Meanness: Philosophical reflections

Meanness: Topic No. 92 that philosophers and ethicists never seem to talk about.

Meanness seems to me to be a pretty common occurrence. It forms part of the social backdrop in which we all live, play and work. Most of us, I think, can think of discrete examples of mean behaviour we have witnessed in the not-too-distant past, and many of us would know someone we think of as mean.

Yet meanness has not been subject to much philosophical attention. Out of curiosity, I recently searched a few academic and philosophy databases for works on meanness. Even in the context of psychology there was surprisingly little—and most of it about school-age children. In terms of philosophical or ethical analysis, there was almost nothing. This seems to me to be startling—surely meanness, as much as selfishness, is one of the key drivers of human misery in the modern world. Perhaps it is more visible when performed to and by schoolchildren, but it is hardly an exclusive concern of that age-group.

Defining meanness

What do I mean by meanness? Meanness is not simply selfishness or callousness. The callous person is amoral: they are someone who is willing to do whatever it takes to secure their desired ends: power, money, influence and so on. But the harm the callous person inflicts is not performed for its own sake, as an end in itself. It is done only instrumentally, as a means to some other, distinct value. The mean person, however, performs the harm for its own sake, and not for any further good. He wants to inflict harm, to drag another person down, to wreck her self-belief and undermine her self-esteem. Meanness, then, is low-grade cruelty. Meanness is cruelty for people without a work ethic.

Meanness, so defined, is everywhere. I submit that it motivates harassment in the workplace, bullying online, vitriol in the twittersphere, spousal abuse in relationships, point-scoring in conversations, road rage and verbal attacks on random strangers in public places. To be sure, all these actions can happen for motivations distinct from meanness. But very often, I think, they are a result of a naked will to harm for its own sake.

Why are people mean? Meanness as will to power

Why are people mean? This seems to me a much more perplexing question than the more general one of, ‘why are people selfish?’ People are selfish because they don’t accept any moral constraints on getting what they want (or maybe they think they have valid reasons to resist applying morality in this instance). Selfish people simply see what they want and they go for it. But this is not meanness. Meanness is not amoral but immoral. Meanness involves enjoying inflicting harm for its own sake—not merely as an instrument to some further, independent wish. As such, it is not only different to selfishness, but can often conflict with the narrow pursuit of one’s other desires. Mean people often undermine their own self-interest when they are mean. Instead of facilitating relationships that might prove massively beneficial for their future, mean people go around unnecessarily making enemies. Soundlessly, invisibly, mean people are cut off from future job opportunities, helpful associations, fun events, positions of authority, wonderful friendships and rewarding relationships, and all because they couldn’t resist the temptation to knock someone down a peg.

But this very fact makes meanness perplexing. If it isn’t performed on the basis of self-interested prudence, then, why are so many of us mean, at least on the odd occasion? To be honest I’m not really sure of the answer here—but here’s one thought. Perhaps meanness is an expression of what Nietzsche called the will to power—the wish to feel and know that one is powerful.  Meanness gives the mean person the thrill of mattering in the world, of being an object of others’ attentions, of having an impact on what others are doing and feeling. It is an action one can perform where one can see the immediate effect one has on the world. A mean action makes a difference, it is a way the world is changed by one’s actions, it is an achievement (albeit one easy to accomplish). If that is right, meanness is a strategy against insignificance; it is a prop for an ego that needs to see its will impact upon the world.

Perhaps we can go further, and speculate on a deeper socio-biological link between meanness and the feeling of power. It is not hard to imagine that, once upon a time, meanness was an accurate indicator of physical, social and political power. Living in smaller communities, if you inflict abuse on another person, someone who is actually physically present and who knows who you are, you demonstrate that they do not have the power to stop you. You show that the victim does not have the power or courage to hit back—to requite, as Nietzsche would put it. Only the powerful and the brave (or, at least, those heedless of the risks of physical or social battle) can be gratuitously mean. If the weak person attempts meanness, he will suffer retribution; he will be put back in his place, through social or physical means. Succeeding in a mean action demonstrates that others do not have that power over you. It impresses this sense of power upon the mean person himself, upon the victim who is forced to endure the ill-treatment, and upon third-parties who can be impressed by the power and confidence of the mean person. In small, tight-knit communities where physical proximity and non-anonymity were the rule, meanness really was a demonstration of personal and social power. It showed clearly that one resided at the top of the pecking order.

