Last year I did a series of posts about a social maneuver call the Rearden that you can use against passive aggressive pricks. It was generally well-received, but there was one installment of it that got mixed reviews, and that’s the part where I gave a specific example where I used it myself. The anecdote was about an exchange with a passive-aggressive Eurodouche.
It got some good feedback but also some negative feedback from commenters like
I don’t know man…
I see where you are coming from, and I agree with the analyses of conversational dynamics you post here, but something about the way you handled this rubbed me the wrong way. Felt too defensive. I would have handled it in one of two ways:
1) Early in the conversation you could have opened up an interesting discussion comparing the relative merits of the more isolated, atomic nature of American life versus the more friendly vibe you felt in AMS (you do agree that there is a qualitative difference, right? I myself found the open vibe in AMS to be refreshing).
2) If you you honestly felt the guy was trying to ho you up, better to go for the throat right away instead of psychoanalyzing and nitpicking. If it’s a “fight”, go on the offensive and start talking trash about what you think about the Dutch. That’s fun. But squirming around about what you think his motives are strikes me as ever so slightly bitchassed.
I like the idea of The Rearden in theory, but I don’t like this example.
All IMHO, of course.
Mu’Min/Obsidian also chimed in with:
Hey T,
Been awhile since we last chatted. So, I see I have some reading to do! I like “The Rearden” but I’m w/TC on this one: in any situation, Mu prefers the North/South approach, straightup, straight line, let’s have it.
Now, if I had been in your shoes w/dude, I would have cut him right off at the knees, cut the ring off on him and made him duke it rhetorically right there. I would have put him back on his heels in a very dominant way, because that’s my nature anyhow. And he would either have to bring it, or stand down. Kinda what you’ve been saying about drawing them out into the open.
On the other hand, people who have been to Europe or other cultures where confrontation tends to be indirect like Japan all agreed with me to some degree. Wade Nichols said:
Good post!
I’ve had a few experiences similar to yours when dealing with Europeans and/or Brits.
One was when I was in New Zealand, hiking the Kepler Track, during Christmas/New Years. In one of the huts, 2 Brits basically started ganging up on my wife and I when they learned we were Americans. They played many of the same games you described, as they were bitching about Iraq, how Tony Blair’s “basically a poodle of the U.S.”, etc. etc. They tried to cast the U.S. as hypocrites since there’s a photo of Dick Cheney with Sadaam Hussein from the 1980’s, and that was somehow indicative that the U.S. was once cozy with him. I didn’t think of it at the time, but later on realized I should have mentioned to these 2 clowns that Britain also once went to war with a certain bunch of people, and that Britain is now friends with the descendents of those people. Today we’re called Americans!
Another time I’ve experienced the same also with a Dutchman. This guy was playing the not-too-subtle “Americans are idiots” game by asking me, “How come you Americans always go to McDonald’s when you’re overseas?” I should have countered him by asking him about the stereotype of Europeans all being a bunch of wimps that “swing both ways”, and ask him how many guys he’s slept with!
Joshua Herring wrote:
What a great post! I spent 6 years abroad, one of which was in Germany, so this sort of thing happened to me all the time. I disagree with other commenters that going for the jugular early on is the right approach. That was always my initial instinct too, but it doesn’t work because (as this encounter demonstrates) they can easily fall back on the faux “OH, I didn’t mean to offend.” It’s true that Rawness calls him on it eventually, but first you have to give the guy enough rope to hang himself. Sitting there and calmly letting him build up a bit belies any impression that you’re easily offended or closed-minded, or simplistic or whatever. Love the Rearden and will definitely plan on using it next time I’m in one of these situations.
Several blogs also linked to it favorably, but the blog articles were always written by someone who actually experienced what I was talking about firsthand. But I had a nagging curiosity about why the reaction was so mixed, and in particular why only people who experienced it firsthand supported my prescription of how to respond. But after a while, I just moved on to new topics.
The other day I came across the old post and suddenly it hit me. It was so obvious. When I was recalling the encounter the first time around, the memory was incredibly fresh in my mind. So mentally, I added all the necessary accompanying details like the vibrant vocal inflection, smiling facial expressions, soothing intonation and friendly body language. But in writing it down I left all those extra details out and related almost nothing but the text of the discussion. And when all you see is the pure text without all those other details that tend to soften the impact, the insults look much more direct to readers than it seemed to me at the time I was experiencing it. Similarly, the readers who visited or lived in Europe and had similar experiences with the people there when reading the text, thanks to their own experiences, were probably able to totally fill in those extra details and put the words more into the context needed to understand why going nuclear in response would have come off badly.
Realizing this gave me some more insight on passive aggressors. People who are really good at passive aggression have a talent of making their behavior, body language and voices so incongruous with the insulting nature of their words that you experience a slightly disorienting cognitive dissonance that causes you to doubt your own instincts. However just focusing on the words alone totally makes the insulting intention jump out at you clear as day, just like the Eurodouche’s insulting nature was much more apparent to those readers who were strictly focused on the content of his dialogue as opposed to the other readers who filled in a more vivid total picture of the encounter.
So in the future if you have what you think may have been an encounter with a passive aggressor laced with veiled insults and are doubting your instincts, focus on just the words and nothing else. Write it out if you have to and read it to yourself. Better yet, have someone else who wasn’t there and can’t fill in the extra details of the encounter themselves read it to give you their impression of what’s going on. Chances are that regardless of how the person was acting, if it looks like a blatant insult on paper, it was meant to be insulting.
