve ultimately made it forgettable) but also to land its main point: can we ever truly know each other? And can we ever truly know ourselves? The chilling thing about Amy is not just how she behaves, but the entire emotional and logical structure she builds around her actions. Her views of men, of other women, and of justice validate her actions. There is no room for doubt, no question in her mind of whether she is wrong — not “wrong” as in making a mistake (she admits to those), but “wrong” as in being The Bad Guy. That, in her mind, is always someone else. And while there certainly are characters that do bad things to her throughout the story, it never occurs to her to think that she should join them in that lineup. The multiple versions of her coexisted in the same person, but she only had eyes for one.
Thing is, I think most of us—even if we haven’t staged our own murders and framed our partners for it—can easily fall into that same trap.
What is, it might be worth asking, a Bad Guy? That’s a question that humanity has arguably been concerned with since the dawn of time, across different cultures. Murder, it seems, has always been unacceptable — at least if divorced from other kinds of death, like war or human sacrifice. Adultery also pops up as a no-no across the globe — again, though, qualified by polygamy or gender. Lying, stealing, and rape also tend to show up in the Don’t column, with their own specific definitions (especially rape, which we’re somehow still trying to define thousands of years into our collective existence). These are general lines, of course, but from those general lines we can deduce that a Bad Guy is someone who violates these rules by putting their desires above them. The Bad Guy cares more for themselves than others. Even in systems that reward selfishness, like capitalism, the admiring eye that goes to the winners is also a judgmental eye: “How do you think they got to the top?” we ask, with a knowingly cocked eyebrow.
Some Bad Guys know they are bad and cannot stop themselves, while others simply don’t care. Yet another group, and here’s where we enter scary territory, don’t think they are bad. They see themselves as righteously taking what has been denied to them (love, wealth, fame, justice), either by specific individuals or the system as a whole. And sometimes, hearing their reasoning, one can see their point; hurt people hurt people and whatnot. But a common byproduct of that reasoning is that it reframes Bad Guy behavior as Good Guy behavior — as Richard Nixon put it, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” When a bad thing happens to us, the reasoning goes, the bad things we do in response are not bad.
“Am I The Assshole?”, asks a popular Reddit post format in which people present thorny situations for public verdicts. You can sense the expected response: “Of course not!” Asking if we’re the assholes shows that we’re baffled by the assignment of Bad Guy status to ourselves and want to have it removed by others, who will hopefully agree that our actions were valid. Of course, a lot of AITA posters are dealing with people who are gaslighting them or being unreasonable — but even in the act of asking others, instead of just being able to confidently say “My dad absolutely had no right to give my mom’s jewelry to his new wife when mom promised it to me before her death, so I was right to break into their house and take it,” they are betraying a horror at the very idea of being considered (let alone being) the asshole.
Part of the problem is, of course, the way we deal with Bad Guys in our society. In John 8:1-11, Jesus is presented with a woman caught in the act of adultery. The crowd wants to stone her, but Jesus gives them a condition: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” This episode, like others in which He showed mercy towards sinners, is often used in modern times to say that Jesus did not hang out with the righteous but with the sinners, which means they might not have been sinners after all. The episode, however, ends in a way that does not support this view: after the accusers leave, since none of them could meet Jesus’ conditions, He sends the woman away saying “Go and sin no more.” He was not giving a green light on adultery — he was giving a red light on stoning. And yet, it seems that what we’ve walked away with is the opposite: it’s okay to stone, but only if the person deserves it, and that lady did nothing wrong. Get yours, queen!
“Wait, who said it’s okay to stone people?” you ask with your own cocked eyebrow — and sure, maybe not literally, but there’s definitely a pro-stoning mood in the air as far as publicly condemning and punishing Bad Guys go. A friend of mine recently started teaching, and one of the first concepts she introduced to her students was the idea of a restorative justice system, which baffled them. “This is too idealistic,” they pushed back. “Sometimes people do bad things, and we should be able to get rid of them.” It became clear to my friend that the students were failing to imagine that they could ever be the person who does the bad thing. Or rather, it became clear to me — what she walked away with was a more refined thought: that they were failing to contemplate flaws in the system, and believed that all it took was just not having Bad Guys in it for it to work.