Sometimes, this link between meanness and genuine power is still in effect in the modern world. I have been in situations where a physically strong person (usually a man), clearly unafraid of the situation collapsing into a contest of brute force, gratuitously abuses people or otherwise picks fights with them. It is an ugly and in many respects scornful show of strength—but it is a show of strength nonetheless.

But in the modern world, everyone can now get away with being mean. You can abuse or harass people online, with various levels of anonymity, and walk away unscathed. In such situations it is possible to feel the thrill of the genuinely strong person, without actually possessing their power. The anonymity of the internet or the city street lets any one of us feel what it is like to push someone’s buttons knowing they have no capacity to retaliate. It provides us with a feeling of power that was hitherto only possible for the tribal chief, the feudal lord, the aristocratic princess. It lets us pretend for a moment that we are at the top of the pecking order, carelessly exacting our will on those beneath us as we please. Just because we can.

Racism and sexism as organized meanness

If we take meanness seriously as a real and abiding fact of human behaviour, then it might change the way we think about other vices.

So here’s a contentious thought: maybe we don’t—as a world, as a country, as a culture—have a problem with racism and sexism. Maybe at base we really have a problem with meanness.

Sometimes social commentators seem to speak as if racists are otherwise decent, reasonable folk who—if only they could only be disabused of their irrational notions about racial difference—would thereafter be good and worthy citizens. On this view, the problem is fundamentally one about their views and values on race in particular, and not a more general one about their moral psychology.

I accept that there are probably some people who are like this—it’s not hard to imagine an otherwise good-hearted person who grew up in a culture where every child is taught that racial differences are morally relevant, or who lives in a world where all the people with a particular skin colour are poor and uneducated, and who mistakenly concludes that racial difference correlates with differences of character or rationality. But in my own world of twenty-first century Australia, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever actually met anyone like that. Pretty much every person I’ve ever met who espoused genuinely racist or sexist views was not otherwise a nice person. Their character flaws were by no means limited to their particular views on discrete classes of people. They were mean in a much more unqualified and generic sense.  

This point needs to be distinguished from a person being insensitive to racial or sexual issues. Certainly someone can be a decent person who, through lack of awareness about current society or prior history, or entrenched and institutional structures that permeate inequalities, acts without a proper degree of sensitivity to minorities. Education can fix a decent person who is culturally insensitive—they just need to learn that their behaviour hurts others and to understand why it does so. But such a course of consciousness-raising cannot cure meanness. The mean person wants to hurt others. Showing them the effects of their actions just underscores that they are succeeding.

Now I’m not implying that all instances of racism and sexism are just simple products of meanness—as if mean people just use bigoted attitudes when they interact with others who they can target racially or on the basis of gender or sexuality, and then switch to different types of abuse when they encounter others. This view would assert that bigotry is just window-dressing to the actual motivation, which is just to be mean generically, to anyone who they can get away with it.

Instead, I suspect it is in the nature of meanness to organize itself. Mean people want to be effective in their meanness, and being effective requires being organized. If I really want to hurt someone, to impact upon her wellbeing, then what I want to do is to oppress her. Anonymous random abuse is all very well for the mean person, but such occurrences are all too easy for victims to ignore, or even laugh away. And that ruins the fun. The type of abuse that is impossible to ignore is the abuse that is well-organized and pervasive. If a mean person wakes up in the morning and wants to oppress a tall, healthy, well-educated white male in my culture, I submit it is almost impossible for them to do so. This is because oppression requires coordination; it requires the victim to be aware that wherever they turn, they will encounter this same harassment and abuse. You can use pointless cruelty to ruin the day of this white male, but that won’t contribute to ruining his life unless you (the mean person) can rely on other mean people ruining his tomorrows as well. For this reason, salient, visible features are crucial—in an anonymous world the mean person will want to target specific features like gender, ethnicity and visible religiousness (even shortness or slowness) in the expectation that his other comrades-in-meanness can do the same in future, and have done the same in the past.