Good news, Costa Rica is awesome. Jaco is a nice enough place but not really my cup of tea personally, but the rest of the country is sweet. Or maybe my expectations were just too high following last year’s vacation. I might dedicate a longer post to it at some point.
Bad news, the heat here overheated my laptop. As in, it was so hot that even with the computer off and screen closed, the laptop totally overheated and shut down. I’ve never seen anything like it. Motherboard is fried. Utterly shot.
Since blogging at work is a no-no, I’m going to be down until I get a new laptop in a few weeks. I have to use a friend’s computer just to make this post.
Since my computer access is going to be extremely limited, I propose this: A while back, I asked you guys to give me ideas on what type of book I should write. The most popular suggestion was a collection of essays, so that is what I am going with. My next question is, what subject matters would you suggest I write about? Which topics do you like to read from me the most? It will help me get an idea of what the range of topics should be. I am currently at the stage of outlining it and the subject matter needs a little more focusing.
Also, tell me what you would least like to see. For example many of you say the political stuff is too divisive, so I’m going light on that. One essay at most.
Thanks.
UPDATE: Doesn’t have to be a topic or even subject area I’ve already covered. It could be something I’ve never discussed in the past ever but you still want to hear my take on.
A round-up of vacation thoughts that were interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant individual blog posts:
The Illusion of Soft Culture:
In some ways, visiting a culture that is blatantly and outrageously different on the surface is probably better than going to some cultures in that seem to only have superficial surface differences from America. In the former, you get a really extreme and intense culture shock up front, which causes you to tread carefully and pay close attention throughout because you’re always hyper-aware and conscious of cultural differences.
Places like Amsterdam and Stockholm, on the other hand, are very superficially similar to America. You’re surrounded by trendy clothing, hip-hop music at all the clubs, guys and girls rapping along to all the lyrics and grinding on the dance floor like they’re in a hip-hop video, lots of American slang and sitcom catchphrases (“How you doing?”), Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers everywhere, Coca Cola and McDonald’s everywhere you turn, posters everywhere for the latest American movie blockbusters. So you feel familiar right away, become careless and don’t pay attention to cultural differences as much as you should. This underestimation of cultural differences makes accidentally offending people and crossing boundaries actually more likely than they would be in a culture radically different than America because you get really comfortable, stop walking on eggshells and start assuming that everything that’s okay at home in America is acceptable abroad.
I found something off in a lot of conversations I had abroad at first before I figured this out. Great conversations would turn stale and then weird, and I didn’t realize until later that cultural misunderstanding was responsible. What helped was when I met some Europeans who spent significant time in America, and thus knew not just the soft culture of America, but also its hard internal culture too. These people were the ones who helped explain to me the little things I couldn’t figure out.
You should always be wary of countries that have a long history of being culturally and racially homogenous (which basically covers almost every country out there except America probably). These are particularly hard to penetrate because so many aspects of their social dynamics are intuitive and unspoken. As an analogy, think of interactions with your family versus interactions with new roommates. With your family, you’ve had years developing common context, you grew up with each other, and the background to every interaction doesn’t need to be spelled out and fully explained. You develop various communication shorthands because you share so much background and have so many shared experiences. There’s a lot of implicit understanding that can be exchanged just through a look or a gesture that would totally fly over an outsider’s head if you tried it on them. Compared to an outsider, you can read between the lines with each other more, finish each others’ sentences and seemingly read each others’ minds. You instinctively know when the other is joking or not.
Now picture times of your life when you’ve had new roommates. You’ve shared much less common experiences and background. Suddenly explicit explanation becomes more important. There’s no implicit understanding of boundaries and personal space, there are less shared habits and attitudes, a lot of lines need to be clearly drawn in the sand, and a lot of concerns need to be clearly voiced in order to peacefully coexist. You have to tread carefully to avoid misunderstandings. There is also less patience with putting up with roommates because you are not tied to them like you are to family. Idiosyncracies that your family would either share with you or have learned to ignore from you now become an issue.
America is the country of “new roommates.” Because we’re such a mix of cultures, and have been from almost the beginning, and that mix of culture keeps changing with the constant addition of new immigrant groups, we don’t have quite the same level of implicit familiarity you find in countries where cultural and racial homogeneity where the norm for most their existence. For many countries outside of the U.S., diversity is still a new relatively concept, an experiment if you will.
European countries are countries that have been “families” for most of their existence that have only recently started allowing new roommates to move in with them. And the more culturally and racially homogenous a country remains, the more it is like a close-knit family. People are used to being implicitly understood. People are not used to explaining everything in explicit terms as possible. People are used to reading between the lines and understanding each other’s motivations for doing things, as they all come from similar backgrounds, races and shared cultural experiences.
I had lunch with some people in Stockholm and they explained to me all the differences in culture I wasn’t picking up on. I consider myself pretty good at spotting social dynamics, and even I was shocked at how much social nuances I was missing. They also explained that Scandinavians were not as used to explaining their culture to people because they didn’t have to until recently. Immigration was not as widespread as it had become recently, and it was not as popular with tourists as some other countries where the tourism industry is so huge that tourists become part of the fabric of the country’s daily life. On the flipside, American culture seems easier for outsiders to understand because we talk, dissect and explain our culture constantly and openly, in our opinion news articles, our movies and TV shows, our documentaries, and our social science books. Because we don’t assume the existence of shared backgrounds and experiences as much as most other countries, we unconsciously have become used to dissecting and explaining and learning about our cultural idiosyncracies.
