Why being a prick doesn't pay

Tonight, after a long week of soul searching, I've finally found my bottom-line for why I'm sure I'm right about my work and why most people, today, are just fuckin' pricks.

The bet that the pricks amongst us are making is that future generations will look back and thank them for being such fuckin' pricks because otherwise the world would be "in a right bloody mess," as Monty Python would say.

And here's the bottom line on this one:

Do you really believe that future generations will define the progress of our culture by how "tough" we got with one another?

Really?

Think about that one again.

Really?

There is definitely a pretension in our culture and in liberal democratic cultures, generally, that tough means more than it does. It's the same pride that leads Iran to execute homosexuals and China to kill political protesters.

But, no matter what happens, say, in the next 50 years in those countries...

Do you really believe that any of those cultures or our own will define their progress by all these brutal realities?

Do you really think they could lie to themselves and one another into perpetuity with such ugliness and really ever honestly define it as progress?

No. Obviously not. The only people who believe that bullshit are people who have lost touch with more obvious human realities, so lost are they in their rationalizations for what pricks they are.

And those cultures do not progress. Not for real. The Soviet Union could call whatever they were doing whatever they wanted to, but it was perfectly obvious to anyone who had experienced real progress that theirs was not a progressive society and that became perfectly obvious to Russian citizens once they could see the outside world.

And our society and every society works the same way.

People will only be pricks for so long until it becomes obvious that it's fucking up their lives.

And when they don't face up, the reality of their prickishness follows them until they do.

That's a law of nature, not a law of man.

Do you really believe, knowing what we know about the history of humanity, that future generations will define their progress by what pricks they are?

Give me a fuckin' break. You have to be deluded to think that and keep thinking it despite all of the failure of the last decade.

Eventually, being a prick catches up to you. It just does. It's catching up with America, right now, that's for sure.

The question is not whether America or the world will face this. The question is when.

Do you really think that history will take any other direction?

Go look your mother in the eye and tell her that.

Or better yet, don't, and see what a fuckin' mess you make of your life and probably the lives of everyone you know until you figure out different.

But you can bet comfortably that people get more decent, over time. It's the one guarantee I can make about people. They may be dicks for a time. But they get better over the long haul. You can take that to the bank.

You really think that future generations will define progress by being a prick?

Good fuckin' luck, dick. You're gonna need it.

Love,
Ben