Now in a non-anonymous community, the mean person can pick and communicate his victims more deliberately. The bullying gang therefore picks a particular target and works on them, rather than dissipating their cruelty randomly and ineffectively. But in an anonymous context, if a mean person wants to coordinate their efforts with other mean people they don’t actually know personally, then salient feature like race, sex, ethnicity or visible religion are helpful markers to direct their abuse.

If this is right, then it means that a lot of what looks like racism or sexism may not be actually based upon a belief that the category of victimized people is inferior, or a genuine value-commitment that they are hated. Rather, there is simply a free-floating meanness—a will to feel the power of abusing, harming and oppressing others (any others)—that converges on salient targets.

Even if this was the full story on racism and sexism (which it isn't), it wouldn’t mean that as a society it isn’t worth making the effort to rid the world of such bigotries. It is worth getting rid of these behaviours precisely for the reason that the mean person gravitates towards them. If racist and sexist behaviours were socially expunged, then the mean person would be robbed of that ability to organize their attacks that allowed them to get together collectively to oppress.

But an awareness of meanness would imply that dealing with racism and sexism may not be getting towards the moral root of the matter, which is the underlying desire to be mean. Robbed of an ability to organize targets in an anonymous world, the mean person might just direct their attention to other specific targets they know personally. They will vent their will to power on partners, spouses, children and employees.

Where to from here?

If some of what I have been saying here is along the right track, then why don’t we see a more concerted effort to focus on and rid the world of meanness? Why do we focus instead on particular, discrete manifestations on it—racism, sexism, bullying-at-school, trolling online, harassment at work, spousal abuse, vitriol on twitter? Is it because these more specified problems appear more manageable? Or is it because we don’t have the first idea why people are mean, or how to rid them of the vice?

If a person is simply selfish then it seems to me they are (morally speaking) at least manageable. One can speak in a Hobbesian spirit about the many benefits (security, material prosperity, social approval etc) that arise from moral action. Even more, one can show the person a picture of a world where many of their self-centred desires are met, even though that person accepts moral constraints. It is possible for us all to enjoy prosperity, after all. One person’s pursuit of happiness need not undermine the similar pursuits of others, and to accept moral constraints is not to renounce altogether one’s self-interested ambitions. That, in a nutshell, is why human rights have proven so successful as a moral idea.

But we cannot engage in this way with the mean person. They want to undermine the other person’s happiness, not as a means to something else, but for its own sake. There is no possible world where everyone gets their meanness kicks without everyone also being on the receiving end. This is what makes meanness so frustrating for any social reformer or moral philosopher. There seems to be nothing to work with, nothing that we can build out from towards virtue and duty.

So, in the end, I don’t have any simple answers. Maybe if people lived in a world where they could feel their sense of power in the world in lots of other ways (competitive sports, meaningful employment creating genuinely satisfied customers, direct charity work, relationships that cement their feeling of worthwhileness, artistic and creative pursuits, and so on) then they wouldn’t feel a need for the quick thrill of pushing people’s buttons and upsetting them. The guiding idea here is that the will to power is (as Nietzsche thought) an ineradicable feature of the human character. Since we can’t eradicate it, we need to recognise it and sublimate it—to mould it into a shape where it is no longer socially damaging. 

But this is just one speculation. What I do think, though, is that meanness is real and that it is a powerful source of human misery. If we want to improve the lot of humankind, then we need to think seriously about why people are mean, and what can be done to face this problem.

Zombie Apocalypses, Lasertag and Ethics

But does she count as a person for the purposes of
applying Kant's Categorical Imperative?

How would people behave in the world of a zombie apocalypse, and what, if anything, does it tell us about ordinary morality?

One theory is that we would all fall upon each other, tearing ourselves to pieces in a ‘Lord of the Flies’ type frenzy. Life in the zombie aftermath would be – in the words the Seventeenth Century political theorist Thomas Hobbes used to describe the ‘State of Nature’ – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And this is so not because of the dangers from zombies, but rather because of the dangers presented by other humans in a lawless world.

Is this really what would happen?

A recent post on The Conversation suggests – in a light-hearted fashion – that there is some evidence that it is. The author describes the player-to-player carnage of the videogame DayZ, where players struggle to survive in a post-Zombie-apocalyptic world. The costs and payoffs to players in the game are structured so that rational self-interested players benefit greatly from killing others and stealing their stuff. And that, for the most part, is exactly what the players do. Of course, some stalwart do-gooders can be found – healers of the wasteland – but they are all the more remarkable because of the cutthroat and solitary world they inhabit.