The “roommates” dynamic is what is called “low-context communication,” the “family” dynamic is what is called “high-context communication.” Americans are used to low-context communication, while most other cultures are more used to high-context communication. In fact, this is a big reason as to why Hollywood movies and foreign films are traditionally so different. The films of Hollywood are traditionally extremely low-context, which is why they have such broad appeal, domestically and abroad. European films however have always been high-context, requiring the viewer to pay more attention to subtext, implication, body language and subtle facial expressions.
The Americanization of popular culture throughout the developed Western world makes Americans believe that the similarities between all cultures in the west are much deeper and more profound than they actually are, leaving them oblivious to just how different values can be from country to country in the West. (On a side note, this is also starting to happen in other places as well. The Westernization of much of the Eastern hemisphere is starting to create the same fallacy, which is why western leaders often make mistakes in assessing the cultures and governments found in places like China, North Korea, Russia and Muslim countries. Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order talks about this problem, for example how a young Muslim may put on a pair of Levis’ jeans, put on an Ipod playing pop music, drink a Coca-Cola and take off to bomb an embassy. His superficial appearances and habits imply a total acceptance of Western lifestyle, but his core internal values are still fundamentally those of his home culture. The post-9/11 world really made this problem apparent.)
Flip-Flops
My whole time there, I did not see that fashion scourge popular among American women, the dreaded flip-flops. Not a single girl was wearing flip-flops outdoors, even to Sunday brunch. This post is a scathing critique of flip-flops. Flip-flops have even become acceptable for reporters to wear on the national news. Flip-flops have become so socially acceptable among the 20-something and younger set that members of the Northwestern University female lacrosse team wore flip-flops when meeting the President at the White House in 2005! The last straw was when a friend of mind told me he saw a young douche on the subway headed to work in a dress suit and…flip-flops!!! My friend asked what was up with the flip-flops and the guy said he just wore them on the commute for comfort. What the fuck?! Just the sound of hearing the clop-clop-clop sound of heel slapping plastic all around you as you walk around New York is enough to drive you crazy. The sight of the accumulated black dirt on a girl’s heels make it even worse.
In Stockholm and Amsterdam, I never saw flip-flops. Not once. Also although I didn’t go to Eastern Europe, I met many Eastern Europeans while in Western Europe and not only did they never wear flip-flops, they never even seemed to even wear flats. I asked a woman, a Latvian, about whether my observation about Eastern Europeans was on point or not, and she said it was true. She said she actually didn’t even own any flats (and saw no reason to), except for one pair of sneakers she used if she had to hike or exercise. I shed a tear.
You can see evidence of a country’s overall national character very much in the little things that country’s people do. For example, in Stockholm no one would cross against a traffic light. Even if there were no cars coming from either direction as far as the eye could see, no one would cross unless the traffic signal gave them the okay. In NY, people are itching for any break in the traffic to exploit in order to cross the street, regardless of what the traffic signal displays. I think it speaks a lot about each country’s attitude toward symbols of authority. This country, after all, was founded on resistance to authority figures if you think about it.
Legs
The legs on women in Stockholm and Amsterdam were great. I don’t think I saw a pair of bad legs or cankles at all while there. It’s got to be all the walking and biking.
In Stockholm you walk all the time. Unless it’s an impractical distance to walk or you are in danger of being late, you are going to be walking to where you have to go. Even if you have a long distance to cover to go home, you’ll probably walk. Going to the afterparty while drunk and in your club clothes? You’ll probably still do the walk, even if it’s 15 or 20 minutes. Drunk off your ass and a twenty minutes or a half hour from home? You may still walk.
Distances that most Americans would call a taxi for are totally natural to walk for Swedish people. I walked everywhere all the time, and no matter what time it was there were plenty of other people taking long walks too. I could be walking back to my hotel at 5 AM and see someone else taking a long walk at 5 AM too, walking in front of me for 20 minutes.
I love walking, so I was right at home. While there though I thought about all my friends back home, some of whom are even gym rats and exercise freaks that will kill the cardio machine, that absolutely hate real world walking. I can have friends that crush the stairmaster daily but bitch if we have to walk a block too far from the car to the bar. Even as a gym cardio lover myself, I’ve got to say that I never got weight loss results as drastic as what I got from walking everywhere I needed to go in Europe. I would just add an extra 15-20 minutes for everywhere I had to go and instead of taking a train or bus or taxi I’d walk. Over the course of a day I must have covered miles. I also spent my mornings and afternoons doing walking tours from my guidebook and inviting total strangers along.
I hate to sound like a typical American Europhile snob (and anyone who reads this blog knows I hate that type), but even I have to admit: I totally see why Americans are so much fatter than Europeans. Gyms aren’t even fashionable there as they are here in America yet people looked great and were on average in better shape just by being less lazy and incorporating more activity in their every day lives. Cumulatively all that walking really adds up over time.
In Amsterdam, it’s not just walking but bikes also. People bike everywhere. The whole city is built to be bike-friendly, and there are actually more bikes than people, estimated at 1.5-2 bikes per person. You see businessmen in suits commuting to work on bikes, hot girls made up and dressed to the nines in eveningwear headed to and from the supertrendy club on bikes, stumbling drunk guys and girls getting on bikes and cycling groggily home. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning and you will see people biking around. Apparently bike theft is so common people don’t want to invest too much in a nice bike, so you won’t see much of those multithousand dollar bikes that are popular with yuppies here. Bikes are the hot commodity there.