This is not an essay about cancel culture, so I won’t go into the ways that our society likes to metaphorically stone Bad Guys as a stopgap measure to avoid fixing deeper problems (I’ve done that already). It is also not an essay on the penal system, because who the fuck cares what I—armed with the power of a journalism BA and a television writing MFA—have to say about that. Instead, what I want to focus on (first) is how a culture of stoning leads us to never ever ever want to accept we are the assholes. “I guess one never realizes how little one wants to be kicked to death until one hears a crowd doing that exact same thing to someone nearby,” goes a quote from one of my favorite short stories, George Saunder’s hilarious Ghoul. That fear of being kicked to death, I’m positing, leads us to constantly seek validation that we are Good Guys.
One of the best books I’ve read in quite a while—so good, in fact, that it made me want to return to the old format of just outright recommending things without all the philosophical bullshit that has taken over this newsletter—is Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer this year, so it’s not like a recommendation from me was absolutely needed). The book is a memoir of Rosen’s friendship with lawyer and disability activist Michael Laudor; Michael is presented (and seems to have been regarded by the people in his life) as a genius, an intellectual Achilles who could take on any issue he deigned to. This engendered a fair amount of envy in Rosen: the book also describes Michael as conceited and not very concerned with other people’s feelings in the face of his mental prowess, but I couldn’t help liking him anyway — after all, is it being conceited if it’s true? (It is). However, much like Achilles, Michael had a vulnerability: in his early twenties, while working a ridiculously remunerative finance job, he saw the office’s front desk receptionist reach out to him with monstrous claws and bloody fangs. He eventually quit the job and went back to his childhood home, but things did not get better. Michael, who is Jewish, eventually became convinced his parents were surgically altered Nazis who had murdered his real family and were posing as them in a plot to kill him.
Thus began Laudor’s long and painful journey with paranoid schizophrenia, a journey that happened in a system that Rosen alternatively criticizes as too draconian and not draconian enough — the book can very much function as a treatise on the history and state of mental illness health care, a subject on which I feel woefully underqualified to have an opinion (see my degrees above), so I won’t comment. Suffice it to say that eventually, with the help of his family and community, Michael not only reentered society but managed to graduate from Yale Law School, a feat that was celebrated in a splashy New York Times profile. His story inspired a community that had hitherto been not only underrepresented but outright vilified; the term “psycho,” which I used earlier as a kind of Jungian archetype, is after all the title of a very famous movie with a very famous scene in which a mentally ill man stabs a woman to death while she takes a shower. Laudor served as a positive example; he became an advocate often sought by the press on the issue of mental health, and the Times profile secured him not just a six-figure advance for a memoir, but also a millionaire deal with Hollywood producer Ron Howard, who attached Leonardo DiCaprio (and then, when scheduling got in the way, Bradd Pitt) to play Laudor in a movie called Laws of Madness.
That, combined with Michael finding a loving partner, Caroline Costello, with whom he moved to a house in Westchester, could’ve been the end (or at least the climax) of a beautiful journey, one which would have been immortalized in ink and celluloid. But life kept going. Michael struggled to write his memoir and became increasingly upset at the prospect of the movie coming out first and Hollywood putting out the definitive version of his story. He fell into a depression; he might have (sources disagree) stopped taking his medication. His social circle started worrying: should they do something? But then again, this was the same Michael who had graduated from Yale Law School. Surely he could handle fame?
Then, on June 17, 1998, he stabbed a then-pregnant Caroline to death, convinced she was a “wind-up doll” who, because she insisted he should seek medical help, was in fact trying to destroy him (Laudor had associated psychiatric commitment with plots to imprison or kill him in the past). He was arrested not long after, still in doubt over whether he had killed his girlfriend or a “nonperson.” Westchester district attorney Jeanine Pirro (whom I had already met while watching The Jinx) charged him with second-degree murder, but Laudor did not stand trial; he was found “not guilty by reason of mental defect” (more commonly known as the “insanity defense.”) Pirro had tried to avoid this by bringing in Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who had found both John Hinckley and Jeffrey Dahmer legally sane — but even Dietz agreed that Michael did not think he was killing Caroline, but rather a non-human imposter.
The lack of a clear locus of responsibility makes the murder hard to process. Who’s to blame for Caroline’s death? Michael? His friends and family? Hollywood? Yale? And just as confounding: what are we to make of this fallen mental illness hero and the cause he defended?