Better hope that Z-Plan is tight.

But it seems to me that all this shows is how warped the DayZ game-mechanics must be. A game that has people avoiding teaming up for survival is unrealistic. (Just to clarify that – a zombie apocalypse is of course altogether realistic. But a world where survival is not improved by being in at least small teams, preferably with cordial relations with other nearby teams, is utterly divorced from the irremovable realities of the human situation.) Some level of decency, trustworthiness and sociability is a core part of rational survival.

Now if we were to take the less fun path, this point could be argued through the theories of the great philosophers since Epicurus in the Greek Hellenistic period, and we could use the philosophies of Rousseau and Hume to refute the grim picture relayed by Hobbes. Similarly, we could make the point in terms of contemporary game theory, arguing that the dog-eat-dog ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ model of human interaction is a misrepresentation of ordinary reality, and that the more sociable ‘stag hunt’ game is a better picture of what is going on.

Instead though, I propose to take the fun path, and to compare the DayZ situation that which arises in zombie lasertag.

Stuck for a gift idea for the person who has it all?
Go with zombie apocalypse erotic romance!

But before we turn to violence; sex.

After all, the normal social motivations that pull people together will be just as relevant post-apocalypse. Indeed, this very day marks the book release of what I suspect is the first ever novel-length erotic romance set in a zombified world: Flesh by Kylie Scott.(No, the zombies themselves aren’t getting it on, so get that mental image out of your heads. Ew. No. It’s about a ménage forming amongst three survivors as they band together against the infected hordes.) And the idea here is a pretty plausible one. People are still going to have the same desires for companionship, love and lust in the new world. Probably more. Heck, you may as well live like there’s no tomorrow when there’s every chance there really is no tomorrow. Indeed, a considerable number of writers have written on this premise; it turns out there is in fact a website for the Romance Writers of the Apocalypse.

And there is a deeper point at issue here. There are basic survival gains in simply having a good time. This is the major problem I have with the TV series The Walking Dead. There’s a point at which grimness becomes pathological. Every character in that show seems just a nudge away from committing suicide. Lighten up people! In order to survive, you need to want to survive. You need something to get you through the day – and that might well be whatever gets you through the night. Ultimately, one of the best survival rules offered in Zombieland is not Rule #1 ‘cardio’, or Rule #2 ‘Double-Tap’, but rather Rule #32: ‘Enjoy the little things’. 

Or, in the case of Flesh, the not-so-little things. And all at the same time. Stag-hunt games indeed.

But to return from sex and zombie erotica to violence and zombie lasertag, last week I was fortunate enough to play in a test-run of the new Laserforce Zombie game.

For those who don’t know much about lasertag, the basic principle is pretty simple. You wear a vest-pack with flashing lights and sensors on it, and it attaches to a gun that shoots a laser. When your shot hits the sensors on the vest-pack of an enemy player, their suit registers that it has been hit, and it ‘goes down’ for a period of time – meaning that their lights go out and their gun won’t work. They can still be shot again, so usually they will have to run away and hide somewhere until their suit reactivates and they can start shooting people again. A central computer keeps track of everyone’s score – basically the amount of times they have shot the enemy and been shot by the enemy.

Social Science Experiments: Lasertag vs. DayZ

That’s the simple story. But most games of lasertag – such as the one I play at Laserforce league – are more complicated. A lot more complicated. In ‘Space Marines 5’ (the game that the international competition is held in) you have limited lives and shots and need to get resupplied by team-members – your ‘Ammo’ and ‘Medic’ – in order to stay in the game and keep fighting. Plus there are nukes, rapid-fire, missiles, ‘generator targets’, power-boosts and more. The goal in that game isn’t merely to outscore your opponents, but to eliminate their team altogether. Kill their medic out of the game, and then remove the other players one by one.