There is no bicycle stigma. I didn’t meet a single person there who owned a car, and you can even show up on a date with a bicycle and not be labeled a loser if you are a guy. A woman can get made up and look glamorous yet show up to her date on a bicycle too. No expectations of the guy showing up in a nice car like in America.
Anyway, it’s no wonder that great legs are so common there. No homo, but even a lot of the guys had great legs too. Guess that’s why so many of them can get away with those skinny jeans. I met one chubby, Seth Rogen sized guy there, the only fat guy I met on the whole trip. Life sucked for him, he said. I told him to come to America where he’d be “average.”
True Stereotypes:
I did my research for this trip backwards. Rather than study the cultures beforehand, I did no research on cultural etiquette. I didn’t want to be biased and arrive with prejudgments. I wanted all my conclusions to be made from firsthand experience or from things I learned directly from natives. After I came back, though, I did a lot of cultural research to see if the conclusions I made matched what the accepted stereotypes were.
Even though I was only in two cities, Stockholm and Amsterdam, I met tourists and transplanted Europeans from a lot of different countries, to the point I feel comfortable in making generalizations about more than just two European countries. Based on what I experienced myself, I think this series of links below from the site Daily Candor are the most accurate descriptions I’ve seen of European stereotypes that are true:
What Americans Think About Europeans – Great piece, first goes into what insular white Americans thnk about Europe, then discusses what American subgroups like blacks, latinos, Asians, Indians, gays and hipsters think of Europe. Uncannily accurate.
Based on my readings before I arrived in Europe, I expected the political correctness in day-to-day life there to be utterly oppressive and stifling. So I was quite surprised to see how open people were about Muslim-bashing there.
It seems that in public discourse, in political speeches and initiatives and in the mass media, political correctness and avoidance of offending Muslims is the norm. The political correctness of our media has nothing on what goes on there. It’s so bad that you can basically tell when a crime story there is about a Muslim because they’ll conveniently omit any hint of name, race or religion.
So it caught me quite off-guard when I found the people on the street to be incredibly blunt about their frustration or outright dislike of Muslims. Once people felt you out and could tell you wouln’t be offended, they’d cut loose in one-on-one interactions, especially when liquor was involved. People there seem sick of the political correctness, of the refusal of Muslims to assimilate, and the supposedly disrespectful way Africans and Muslims approached the white European women.
Apparently Muslims hear so much about the hedonism of the West that they expect European women to be total whores that require minimum effort to bed, and often approach them in such a way. They then get disappointed when the reality turns out to not be true, or a total media-fueld exaggeration. I heard about the frustration Muslim immgrants experience over this disconnect is even worse in Eastern Europe. I heard many Europeans in these supposedly open and egalitarian cities making approving remarks when a bouncer would refuse a “ghetto” African entry, saying things like “Thank goodness.” One girl even told me “We’re not racist, they just don’t know how to act civil or treat women with decency. You’re black, but you’re classy, handsome and well-mannered. If they could be the same as you, they wouldn’t have the problems they do.” I didn’t know if I should be offended or not. It’s like when I was growing up and white kids would tell me I was one of the “good blacks” like it was supposed to be a compliment (hated that).
That being said, I began to understand their dilemma. First off, multiculturalims is quite new for them. It’s that “family” vs. “neighbor” dynamic I described earlier in the post. We in American have always had a low-context “neighbor” dynamic. Getting new “neighbors” in the form of immigrants is not as big a deal for us. For them, they are going from a longtime high-context “family” dynamic to an open door unlimited “neighbors” dynamic overnight. And to make it worse, the “neighbors” don’t want to learn any of the family’s rules or traditions or customs yet still want to take advantage of everything the family has to offer.
You can definitely feel the tension betwen Muslims (both the Middle Eastern and black African variety) and Europeans all over. I even found myself starting to experiencing some of the same discomfort. I started understanding why even in simple encounters they can be off-putting. A lot of it stems from different social customs and body language rules. For example eye contact is much more intense and off-putting from the Middle Eastern muslims I met, and the acceptable personal space was very different. A guy would have no problem standing inches from my face with an intense, eye-to-eye stare while asking me for directions or where the bathroom was. I’d unconsciously take a step back to reintroduce distance and they’d just keep closing the gap automatically, oblivious to the fact that they were too close. It wasn’t done deliberately to make me uncomfortable, they guy was just socially clueless until I put my hand up to stop him from closing the distance again.
If it made me uncomfortable and I’m a big guy who can take care of himself, I can only imagine how it made women feel. Women have to constantly keep in mind that they are physically weaker than men and can be in danger at any time, so they are extra sensitive to sensations of creepiness and personal space.
I predict a strong, grassroots opposition movement of conservatism from Scandinavia and the rest of Western Europe that will blindside the sitting politicians and the mainstream obnoxiously liberal media totally off-guard in the next few years. I heard similar things have happened in Finland recently as conservatives won major election victories there last Sunday that no one saw coming.
Male Fashion
It’s harder to be a high-fashion guy in Europe. In America, the average man is so afraid of being bold and sexual in any way that he is constantly thinking in terms of what he is unwilling to wear rather than what he is willing to try. American men dress thinking how not to offend, how not to stand out and how not to be mistaken as a fag due to tight fit or bold colors. Grey, blue, khaki, repeat. Dullsville. Thus, over here, a guy like me who actually wears clothes that fit, takes a little risk with color selection and is willing to wear pointy shoes or shop at someplace other than the Gap is considered a top-notch dresser. I get complimented here as having a “European” style of dressing.