Society reacted pretty much as expected. The New York Post called him “PSYCHO” (there is that word again) on its cover, following it up with: “Twisted genius charged with savage slaying of pregnant fiancee.” According to Wikipedia, “Laudor’s movie and book deals were canceled, with Ron Howard going on to make A Beautiful Mind in 2001 about schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, whose story was deemed more palatable for audiences.” And then, in a terrible aside, the article notes: “A Beautiful Mind went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.” More palatable for audiences indeed.
I know that bringing up Michael’s example could seem like me saying that his schizophrenia made him a Bad Guy, which is of course not what I believe (in case that wasn’t clear). But he did grow up in a world in which people with mental illness were deemed murderous “psychos.” Is it any wonder that, when he got a spotlight, he used it to try and disabuse others of that notion? That he pushed so hard against the idea that people like him were dangerous? In an article for The Atlantic (adapted from his book), Rosen notes that:
Two years before Michael killed Carrie [as loved ones called Caroline], a Times article had quoted him, identified as a legal scholar with a history of schizophrenia, expressing outrage that a medical student—who had stopped taking medication for his bipolar disorder and was alarming psychiatrists and fellow students with what they considered violent and threatening behavior—had “lost five weeks of his life” to forced hospitalization. The article was called “Medical Student Forced Into a Hospital Netherworld,” but who among Michael’s friends would not wish now that the same had happened to him, if five weeks could have helped return him to the treatment he needed, saved Carrie’s life, and prevented Michael’s destruction?
One of the things that drew me to Michael as I read the book was seeing him and the people around him try to navigate the interplay between his many selves: the “psycho” he wanted to prove that he was not, the genius he was lauded as, the advocate he had become. I saw him as someone who became trapped in the story of himself, someone who was so skilled at communicating that story that he assuaged concerns (mainly, that his disease, if untreated, could put him and others in danger) that should not have been assuaged.
I’m under no illusion that I didn’t project onto his story. As I become more of a public figure myself, especially as an advocate, I feel the pull of totalitarian narratives with heroes and villains — especially in a country in which the only take on immigration that currently seems to appeal to all voters is “no.” “I am the avatar of my community,” my pride tells me. “I stand for something bigger than myself.” I push these thoughts away and try to remain humble, focused on the work… but I wonder if they’re seeping in, hiding somewhere deeper. Michael’s story, grounded in his ability to overcome, might have made others think he couldn’t possibly struggle with his illness; his fierce defense of his community made any discussions of his own capacity for destruction distasteful, if not bigoted. What might my “Patron Saint of Immigrants” status (as I jokingly call myself to friends) shield me from?
Where might I, convinced of being a Good Guy, end up going bad?
“Hasan Minhaj Breaks Bad,” announced the headline of the Vulture review of the comedian’s latest special, Off With His Head, which was released a few weeks ago.
Initially, I scrolled past the article in my news reader, as I don’t really know Minhaj’s work — or care. My opinion of him for the most part was informed by a tiny quote I read a long time ago about how he thought that the Netflix show Bodyguard was Islamophobic. It was 2018, and comedy, shrouded in the mantle of #Resistance, had decided to pursue not laughter but a term I learned on the Hulu sitcom Difficult People, “clapter.” Although that series didn’t create it, it did perfectly illustrate it by having Billy Eichner’s character be told that a good way to warm up the audience of the late-night show he works at was to give them prompts such as “How many of you here hate AIDS?” Minhaj’s accusation of Islamophobia towards Bodyguard was delivered as a joke, but it’s notable that it’s not received with laughter, but with—you guessed—clapping. So, based on just one joke from Patriot Act, which I didn’t watch, I wrote Minhaj off. Regardless of whether he had a point or not, all I took away was: “Just another clapter guy.”
Then, many years later, came the infamous New Yorker exposé by Clare Malone that accused Minhaj of fabricating stories for his standup, making up incidents of racism and Islamophobia that he did not, in fact, live through — while defending them as being grounded in “emotional truths.” I lapped that shit up. It confirmed everything I thought about him: that he was a fake social justice warrior, purportedly fighting the system while benefitting from it, in a classic case of elite capture. And so, my suspicions confirmed, I shelved the tiny file I had of Minhaj away… until that Vulture headline popped up in my Feedly last month.
