It's a Prick's Paradise

The landscape is teeming with pricks. They are everywhere. Under every bridge, hunkering in every dark corner, lurking in every back alley.

And with increasing boldness, walking down the street proudly flouting their prickishness.

What do I mean by “prick?”

A prick has one purpose in life. One reason for waking up in the morning. It ain’t love, nor money, nor philanthropy.

Pricks live solely to antagonize.

They are unnecessarily unpleasant, aggressive, hyperbolic, and abrasive. They work in needless alienation like a composer works in pitch and tempo.

They wake up every day and choose mental violence. Step one is figuring out who to resent, often by watching and listening to other pricks. Step two is to incessantly insult, heckle, and humiliate.

It starts as a habit, becomes a routine, and develops into a core identity.

Why?

Who knows. It’s never been clear why pricks exist or from whence they were belched into polite society.

We can surmise via amateur diagnostics they are motivated by anger, grievance, and bitterness. Often, these are manifestations of fear that they’re being secretly scorned, hunted, marginalized, or even replaced.

Pricks are entertained by the mood music of their own niche composers. Those composers work with such scary themes to create memes, conspiracies, and fictional plots with their own lyrical styles and specialized glossaries. These limericks are the backing track of the prick’s daily dance.

Pricks are walking clinical examples of projection. They feel a high degree of internal inadequacy. Insolvency. They’re not sure who or what they are because no one else is present enough in their life to help them define themselves. But they know whatever they are, it’s not very good.

Mommy and/or Daddy didn’t love them enough and/or loved them too much. The world doesn’t see their genius, credit their unique beauty, or fawn at their poetically primal mystique.

This really pisses them off. Someone must pay. Maybe someone who exemplifies everything they lack. Or maybe just someone who they’ve been told is a popular and suitable target. Or maybe just whoever they stumble into.

Modern-day pricks are a special species. They claim to really care about some issue, and explain this is why they are so irritated all the time. Something is wrong and must be fixed. A more lethal national defense. A more honorable Congress. An improved economic reality. Taxation. The institution of marriage. Immigration.

But these people to which I refer are too intelligent to miss two things.

First, that it’s impossible to get anything done by themselves or solely by assembling those who already agree with them. Second, that nothing is achievable when everyone else is pushed away and alienated.

They know if they genuinely care about something, they will need to persuade people. Influence people. Present facts and analysis that can change minds and bolster initiatives.

So they’re really just full of shit. They are just pricks. They’re using a pet issue as a target filter to help them quickly discern who should be attacked. If your whole purpose is to pester people, you don’t want to waste time figuring out who they are. So you apply a sortation device.

If they cared, they’d get past their own feelings and actually discuss the thing they claim to care about in a constructive and solution-oriented manner.

Pricks are too mad to get interested in anything constructive. They stay in an irrational state of mind, which causes reason to bounce off. Whatever does make it through is received as a cynical attempt to beguile them. To try and dissuade them from the inherent moral rightness of their justified anger.

Occasionally, a rational person will manage to spirit a projectile or two of accurately reasonable thought past their defenses. This is the worst thing you can do to a prick. When an undeniable fact hits too close to home, it threatens their worldview. Calls into question their belief system. Makes them doubt, for a fleeting instant, their choice to be a prick.

This uncorks a seismic blast of insecurity the prick works tirelessly to contain, often gritting their teeth until their hair falls out. It also risks them looking too kind and agreeable — a certain path to exclusion and perhaps even active targeting by other pricks.

The bile flows like liquid hot magma, scorching the land and often burning down the prick’s own barn, where they keep their prized stable of jackasses.

Now, to be sure, there have always been pricks. There has always been human insecurity and isolation. Fear and the anger it fosters are both features and bugs of being human, and have always tempted a number of people far left of the behavioral mean.

There have always been men who just want to watch the world burn. Who prefer conflict to conciliation. Violence over peace. Hate over love.

There have always been bosses who cancel Christmas bonuses without warning their employees. They delight in the whimpering and sobbing of heartbroken families who were dumb enough to trust and depend on them.

From time to time, such mean creatures have risen to powerful positions, becoming cult heroes for pricks everywhere.

We live in such a moment now. While pricks have always been around, they’ve become more bold and present these days because it’s fashionable.

The internet has given them a means to connect with fellow pricks, and to bear witness to prickish tactics and techniques which both reinforce their life choices and help them become more effective.

And of course, the presence of pricks in notorious positions where they can normalize and herald prick conduct is the ultimate affirmation. It’s the salve cooling the raw nerve endings exposed in their wounded souls.

Pricks can today look with admiration upon a President of the United States who is everything they hope to become. All they wish to devolve into. When a famous and cherished American entertainer is murdered, the President does not seek to reassure, heal, or commemorate. That’s not what pricks do.

He makes it about himself. He blames the victim for his own demise, opining that it only happened because he committed the sin of disagreement.

And pricks everywhere rejoice. Because humiliating a perceived opponent who is too dead to fight back is in the prick Pantheon.

Powerful pricks surround themselves with other pricks. Like veterans who hate other veterans. Lawyers who hate justice. Cops who love crime. And health officials who are themselves sick and sickening.

This dynamic has pricks running the show. Which means not only is pissing all over everyone the point, but it has the official backing of a citizen owned government. Which means we are represented by pricks, and by extension, all pricks ourselves. Whether we like it or not.

It’s a great time to be a prick. Access to a digital playground teeming with targets and totally unregulated is a prick’s fantasy world made real.

But there’s a problem.