Over there every person has a European style of dressing. It’s Europe! I was told that I had to dress nice to get into the exclusive clubs there without being on the guestlist. I put on my best outfits, the ones that get me to skip lines and get into top clubs here in NY, and door people were utterly unimpressed. An outfit that an American guy would find risky was just tame and boring there. You have to dress at another level to have above-average style there.
I’m not sure if I want to ever be that metrosexual though, especially at the Stockholm level of male fashion. I’m 34 years old, fuck that. I accept defeat in that department.
I described the Rearden recently. Here’s an example where I tested it out in Europe (I’m reciting to the best of my memory, but I think this captures the gist of the conversation pretty well).
I’m sitting at an outdoor bar called L’Toosje in Amsterdam right outside of the red light district, drinking a beer at a sidewalk chair. I was using the messenger function on my Blackberry to talk to a friend back in the US. Since I had limited internet access and my cell phone cost $1 a minute to use, I found the free Messenger service to be the best option for keeping in touch with people back home and letting them know I was doing okay. I felt letting people know i was okay was especially important given the amount of time I was all alone abroad.
A guy walked over to me. “How are you doing?” he said with a mischievous grin.
ME: I’m okay. How are you?
DUTCH GUY: I see that you are…American, yes?
ME: (Oh brother, here it comes) Yes, I am.
DUTCH GUY: I find you Americans so…interesting. Do you mind if I sit?
ME: Go ahead.
He sits.
DUTCH GUY: I find it fascinating how Americans are never able to just relax and enjoy what is around them. I was an exchange student in American for a while in high school. I ran track. The whole team was black guys. I was the only white person on the team. I learned a lot about American people. It was the first time I really understood what being white was.
ME: How so?
DUTCH GUY: I just judge people as individuals. But I did not understand race and how things work until I got there. For example, my team told me to go up to this other black guy on the field and say “What’s up nigger?” I had no idea that was a bad thing to say. And they stood in the back and laughed as I did what they said and got into trouble with the guy. He almost killed me and I had no idea why! Then they came our and saved me.
ME: Were you mad?
DUTCH GUY: (Grinning) No, but I learned about how I’d never fully be one of them. They were my brothers, my team, at the end of my time there I considered them my family. I never considered myself a racist at all, but I realized there that because of the history of America, when I walked around there I was automatically assumed to be racist by the black people there. Do you think that’s fair?
ME: What does it matter what I think? It’s your problem. All that matters is how you think.
DUTCH GUY: (Still smirking) I think you Americans are naturally divided, neurotic…you disconnect from things. You isolate yourselves, even in a crowd. That’s how I knew you were American. And the worst thing, I can’t hold it against you because I know you can’t help it. (What he did here was a very subtle trick. He is subtly “forgiving” me for a trait that I never even apologized for. He’s also giving me permission to be myself, when I never even asked for him permission. The general vibe is that he’s toying with me slyly and placing himself above me with subtle power plays in conversation. His sentences place him in a position of judgment. He’s in the driver’s seat, trying to steer the conversation in a way that’s subtly condescending. But he hasn’t said anything blatantly insulting yet, so i can’t call him on it too harshly. Time for the Rearden)
ME: What are you getting at?
DUTCH GUY: I’m not trying to get at anything.
ME: You’ve come to sit with me, tell me your life story, and a bunch of negative things about Americans and then say these negative things are the reason you knew I was American. I’m impatient. Just get to the point of where you’re trying to go with this. I tend to be a very direct guy.
DUTCH GUY: (Speechless, pauses for a bit) I just feel that Americans isolate themselves and live in their own world like no one else exists. A very, how do you say, self-focused…
ME: Is that a nice way of saying narcissistic?
DUTCH GUY: No, I wasn’t saying that, I was…um…
ME: No, you weren’t saying it. You were implying it. I’m the one explicitly saying it.
DUTCH GUY: I’m sorry…I’m not trying to offend, I…uh…
ME: No, you weren’t trying to offend, you were trying to insult me without offending. That’s even worse because it’s almost dishonest. Anyway, what are you sorry about, that you tried to insult me or that I called you on it?
DUTCH GUY: I feel like…like you misunderstand me.
ME: (laughing) I think I understand you perfectly. You saw me on a Blackberry, so you knew right away I had to be an American. [Blackberry use is a red flag that you are an American, or maybe a Brit or Canadian, when overseas. But most assume American. I only saw another Blackberry once in my whole time abroad] So you decided that me, being the American stereotype that I am, disconnected from the world, needed to be lectured by you, right? For my own enlightenment? And I wouldn’t be sharp enough to catch on to the condescension?
DUTCH GUY: (Realizing this conversation is not going at all like he expected it to be, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself anymore. HIs smirk has long faded.) Yes, well, I saw you on the Blackberry just messaging and messaging and messaging and you know…I felt sorry for you, that you are so unable to just turn it off and enjoy where you are?
ME: Who exactly are you to feel sorry for me?
DUTCH GUY: No, I don’t mean to get you mad.
ME: I’m not mad. (calm smile.) But seriously, who are you to feel sorry for me? Aren’t you Europeans always going on about Americans and how we don’t respect or understand other people’s cultures and traditions?
DUTCH GUY: ….
ME: Well I’m from New York City. Talking on Blackberries all day is my culture. Why isn’t that worth respecting? Right?
