Nice Things that People Do at the Expense of Others

            The funny thing about an ethical/moral/nice act is that it’s supposed to be done for someone else. Otherwise it’s not necessarily selfish, but at the very least selfist (and no, that word doesn’t exist, but it should, if only because of the fact somewhere in between giving your lunch to a homeless person and viciously beating up a small child for his bicycle, there is a huge spectrum of acts that, while not necessarily cruel, certainly aren’t being done for anyone else’s benefit i.e. jerking off, writing a blog). While I am not particularly against selfist acts, or even selfish acts—at a certain point, selflessness begins having an inverse relation with emotional integrity and genuine humanity—what does bother me is selfish/ist acts that come draped in the sanctimonious garb of benevolent selflessness. These acts are selfish in the most insidious and narcissistic of ways. They are born out of a person’s innate desire to see himself as a good person, even if that means making everyone around him feel like shit.

            The most obvious and basic form of this comes in the pursuit of manners and politeness. Now of course, no one likes sitting next to the guy who slurps and smacks his food with a gaping jaw, nor does anyone like being stuck in the elevator with a crust-punk who is at battle with bourgeoisie notions of hygiene. However, some forms of manners are not only completely useless (keeping your elbows off the table), but are also entirely selfish. Case in point. Where I go to college, people are constantly walking in and out of the buildings in between classes. When there is a steady stream of people it only makes sense that as you are walking through the cusp of the doorway you would hold the door for the two or three people directly behind you. But sometimes the situation arises when you look back and see that the next person headed toward the door is maybe fifteen feet behind. You walk through the door, and while you don’t necessarily stop, you hold the door out behind you, moving your feet forward at an increasingly slowed rate, as though your stretching arm were nailed to the door. Literally everyone at my college does this. And yet the moment you do it, the person behind you, who is fully aware that you are in a rush to class, is forced to rush to the door out of social obligation and guilt at holding you up. You do this in spite of the fact that a person with four, presumably functioning, limbs would be more than able to open the door for his or herself. And so you force the person behind you to feel guilty for holding you up and to jostle in a frantic rush to the door, just so that you can feel like a nice, doorholdin’ fella.

            In most situations, the aggression of politeness is like a drive-by shooting. The victim is mowed down in a random, singular occurrence. But occasionally such acts trigger vicious retaliations and a politeness battle ensues. The other day the treaties of armistice were dropped, and I found myself engaged in a politeness battle of vicious proportions. I was sitting outside of one of my lecture halls smoking a cigarette when this kid came up to me

            “Hey man, you mind if I buy a cig off you,” he said holding out a dollar

            “Nah, you can just have it,” I said pulling one out of my pack and handing it out toward him

            “No, really, I insist”

            “Nah, just take it, it’s no big deal”

            Just two guys trying to do the nice thing? That’s what I thought too until I looked up and saw the brief look of guilt and disappointment that flashed across his face. It was subtle and only lasted for a fraction of a second but it was there. It was then that I realized that if I had actually had cared about him, I would have simply accepted his dollar after he insisted, and after it became clear that his self image of non-leeching, self-reliant decency meant far more to him than did the dollar. Similarly, if he had actually cared about me, he would have taken back the dollar after my first refusal, and after it became clear that my self-image of charitable good will meant far more to me than did the dollar. But neither of us really gave a shit about the other person. I ended up winning the politeness battle. I charitably let him keep his dollar, because, well, fuck him.

            All these acts of selfish politeness are really indicative of the larger tendency of pursuing social virtue as opposed to actual decency or kindness. A social virtue is a trait that society, or people in general, look upon kindly. Traits like honesty or self-reliance. There is nothing inherently ethical about acting honestly or self-reliantly, since the true moral essence of an act is found in the consequences it has on others. In the pursuit of honesty, I can tell a bulimic how fat she looks in her dress and induce days of tearful binging; in the pursuit of self-reliance I can put my entire family at risk by cooking meth to pay for my cancer treatment, rather than simply accepting the financial help of friends. Although such traits are not inherently ethical, they acquire the status of social virtues because a strong enough correlation is noticed between the trait itself and ethical action. What happens is that people fail to make a distinction between the two. They pursue the social virtue because it creates the positive self-worth and respect that actual ethical action creates, without any of the responsibilities toward others. A man may behave with chivalry, loyalty and bravery in standing up for his girlfriend when she is insulted by some drunk asshole at the bar, but if he is not taking into account how his actions will effect her—that is, whether they will assuage her pain at being called a bitch or will just make her feel infantilized and embarrassed--, then what is he really concerned about, her or his self-image?