It’s one thing to suggest we don’t need so many Chivalric traditions. That being kind is overrated. Being a menace is underrated. That society has gone so soft it needs a Season of the Prick to restore balance.

But taken too far, this can unravel things that even the most insufferable pricks still need and cherish, whether they are capable of consciously registering it or not. Things like food, water, shelter, and safety.

When pricks become so numerous that it becomes impossible to pursue a constructive discussion on any subject with anyone who doesn’t already agree, we develop a collective action problem.

We cannot address issues. And they don’t go away when we ignore them. They just fester and metastasize until they are strategic threats.

In times past, the per capita rate of pricks has been acceptable. Antagonism has been a feature, but not a dominant one. Disagreement over one thing did not stop people from agreeing on other things, or even on some aspect or element of the thing they disagree upon.

Reagan-era legislators are a great example. Reagan took a hardline approach to certain aspects of governance. Financial deregulation, national security, and curbing drug use were among them.

But even as these positions inspired deep-set divisions over what was best for America, elected officials continued to debate. To look for common ground. To agree on the existence and nature of problems and find compromises on addressing and remediating them. They took action.

The subsequent years gave birth to three ugly babies. Opposition research, 24-hour unregulated propaganda disguised as factual news, and the rise of dark money in politics.

These ugly babies grew into behemoth pricks.

They have not only created an environment more welcome to pricks, but demonstrated that being a prick can be materially profitable. Social media gave them a stomping ground and a place to gather their hordes. They now hold court every minute of every hour. Their core intent is to antagonize. Their main impact is the obstruction of consensus or affinity of any kind, on even the simplest of issues.

We should all be able to agree homicide is wrong, no matter who does it. But we don’t all agree.

We should all be able to agree that war crimes are crimes, and therefore wrong. But we don’t.

It should not be controversial to suggest that a President should not call for the executions of political rivals when they disagree with him. But that too escapes consensus.

Prick population growth is crowding out the reasonable. The constructive. The solution-oriented. The tolerant.

This leaves no one to actually do shit. And shit needs done.

Pricks can’t solve problems. They won’t even acknowledge a problem if that acknowledgement construes them as too aligned with non-pricks. They’re happy to let things stay broken. The negativity is fun for them. The more it annoys and demoralizes everyone else, the better. Taunting is the point.

But too many problems unsolved leads to overlapping and interrelated cycles of dysfunction. At some point, sludge gets thick and deep enough to trap whole communities in cul-de-sacs where nothing works.

Ambulances don’t respond when called.
Crimes don’t get investigated, so criminals multiply and embolden.
Power grids fluctuate.
Water becomes contaminated.
Fraud happens constantly and is never addressed.
People don’t pay bills or taxes.
Bridges don’t get inspected or repaired, and eventually collapse.
People who want work can’t find it, and earn it via thievery or vice.
Unsafe drugs get approved. Safe drugs don’t get approved.
The cost of survival exceeds the earning power of earnest people.
Remedies don’t materialize. Votes cast don’t translate into action.
Institutions become untrusted. Sources of authority become scarce.
Public safety, the bedrock of everything, starts to deteriorate.

This is how civil order wobbles, becoming uncertain. Once that becomes noticeable, there are more than enough mega-pricks — those sufficiently misanthropic to have long fantasized about mayhem and amassed an arsenal to live out their dreams — to turn a momentary wobble into a terminal meltdown.

Collections of people who agree to be governed by shared rules are far preferable to anarchies.

But agreeing to shared rules is just what happens at the beginning. As such systems of shared power age, anger builds and is stored. Every annoyance is cataloged. Every instance of pettiness and mockery infuses a little more antipathy. Resentment grows.

Eventually, someone decides they no longer want a relationship. They’re pissed off and they want everyone to know about it. They don’t want to mend. They want to spend the rest of their lives bitching and making others pay.

In small numbers, such crybabies make no dent in civic function. In large numbers, they shit the bed for all of us.

Relationship breakdown on a mass scale is a fundamental impairment preventing solutions to collective action problems that arise in any system of shared power.

Solving those problems is about building enough agreement that the levers of power are moved in some way. Building agreement requires dialogue, debate, and disagreement. When we can no longer do those things, we’re stuck. Our feet are planted as a tidal wave approaches. The environment changes, and we don’t adapt. We get out of phase with that environment and can no longer survive in it.

Too many pricks being too prickish for too long leads to such entropy.

Pricks may not realize what they’re hastening. Because when and if cataclysm occurs, they won’t be spared. Nor their loved ones, pets, or favorite beer mugs.

So maybe you’re a prick and thinking to yourself “I am but one prick of meager importance. A single prick cannot bring down whole worlds.”

You’re wrong. Every prick matters.

There is a place for pricks in society. They play a role. They are driven. They sometimes offer useful clarity. If nothing else, they provide the contrast necessary to appreciate those who are capable of disagreeing and being annoyed without losing their rag for the rest of time.

But a society of pricks competing to see who can be more miserable and inflammatory, driving everyone around them into replete exasperation with every hour God sends, is capable of pulling down the temple.

We’re all pricks from time to time. Myself included, as evinced herein.

Making it a lifestyle choice and a core identity is just not cricket.

If you feel attacked by this message, reconsider your choices. Take a break occasionally. It takes a lot of energy to hold on to all that angst.

If we spent a tenth of it working together, who knows. You might actually enjoy the life made possible by not being insufferably repellent and hating countrymen.

Tony is an American writer, veteran, and semi-retired businessman.