Jennifer Horgan: There are accidental assholes, and pure assholes. Which one are you?
Plenty of pure assholes exist in the news, certainly: the recently arrested Andrew Tate is one example. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
As I see it, there are only two types of people in the world: accidental assholes and pure assholes. You are either one or the other. That’s it.
Most people are accidental assholes. You know what I mean, generally nice people who will engage in accidental asshole behaviour, at one time or another. Yes, I have been one. Rest assured, you will have been one too.
That guy I endured on a Kerry beach last weekend — now, he was the perfect example of an accidental asshole.
He had a D4 accent, bless him. Is there any worse accent in the world? Honestly, give me a snooty South African any day. Dublin 4. It’s where likeability goes to die, lost in their jumble of local organic markets, almond-milk brews and dry robes. Theirs is an intolerable, self-satisfied nasal whinge.
Anyone leaving the D4 area during the summer months to join the rest of Ireland needs to be hyper-aware of themselves. Whisper, people. Know that, carried on a certain wind, your accent ranks lower than even that of the most obnoxious American.
Nobody asked the D4 guy to pipe down, mind. Of course we didn’t. The poor guy was nothing more than an accidental asshole — someone who behaves like an asshole only sometimes, and out of an absence of self-awareness.
The guy didn’t know. He genuinely had no clue. Such accidental assholes are everywhere. They’re most of us.
No, the poor fella genuinely had no idea how intolerable his accent was to our Munster ears, and so he carried on discussing his recent run and the apps he was using to ‘smash’ his previous records. I swear to God I thought I heard someone call him Sneachta… Anyway, the entire, otherwise quiet and unassuming, beach loathed the bones of him, but quietly, with respect for his ignorance.
Sadly, accidental asshole behaviour is on the rise across Ireland, in all eircodes, because technology is fantastic at one thing above all other things: it obliterates self-awareness — our main defence against being an accidental asshole.
A few days before encountering Sneachta on the beach, I waited for a bus to Caherciveen at Killarney station. The sun was belting down. I wasn't feeling great after a dodgy, over-priced sandwich, when an elderly man approached on unsteady legs to ask the time.
He was clearly in need of a seat. I was also standing so there was little I could do to help him, but there were two younguns on the bench, limbs outstretched and agile.
They were physically present, I should say. The rest of each one of them, head, heart and hand, was fully absorbed in their phones. They didn’t see the poor man struggling. They didn’t get up to offer him their seats. They were accidental assholes. Assholes through an absence of self-awareness brought about by technology. I have done it myself – more than once I’m sure.
The danger with accidental asshole behaviour is that if it happens often enough it can develop into pure asshole behaviour. Pure asshole behaviour is not about a lack of awareness. It is a blatant disregard for other humans.
Last week, I got into a taxi to bring some takeaway home to my son. The driver brazenly had two full-blown conversations on his hand-held phone while driving. Once again, technology was at the root of it.
I could tell from the conversations that he was an accidental rather than a pure asshole. One call was to check in on his elderly mum. Another was to ask a nephew along to a gathering because he’d missed the last one.
Maybe I wouldn’t have said anything to him but when he joked about the smell of my food I went at him full steam ahead, pointing out that it’s actually illegal to hold a phone and drive at the same time.
To be fair to the man, he took it incredibly well. “Do you know what,” he confessed, “I wasn’t even aware I was doing it. It’s just my memory is so bad, and I have all these jobs I know I have to do in my head. Sure, I do them when I think of them or they’ll be gone.“
I told him I understood perfectly but explained that I’m a nervous passenger. The man could not have been nicer or kinder. An accidental asshole if ever I came across one. A nice person doing an asshole thing through an absence of awareness.
I like to think I caught him and brought him back from the edge. Because if annoying people like me don’t point out accidental asshole behaviour, it can go beyond the accidental and tip into pure asshole behaviour territory. This is when asshole behaviour becomes so commonplace it’s customary.
Let me give you another example here — again it’s road-related. Has anyone else noticed that drivers have stopped waving thanks to one another? One driver might go out of their way to wait, hang back, or even manoeuvre into a scratchy ditch, and the other driver just whizzes past. This is pure asshole behaviour. Plain and simple.
It happens off road too. It is pure asshole behaviour to not thank someone for stepping aside or holding a door open. I don’t care what gender you are. If someone shows you a kindness, inconveniencing themselves for your sake, you say, “Thank You”.
It’s sad to see this pure asshole behaviour becoming customary. I like to shout “You’re welcome” into the silence. It achieves little but makes me feel a little bit better to acknowledge that I’m still signed up to an eroded social contract.
There is a good ending to all this categorisation of assholes by the way. You can be a very nice person and simply engage, every so often in accidental or even pure asshole behaviour. It is extremely rare that one meets a pure asshole — extremely rare.
Plenty of them exist in the news, certainly: the recently arrested Tate brothers; the orange-faced ghoul who refused to leave the World Cup award ceremony stage; the dullard across the water attacking immigrants, yes, all pure assholes.
But in the real, everyday world they are genuinely rare. I don’t think I know any pure assholes in my personal life. I have come across an average of one in every workplace. I make it my mission to avoid them.
But the point I really want to make is that we all need to accept our susceptibility to being an asshole. We need to move through the world with an understanding that we are capable of it at all times. We need to look at accidental assholes with kindness and understanding too. Self-awareness should be prized. And beware the people going around believing they are simply good people.
Because remember, there are only two types of people in the world: accidental assholes and pure assholes. The question is, dear reader — which one are you?
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