DUTCH GUY: Well, you have to understand, I just wanted to talk about things, my time in America. My best friend, he was a black guy named Darrell, and when I was there we were so close. And sometimes I think back, and I wish I could find him and get back in touch with him. On the surface, we were so different, different backgrounds, different cultures, different races, yet we ended up being great friends, almost brothers by the time I left. And I always wish I could find him again.
ME: So what is this? You have a lot of unresolved issues with America in general and black Americans in particular and now that you see me, a Black American , and this is your chance to work out all your nostalgia and issues with Americans and black Americans all at once right? I’m like a stand-in for America, for the black guys you remember in the States, for whatever? I don’t care about your issues.
DUTCH GUY: You….you’re really honest.
After that, all the smirking and passive-aggressiveness left. He magically turned into a normal person and we had a normal conversation. He invited me to a fashion show he was throwing and gave me invite. But I knew I would never go to the show because, let’s face it, he was a dick. This exchange went on longer than I wanted as it is, and if he continued on the same track even one more time I’d just have told him to leave me alone, but thankfully he gave up.
There were several other exchanges in Europe where I had to use the Rearden, but that was the longest conversation, and my favorite. Overall though most of the Europeans I met were wonderful, and showed me a great time. But when Europeans do condescension, they do it on a whole other level of assholery.
I’ve been talking about dealing with passive-aggressive people, or as I’ll call them from this point forward, Passive Aggressors, and the technique I’ve been working on to deal with them called The Rearden, based on the character Hank Rearden from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged.
In this installment I described the dilemma in detail. I also described how Europe was filled with intellectual men who were very skilled at this type of subtly acidic interaction.
In this next installment, I described the excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, a scene of Hank Rearden’s trial, that inspired me to come up with The Rearden, my strategy for dealing with Passive-Aggressors. If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you click the link and read the excerpt of the Trial of Hank Rearden for yourself.
This is how The Rearden works.
Passive Aggressors have a weakness that you can exploit. They desperately want to engage in confrontation for whatever reason. Maybe they feel powerless in general and have typically felt this way since adolescence and winning conflicts are a major ego boost for them. Maybe they are trapped in middle management hell. Maybe they have unresolved issues about something, and you remind them of those unresolved issues. In some form you are the embodiment of whatever it is they have issues with, be it because of your race, your culture, your personality, your archetype (maybe you remind them of the big jocks that pushed them around in high school, the cool guy that got all the girls they couldn’t, the hot chick that never gave them a time of day growing up, the optimist they always envied, the smart guy who always did better in school). For some reason, they have a need for conflict and victory in general, and something about you in particular especially triggers that need for victory.
But on the flipside, they are deathly afraid of conflict, specifically the risk of losing because losing a conflict would just reinforce their unresolved issues and sense of powerlessness. They will only do open conflict if they feel 100% sure they can win it. Open conflict, where both sides know they are in a conflict and go head to head openly, is high risk. It leads to a definitive winner and a definitive loser. It is the sign of a mature man to not only be willing to risk losing, but also, if he does indeed lose, to lose gracefully (this is a big reason why sports are considered to build character, and also why so many beta males resent athletes). Since they are immature men, they do not know how to lose gracefully without having their whole ego and self-worth shattered by the loss.
Also, an open conflict, whether you win or lose, often gives you closure. That’s why you often see two guys get into a fight or an argument or a competition, have it out, and regardless of who wins or loses they can squash the beef and put it behind them afterwards and move on. And even become friends. Meanwhile women and especially teenage girls, because fighting or having an all-out throwdown with a woman is unladylike, spend a lot of time with doing passive-aggressive and catty conflict with each other below the surface, using cutting remarks, double entendres, reading between the lines, subtle social cues, cheap shots, etc. (think of the popular girl and Queen Bee conflicts you see in high schools). Because these conflicts are never open, they never get a definite winner or loser, just a vague sense of getting over on someone or a vague sense of having lost. This lack of open conflict and closure is why women often hold grudges so much longer than men. Since male Passive Aggressors approach conflict like teenage women, they too never have a definite winner or loser, never experience conflict closure, and thus are never satisfied, which is why ignoring them doesn’t work as far as making them stop. The beta bully never stops because he never really feels the satisfaction and closure that can only be attained from earning a solid win. They keep laying on the sarcastic and snarky cheap shots in hopes of scratching that itch to dominate and win, but the irony is that the weak, ambiguous nature of the “wins” one receives from such beta male behavior are too weak to ever successfully scratch that itch, so it never ends no matter how you try to ignore it and hope it will pass.
As an analogy, think of it like the guy who tries to get girls by being a “nice guy” rather than just putting his balls on the line and asking a girl out. He does this because he’s afraid of rejection, so using a “nice guy” approach gives him the psychological satisfaction of saying he’s actually in the game, but the inconclusive nature and mixed signals that come from never clearly scoring with the women nor clearly getting rejected by the woman keeps him in a “friend zone” that never offers any resolution. This lack of resolution keeps him sticking to his ineffective strategy and tolerating this friend zone placement for an uncomfortably long time, whereas if he just put his balls on the line he’d risk more anguish in the short run but at least he would get immediate closure by scoring or getting rejected right away.
Likewise, Passive Aggressors fear open conflict for the same reason Nice Guys fear approaching a woman honestly about their sexual interest: their fear of losing (and thereby losing face) outweighs their nagging desire to win. This is the weakness the Rearden exploits.
