The Asshole Theory of History

It takes only one person to screw things up for a large number of other people: that's the asshole theory of history. I began to understand this idea way back when I was a grad student looking for a place to live. Apartments that had one remaining tenant were usually to be avoided because, all too often, that remaining tenant was an asshole, someone who essentially compelled everyone else to move. I extended the idea to traffic--one bad driver could make everyone else's experience on a highway miserable. And eventually it was connected to history itself: the bad tenant/driver became some individual (or even individuals) who, in some way, makes a whole lot of other people miserable. Why? Because he/they is/are an asshole. Simply an unpleasant, piece of shit human being who revels in other people's misery--or, posssibly worse, who isn't even aware of his/her impact on others yet still idiotically manages to inflict misery. Because we often have scarcity of something or another, human beings can affect each other if someone is an asshole, and usually that impact will be negative. There's little we can do about it. And that's why any change which actually improves the human lot is precious and unusual.