The 60/30/10 Asshole Rule

Let’s say you have a job and you are dealing with a co-worker who is an asshole extraordinaire. Just a miserable piece of shit.

I have a theory about this.

-       60% of the time, that person has a substance abuse problem

-       30% of the time, that person has a mental illness

-       10% of the time, they are actually an asshole

So the thing about this is that 90% of the time, you have no reason to be angry at that person. They can’t help it—they’re sick. You may not like their symptoms, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are dealing with some issues and deserve your sympathy, not scorn. This isn’t a joke—I’m deadly serious about this. If you are at work and you are working with a lying, backstabbing jerkface, that person is probably an alcoholic. Or bipolar. Or both. I worked with a lot of assholes at Lehman Brothers—all alcoholics or addicts. I personally have a mental illness and I was pretty much of an asshole back then. I got treatment, and I am no longer an asshole. Funny how that works.

Sometimes I am fooling around on Twitter late at night, and some troll flames on me. My first assumption is that the person is drunk. One guy once said my wife was ugly as a dog. Probably drunk. Alcohol and social media do not mix. If you look closely, it is pretty easy to pick out the drunk posts, especially on Facebook.

Alcoholics and addicts can be pretty hard to get along with, even if they’re not currently drunk or high. For starters, they lie all the time. They lie about things big and small. Another way of saying this is that they are incredibly full of shit—all the time. Substance abuse gives rise to behavior that evinces a certain kind of psychopathy. And all those studies that say that x% of Wall Street people are psychopaths? They’re just drunks. And that’s not exclusive to the finance industry—there are drunks everywhere, and they leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Many decades ago, we started to view substance abuse disorders as a disease. It is an allergy of the body—some people simply react differently to substances than others. And it is an obsession of the mind. And a disturbance of the spirit. The upshot is that if you have someone who is an alcoholic or addict, you don’t view them as a bad person, you view them as a sick person. And sick people deserve your sympathy—even if they’re fucking you over. I worked for a guy at Lehman who took all the money for himself and left scraps for everyone else. Let’s put it this way—he was not in the 10% of true assholes.

If you’re dealing with someone who you believe to be an asshole, and they’re not actually an asshole, and they fall into the 60% or the 30%, you must be aware of the fact that this is a profoundly unhappy person. You may be wishing for karma to take over—karma has already taken over. But instead of wishing ill of them, you should be wishing for them to get better, to undergo a profound psychological change. You would not wish for a sick person to get sicker. Unfortunately, if this person is your boss, then you are kind of stuck. Patience and tolerance are our code. It is hard to exercise patience and tolerance with an addict or a mentally ill person, and it is important to note that they will not seek help until things get really bad, which means that things will probably get really bad for you in the meantime. This might be the point in time at which you polish up your resume, which is part of a broader theory of mine—it is often better to go around than to go through. You’re not going to be able to work with this person.

The world is full of assholes. The world is also full of alcoholics and drug addicts, and people with mental illnesses, and people who have unresolved trauma. There are a lot of sick people out there, and the thing about social media is that they are pouring out their sickness onto the internet for everyone to read. This is one of the reasons I don’t spend much time on Twitter anymore—drunk people can make you drunk. Crazy people can make you crazy. It is not a psychologically healthy place to be. There is someone I know who retweets every single nice thing that someone says about him on Twitter. Doesn’t take a psychology PhD to get to the bottom of that one. But again, I can choose to be annoyed by this behavior, assuming that this person is an asshole, or I can have sympathy, and operate under the assumption that he falls into the other 90%.

It is worth pointing out that there are some people out there who really are true assholes, either through nature or nurture. There are people out there who take pleasure in hurting people. I think I have only met two in my life, and one of them is a family member. The only possible course of action in these situations is to disengage, get as far away as you possibly can. I can deal with sick people—they’re pretty easy to figure out. I can’t deal with bad people. Some of these people are in prison, but a lot of the people in prison belong in the 60/30 category as well. I have heard stories of people committing all sorts of crimes while drunk or high. In fact, the number of crimes that are committed by people who are stone cold sober is probably pretty low. And as you know, the mentally ill population has shifted from psychiatric institutions to jails. Which brings us back to the idea that there really aren’t that many true assholes out there—even in the criminal justice system.

This all ties in with another general philosophy of mine which is that you should be gentle with people. We’ve all dealt with a lot of shit in our lives—crappy parents, abusive parents, trauma, bullying, random exogenous events—the number of people who had a drama-free, happy childhood is actually pretty small. We are all sick in some way, shape or form. We all have our things. We all have our baggage. And whenever you are observing someone’s behavior, and it confuses you, remember: it makes sense to them. Even the most rational among us have our blind spots.

When dealing with what you presume to be an asshole, the best you can hope for is to be a power of example. If you are a stable, happy person, the asshole might reach out to you one day and ask for help, and then you can be in a position to do good in the world. But remember, alcoholics (and mentally ill people) generally don’t want help. Sick people want to stay sick. I wouldn’t start dropping any hints that someone should go to rehab. All you can do is to be there when the wheels come off and then you can lend a helping hand. Other people did this for me, in 2006, when my life was completely unmanageable, and I have never forgotten it.

It's one of those things that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The world isn’t full of bad people, it’s full of sick people. I call this the 60/30/10 Asshole Rule. If more people understood this rule, the world would be a kinder place.