On the last League night, league players were used as the test subjects for Laserforce’s new Zombie game. The game is pretty much how you’d imagine it. Everyone but one player starts as a human ‘survivor’, with flashing red lights on their vest. One player starts as a zombie. The zombie (with flashing green lights) wants to infect the survivors, which it can do by shooting them with a ‘missile’. Using a missile is just like shooting them normally, but it takes a little longer. You have to ‘lock on’ to them with your gun pointed at their vest-sensors, which takes a little over a second. The zombie is also hard to kill. He has to be shot multiple times before he goes down, and it doesn’t take him long to get back up again. Once a survivor is infected, they have 30 seconds to get the ‘cure’, which pops up periodically at one of the in-game targets. If you can’t get the cure in time (and you can only ever use one cure per game), then the infection takes hold. Your lights turn green and you turn on your buddies, trying to infect them.

The game is an ‘individual’ game. That is, the score and player rankings are not built around team victory, but solely on individual performance. Your aim is to win personally, not to play a part in getting your team to victory.

So how did the survivors act in this situation, in order to maximise their own individual score?

Exactly how you would imagine. They teamed up.

Of course they teamed up. It took barely seconds for players to realise that there was safety in numbers. To be found on your own was to be infected. You needed players around you to communicate where the zombies are, to check in every direction the zombies might attack your position, and to create enough firepower to shoot the zombie down before he could infect anyone in your group. As well, the less zombies that were out there on the playfield, the more manageable the task was. Keeping track of and defending against one or two zombies was straightforward. But once you have five or six zombies, coming at you en masse and from different directions, the end is nigh.

In fact, so successful was the teaming up and communication amongst the dozen or so survivors that in the first test game the starting zombie wasn’t even able to infect anyone. Spreading out across the upstairs levels, players gravitated towards vantage points that allowed each group to patrol and defend one of the four routes the zombie could take to get upstairs. Equally, being upstairs allowed each group to keep track of an area of the lower playfield; with good communication every player on the field knew exactly where the zombie was at pretty much every moment of the game.

This might have happened in the second game as well, if some morons hadn’t ruined the important social science experiment by deliberately allowing themselves to be infected just so they could stagger about the playfield, infecting survivors and mumbling, ‘Brains, brains’. (I totally deny any involvement in such silliness.)

There was even enlightened self-sacrifice when it came to the cure. After some frenetic in-game arguments, some players were willing to forego getting the cure themselves, in order to let infected players use it. Better to not have the resource yourself than to have an ally turn into an enemy, and to let the zombies get a foothold in the survivor population.

The point is that a basic level of teamwork is a fundamental part of any real-world scenario. Human beings are in many respects, if not a pack animal, then at least a social animal. Throughout history they survive, or perish, in groups. They cannot see every direction at once. They need time to sleep, recuperate and reload. Their capacity to fight off threats increases in their greater numbers. And their natural specializations can lead to a useful division of labour in groups.  In a word, society pays off.

Thus I conclude that the zombie lasertag social science experiment supports the view that some level of moral behaviour – trust, teamwork and so on – arises amongst self-interested rational actors.

What is the result here for moral theory? Well, some might say that morality is entirely divorced from self-interested rational behaviour. Prudence has nothing to do with genuine respect for others. Others might say morality just is enlightened self-interested rational behaviour. The truth, though, is perhaps somewhere in between, and that the sociable teamwork required by the human condition – both in ordinary life and during zombie apocalypses – sets us on a path to morality proper.

A final observation. One interesting facet of the zombie evening was the question of rules. All the players on the night were Laserforce league players – and the League requires players abide by various rules, such as not chasing fleeing opponents with their lights out and not ‘blind-shooting’ opponents (sticking your gun around corners without looking and shooting). These rules are standardly applied in non-league games as well; while there are no referees in these games, others will chastise you (that is, they will abuse the heck out of you) if you clearly breach these rules. But no-one expected the zombie to follow the rules. Of course zombies chase their prey. The rules cannot apply to them. The ease with which everyone instinctually accepted this departure from the rules that accompany every other game was fascinating.

But then the further question arose as to whether the survivors should be rule-bound to the zombies. How could it be wrong to cheat against the undead, by blindshooting them for instance? They weren’t human; they weren’t really persons anymore.

Rational self-interest may lead us on the path to morality proper. But even morality proper has its limits – and they seem to stop about the time you dig yourself out of that shallow grave and start feasting on people’s brains.

There will be morality amongst humans in the post-apocalyptic world – but it probably won’t extend to the post-human. Sorry.