The Easy, Tempting Steps People Take in Becoming Jerks

Apparently, it’s easy and, I dare say, tempting to become a jerk if one can get away with it. Jerks get to jerk people out of their way and into their subservience. They get to jerk people around sado-narcissistically for a self-satisfying sense of superiority.

Here, I’ll explore the steps by which one descends into jerkdom. To do so, I’ll draw parallels to how we learn any complex system of habits—for example, language acquisition.

Children start by learning one-to-one, word-to-object codings. For example, the word “rabbit” codes for a kind of animal. Young children get fluent in a vocabulary of such one-to-one codings.

At some point, a child realizes that there’s a relationship not just between words and objects but between words and words. That’s when they start using simple sentences. Then they learn the do’s and don’ts of grammar, discovering what combinations work and don’t.

In his book on the evolution of language, neuroscientist Terrence Deacon illustrates the process. The first step is learning word-to-object relationships. The second is learning what works for combining them grammatically. The final step is fluency.

Source: Created by Terrence Deacon. Modified with permission by author.

Deacon argues that grammar constrains word relationships for efficient reference, for example, “Tim won. He caught the biggest fish”, with “he” near “Tim” so we know who “he” refers to.

We formalize such relationships with rules of grammar. According to linguist Noam Chomsky, the grammar code is too complicated for children to learn so it must exist in a “universal grammar module" in the brain that evolved by accident and contains the universal grammar code that can be applied to any languages. Just slot in the word-object terms and you can generate any sentence.

To Deacon, Chomsky gets it exactly backwards. Sure, toddlers can’t and don’t learn a formal grammar rule book. Instead, children intuit grammar by trial and error, success and failure at getting their messages across. The formal rules of grammar come later if at all, perhaps in elementary school or when learning a foreign language. Once one learns the formal rules it can make it easier to learn other languages or be a linguist, but that’s not how people learn natural language.

What does any of this have to do with how people become jerks? It has to do with the relationship between rules and intuition, formal codes and fluency.

Jerks act like they have a universal moral codebook in their heads, the moral equivalent of Chomsky’s “universal grammar module”. Jerks pose as the judges entitled to adjudicate all cases. At the same time, they’re profoundly impulsive and capricious in their own actions.

They thus alternate between two postures of rhetorical authority, formalism and fluency. In lecturing others on how to act, they lean on the authority of formalisms. Still, they act with fluent impulsive confidence, as if they no longer need to wonder whether they live by their own rules. Thus, they’re prude-punks. One minute they’re shaming you for not following the rules. The next minute they’re ridiculing you for trying to get them to follow the rules.

What makes them feel entitled to such arrogance? Often, it’s a “revelation,” another term for “woke.” Revelation is an imagined moment of sudden insight, the whole big-picture moral code revealed and imparted to them, like taking the proverbial “red pill” from the movie The Matrix.

Jerks feel as if they’ve absorbed the whole truth with such a wallop that they’ve internalized it and can now trust their impulsive fluidity, on the false assumption that the rules are guiding them. That’s what frees them to jerk people into conforming to Their Laws without having to live by them. It’s license to recklessness, license to ticket others for not following the rules. Jerks become like renegade robocops on impulsive autopilot, ticketing others for their violation of the moral code.

The difference between revelation and language-learning is what they’ve learned. But unlike with language learning, they’ve not learned a set of consistent rules.

There are lone jerks whose revelation is nothing more than self-deification. They devote themselves to an imaginary idealized self-image and, thus split, become the prude disciple who defends the God they pretend to be.

Many jerks—cultists, for example—simply find a brand and become hypocritical fundamentalists about it. They “saw the light” by discovering some cult leader or ideology. Their discovery packed such a wallop that it installed in them some universal moral module, the grammar of right and wrong.

Now that they’re religious fundamentalist, MAGA, leftist woke, or any other popular locally credible brand, they can do whatever they want and they can use any rule in their imaginary rule book to justify it.

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Unlike language grammar, their brand isn’t consistent. For example, history demonstrates again and again that, though touted as universal moral formulas, sacred texts, cult leaders, and grand ideologies are interpreted more like a catalogs of rationalizations for justifying whatever actions one needs or wants. A jerk can always find some rule in their inconsistent imaginary codebook that rationalizes constraining you and liberating them.

Morality is more complicated than that. We’d like there to be a moral code, especially one created in Our Image, one that confers on us special status as the priest, humbled before the code and entitled to lord it over others, but that’s not how morality works. It’s more complicated and situation-dependent.

Then again, people often make life much harder than it has to be by pretending it's easier than it can be.

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