I scrolled past, then stopped, then scrolled back. “Hasan Minhaj breaks bad?” What did that mean? Could he be calling himself out, coming clean? The past few years have been littered with comedians who fell from grace and whose responses to these falls I’ve deemed unsatisfactory. Could Minhaj be doing something different? The Vulture review suggested as much — but reading it, I realized I simply did not have enough information to understand it. It was the first time it dawned on me that my reception of the New Yorker exposé was based on nothing but one (01) joke; that I had not seen either of the comedy specials at the center of the article, and that I had definitely skipped Minhaj’s own response to it. So I decided to go on a Hasan Minhaj deep dive and watch his first two specials (Homecoming King and The King’s Jester), then re-read Malone’s article, then watch the Minhaj response, and THEN watch Off With His Head.
Why? Because I am a loser no longer taking French classes and need hobbies.
Where do I stand, on the other side of that journey? Am I still firm in my convictions, or have I become a Minhaj apologist? Neither, really. I just feel like I have a more nuanced understanding of the man. I found him to be, despite his weakness for clapter, a talented comedian. While his first two specials annoyed me with moments in which he addressed the camera directly or relied too much on news clips and quotes to lend verisimilitude to his jokes (the very thing that would get him in trouble later), I also genuinely laughed several times. The Malone exposé, on a re-read, came off thinner than the first time, trying to make points that sometimes were not supported by the facts offered. Minhaj’s response, though cringely sandwiched between mentions of October 7 and the invasion of Gaza, showed what I thought were some worrying lapses in judgment on the part of Malone and the magazine’s fact-checking team — but also didn’t disprove the main claims the article made.
The person who changed the most after that self-given assignment, though, was me. It became clear I had suffered from confirmation bias: I made up my mind quickly about Minhaj, and was thereafter predisposed to receive information that validated my opinion. One of the narratives I have about myself is that I’m a critical thinker, someone who hears all sides before making up his mind — now it seems that’s not always the case. My brain is against me: a recent article for the New Yorker, titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” talks about research that suggests that “people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.” My idea of myself as a critical thinker prevented me from seeing myself as someone who gets a high from being right.
That social media has amplified this phenomenon is not news; Minhaj himself tackled it in a bit in his second (pre-scandal) special, in which talks about how calling out tyrants across the world got him addicted to the validation he received online. What got him to stop, he says, was getting a threatening letter with powder, which he accidentally spilled on his daughter, having to rush her to the hospital for what thankfully turned out to be a false alarm. His wife got so angry at him for putting them in danger that she threatened to leave him, leading him to realize how his search for clout had made him selfish. He hung up the cape and stopped going after evildoers. Except… this is one of the things that turned out not to have happened. There was no medical emergency; after the New Yorker exposé came out, he explained he did open a letter with powder and his daughter was nearby, but he did not spill it on her or rush her to the hospital. But that’s a more boring story, so he amped it up. In the same special in which he called himself out for seeking virtual validation, he tweaked the facts so that they’d get him a bigger laugh in the room.
It is, arguably, his job to do this: he’s an entertainer, and he needs to entertain. But in an online world that has so highly prioritized self-branding (a coworker of mine once called social media “The People Magazine of randos”), entertainment often goes hand in hand with relatability, vulnerability, and other ilities that lead us to construct the world anew in an algorithmically-optimized image — one that can garner us the most likes, the highest dose of dopamine.
It’s not just the fear of being stoned: being seen as a Good Guy literally feels good.
I recently read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; it gets a tiny mention in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous that I always gloss over. Working with a sponsee the other day and reading that passage again, I realized that, despite Jekyll being a classic, I had no idea what it’s about other than “man turns into monster.” Actually, it’s way more interesting than that.
A member of Victorian high society, Dr. Jekyll, is embarrassed about what he calls his “pleasures” (it’s never made explicit what they are, but the book hints at sexual stuff); he says they would not be a big deal in others, “but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.” So he creates a potion that turns him into someone else (Mr. Hyde) whenever he wants to enjoy these pleasures, reasoning:
If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
You can imagine how the experiment goes, so I won’t get into it — all I wanted to bring up is the Doctor’s own admission that his desire to partition himself stemmed less from what he wanted to do than from his shame at wanting to do it. What could things have looked like if his narrative of himself wasn’t so rigid? What if he was not so afraid of being The Bad Guy, or so convinced he was a Good one?