This is the same mentality that can be seen in the looters in Atlas Shrugged. They want to be powerful and rich and have the status and profits of a Hank Rearden, but they would never take the risks of losing by openly competing in the harsh, brutal free market that Rearden embraces because the fear of trying and losing is stronger in them than the desire to win. The sight of Rearden’s success infuriates them because he gets the gratification of being a winner, which they never experience, and he gets it through prevailing in open competition, which just reminds them of how much they’re afraid to (or lack the skill to) openly compete themselves. They want all the glory with none of the risk of losing, and since that’s not possible they resent everyone who does succeed by risking loss. Using the Nice Guy as an example again, you often see him bashing the “player” who is successful with women, calling him an asshole or acting like he is using some trickery or exploiting the poor women he sleeps with, because to admit that the player won fair and square is to admit that they, the Nice Guys, lost fair and square either through lack of courage or skill, which just hurts their self-image even more.
So what’s the solution of these ambitious cowards? They disdain that which they are afraid to do, and use subtle smokescreens to demonize and humiliate those who are willing and capable of doing it. The looters going against Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged make being an unrepentant, free-market capitalist into something to be ashamed of, into something evil, , much like the Nice Guy portrays the act of being a ladies’ man, someone who is open and unrepentant about what he wants from women and is proud of achieving it, an evil exploiter of innocent women. Similarly, the intellectual Passive Aggressor creates an environment where being in open conflict or punching a guy in the face for being a dick is shameful, evil and barbaric while sarcasm and snarkiness are the most admirable, mature way to engage in conflict. This intellectual smokescreen that disguises the true nature of the conflict is what I call The Reframing Area.
So here’s how the Rearden works:
First, do not get mad or show any negative emotion as long as you are in the Reframing Area of the conflict. This is important. If you react negatively and strongly, the person will backtrack or smirk and keep picking the scab. They may deny they were being dickish, accuse you of being too sensitive, keep “innocently” repeating the annoying behavior or even escalating it, and/or keep doing whatever it takes to keep you on the defensive while pretending to be taking the high road. They may feel a victory in getting you upset or losing your cool. Throughout the whole interaction, maintain the bemused demeanor of a much older brother dealing with an annoying little sister or a wise teacher dealing with a bratty first grader. Don’t get outright condescending, but give off the air that this whole thing is beneath you but just this once you’ll humor the situation and play along to teach the child a lesson for its own good. Once you force the Passive Aggressor into open aggression, you no longer have to follow this rule and can get as openly angry or hostile as you feel is necessary. This air is only necessary for so long as the conflict is in the conflict is not clear yet and the Passive Aggressor still has plausible deniability regarding his intentions to insult you.
Second, exercise the Three Strikes rule. The three strikes rule simply means don’t let more than three comments go by without checking the offender. You can check the offender as soon as one strike if you want, but you definitely don’t want to let it go as far as four strikes.
Third, don’t let the true nature of the conflict be disguised. Force them out of the Reframing Area. Make them be frank about what they mean. As long as you let the nature of the conflict be defined by them, they will have the upper hand. Every chance you get, you must force them to be frank about what they are trying to say. Remember, they dread open conflict. If they didn’t, their default mode of dealing with conflict wouldn’t be passive aggression to begin with. Your goal is to force them to explicitly say in a frank manner whatever it was they were trying to say passive aggressively, to make them openly commit to the insult. This puts them in a tenuous position.
If they openly commit to the insult and their intent to insult gets put out in the open, you now have grounds to retaliate and escalate without fear of looking like you are overreacting. If they unambiguously commit to the insult now you can get mad or show negative emotion. Their main weapon is the vagueness of the insults and the conflict, and if you take that cover away from them and lay they conflict bare, they now feel unprotected and exposed. They can now lose the conflict, and in turn, lose face.
They may be caught off-guard, backtrack, and try to catch you off-guard later by returning to the behavior again later in the conversation. One tactic they may use is to be extra-charming and friendly in order to disarm you first so that they can catch you off-guard with the verbal cheap shot later. This works both to get your defenses down and also to make you doubt your instincts by giving you mixed signals. After all, if the Passive Aggressor was just being so nice and charming to you, you may think that maybe you are just imagining the perceived insult. Do not be fooled. If the Passive Aggressor tries to go back to the sarcastic and snarky stealth insults after a period of good behavior, go right back to exposing the true nature of his statement no matter how nice he was to you previously.
Fourth, don’t let the Passive Aggressor off the hook.Passive Aggressors need your help in maintaining the illusion of civility surrounding their behavior. This can be shown in the Trial of Hank Rearden from Atlas Shrugged.Remember the scene I described in my last installment, and pay special attention to the parts I put in bold:
“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”
“I do not.”
“But you have to.”
“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”
“Yes.”
“I volunteer nothing.”
“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”
“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”
“Well, no – yes – that is, to complete the form.”
“I will not help you.”
The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a -” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.
“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”
“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”
“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”
Like Rearden, don’t help them reframe sarcastic snarkiness as a legitimate or harmlessly benign way of communication. Don’t validate it as such by responding back with more sarcastic snarkiness. Let the nature of the statements appear exactly for what they are. Do not help them pretend that it’s just harmless conversation. Do not help them preserve an appearance of innocent jesting. Do not help them pretend that no malice is meant or no chronic toxicity exists in the Passive Aggressor when it is apparent to anyone who is intellectually honest that that is not the case.