To Dr. Jekyll, and everyone else who needs to hear it: IT’S OKAY TO BE THE ASSHOLE.
It’s okay to be imperfect. It’s okay to have made mistakes. It’s okay to have caused harm. We are still alive, which means we get to make things right. A lot of fellows in my 12-step program note the phrasing of the 10th step: “We continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” “When we were wrong,” not “if we were wrong.” It’s impossible not to be the asshole. We can try to avoid it, of course, but it’s going to happen, and we might as well promptly admit it.
Of course, as Dr. Jekyll exemplifies, the fear is often less about being the asshole and more about being seen as the asshole, like the person who cuts in front of you in traffic but does it veeery slowly — either don’t cut me off or just GO FOR IT! If fear of what people will think of us doesn’t lead us to behave better, it curdles into selfishness and self-centeredness. I wonder if there’s an opposite of confirmation bias; if just as we get a rush of dopamine from having our views confirmed, we get a rush of cortisol from being challenged — which makes the idea of getting honked at equally as bad as being stuck behind a double-parked car, even though one has real consequences (wasting time) and the other is just an audible form of judgment.
I lived up to my promise from last time and read another classic, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In its dystopian society, feeling happy is such an important mandate that people are in a permanent state of distraction and pleasure, going from entertainment to entertainment, sexual encounter to sexual encounter, and constantly doing a drug called somma, which puts them in a state of bliss (which they call “a holiday.”) The idea of being uncomfortable is basically forbidden. I wish it resonated less with today’s world, in which every single free moment is filled with a screen, and where “words are violence” — the mere mention of things we don’t agree with provoking tension that is deemed unacceptable.
I wish we were more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Maybe that would lead us less to create potions that partition the self (story idea: a modern Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which Mr. Hyde is a finsta account that gains sentience and goes rogue) and more to address the things that lead others to judge us in the first place.
So, what do we do? Are we forever bound to hormonal rush cycles that keep us trapped in the stories we have about ourselves, our only aid being digital pacifiers for the anxiety of being Bad (or at least not Good enough)?
I don’t think so. At a 12-step meeting the other day, we read from a book that encouraged us to contemplate “the mystery of the self” — the idea that we don’t really know who we are or what we can achieve. I think it’s fair to say I’ve been contemplating that mystery a lot, but I think it’s also fair to say that I don’t really believe that I or others are unknowable — or that our selves stretch into infinity, into anything we set our minds to. The stories we have about ourselves, in my opinion, are not (completely) unmoored from reality; sometimes there’s evidence to support them. I just don’t think that evidence is enough to turn those stories into hard fact. I believe we are something, that there is a Platonic ideal of each of us somewhere on a celestial shelf; we just don’t get access to the whole thing, only parts — like the story of the blind men and the elephant (here sourced from Wikipedia):
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable.” So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake.” For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, “is a wall.” Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.
Like the three Amys from Gone Girl, each piece was true, but none of them were the whole truth. And I do believe there is a whole truth — my faith tells me that God does know me perfectly and, more importantly, that He has very little patience for my stories about myself, which tend to get in the way of His plans. Saint Peter (né Simon), upon first encountering Jesus and witnessing a miracle, cried out “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man;” Jesus not only did not depart but made Peter the head of His church. I don’t think that’s what’s in store for me (though you never know… the Pope is already called Francis, it would be an easy transition), but the point is: I do not know who I am. I do not know who I’ll be in the future. I know so little—fragments of stories I have created or collected about me—as to know basically nothing.
All I know is that I have to do my best to be a Good Guy while acknowledging that doesn’t mean I can’t, and often will, break bad — and when I do, I need to take inventory and promptly admit it.
That should keep me plenty busy for the rest of my life.
Special thanks to Hope Chávez for reading this one (there were many drafts) and giving me thoughtful feedback!
Shameless self-promotion
As the Patron Saint of Immigrants, I’m part of two residencies this season:
The Garden State New Play Festival with my play Best Foreign, which focuses on an Argentinian filmmaker fresh off a Best International Feature Oscar win who’s being haunted by his narrative choices;
The Civilians’ R&D Cohort with a new project, USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division, a spoof of police procedurals that follows a division of the American government tasked with giving immigrants recurring nightmares about deportation to keep them compliant with the system.