Another way Passive Aggressors get themselves off the hook is by surrounding themselves with a social circle of enablers, people who either validate their behavior by escalating it with their own passive aggression or by never calling them out on their bullshit. Be prepared for these people in a group. The Passive Aggressor is counting on and expecting the need of other people to be polite or the tendency of other people to believe the best in others or doubt their instincts to get them off the hook. They are expecting you to think you may be overreacting. They are counting on other people to change the topic to safer areas out of discomfort when things get awkward. Basically, they expect to be “bailed out” and usually surround themselves with people who they can count on to bail them out of hairy situations, usually by engaging in the same behavior, excusing their behavior as harmless or by changing the subject for them in sticky spots.
For example if the Passive Aggressor makes a backhanded compliment toward you with a smirk like “That’s pretty good, I suppose, all things considering…” and you catch them off-guard by saying politely and without any apprehension “I’m sorry, what exactly do you mean by all things considering? I don’t quite understand. I’ve always sucked at reading between the lines.” The Passive Aggressor may respond with something like “Well, you know…I’m just saying, all things considering.” And you respond politely, “No, honestly, I don’t know. Come on, just spit it out. Are you trying to say x, y and z?”
At this point, one of the enablers may jump in and try to defuse with something irrelevant like “Isn’t this guacamole great? I love it!” Turn and respond and say something like “Yeah, it sure is.” After addressing the attempted bailout, simply turn back to the Passive Aggressor and pick up right where you left off without a hint of malice: “So as I was saying, were you trying to say x, y and z? I just want to be clear.”
Fifth, force the Passive Aggressor to either back down or escalate the conflict to open, naked aggression. The point of not letting the Passive-Aggressor off the hook in the previous step is to force him into one of these two scenarios. You mustforce him into one of these two choices or it’s all for naught. The point of forcing him into one of these choices is that no matter which one he chooses, he loses. If he backs down and pretends he didn’t mean anything bad by it when at this point to everyone watching it becomes apparent that he actually did, he reveals himself as a petty coward, someone who can dish it out when he thinks its a safe target but crumbles when he gets called on his bullshit. He ends up realizing his worst fear, he loses face. You must realize that usually whenever your instincts are telling you disrespect is occurring, you are not alone and other people vaguely sense it too. Once you hit the Passive Aggressor with the Rearden, any lingering doubts they had will disappear and they will realize you are on the right side of the conflict. This is why the crowd in the Trial of Hank Rearden scene ended up laughing at the judges by the end of the scene, even if they weren’t necessarily on the side of Hank Rearden initially.
And if they aren’t on your side when the dust clears, then fuck ‘em, you don’t need enablers like that as friends. When you get the Passive Aggressor to back down, if he does so by trying to backtrack with a long-winded, disingenuous explanation of what he supposedly really meant, let him talk and talk. Don’t cut him off. Let him embarrass and bury himself with the obvious backing down. The longer he talks and tries to explain it away, the more obvious, cowardly and dishonest and petty he makes himself look. At this point if he’s smart he’ll probably be too self-conscious to try it again and the rest of the conversation should go smoothly. After that, do your best never to hang out socially with that toxic person again.
If you get the Passive Aggressor to go to the other route and escalate the conflict (which is rare because if they were comfortable with this option they would not be Passive Aggressors to begin with) then you are perfectly justified in insulting them back, laying a verbal smackdown on them, punching them in the face, or whatever you want without looking like you are overreacting to harmless behavior. At this point, you can resort to whatever your preferred method of dealing with open conflict is.
If you do get them to openly cop to trying to insult you, you now have the added option of shaming them to the group for their bitchiness and their sneaky attempts to conceal it. You can laugh and say “Oh, so that’s what you meant? I wasn’t sure, I don’t speak passive-aggressive. I’m old school, I was raised to think type of shit was only okay for my sisters.” with a wink and a smile. You can even go for the shame nuclear option with this line: Shake your head and smile slightly like you are dealing with an annoying little sister or a petulant child and slowly state “If you’re going to be a dog, be a rottweiller. If you’re going to be a bitch, wear a skirt.” This may be overkill, but if you really want to devastate, add the following two sentences to the nuclear option: “But no matter what, don’t be a weasel. No one respects a weasel.” But that’s just cruel.
Keep in mind, if this does not shut the Passive Aggressor down and he’s still trying to save face by yapping back and forth after you expose and embarrass them with the Rearden, you have to either beat their ass or laugh at them and leave. Sticking around to keep trading barbs after you succeed with the Rearden just starts looking bitchy and catty and is an easy way to turn your victory into a loss and place yourself on the Passive Aggressors level. Either say you are not going to sit around and bicker like a woman, and invite him to fight. If the Passive Aggressor tries to use this as proof that you are barbaric or put you down for choosing this option, just say “Spoken like a true coward. I expected no less.” And walk away. If you do end up fighting, make sure you fucking win. If there’s any doubt, don’t go that route. If you choose the route of leaving, simply get up and say “I don’t know when you threw in the towel and gave up on living life as a man, but I do know bitchassness is contagious. I’m out.”
Now I’m going to illustrate how I used the Rearden in Europe during my vacation with a few examples.
talks about this problem, for example how a young Muslim may put on a pair of Levis’ jeans, put on an Ipod playing pop music, drink a Coca-Cola and take off to bomb an embassy. His superficial appearances and habits imply a total acceptance of Western lifestyle, but his core internal values are still fundamentally those of his home culture. The post-9/11 world really made this problem apparent.)
