According to my online dictionary an arsehole is either: A person's anus; or a stupid, irritating, or contemptible person. It can also be used to describe an unattractive or undesirable place, as in “Ashford is the arsehole of the world.” I chose Ashford in Kent, not far from where I live, because it is the arsehole of the world, or at least the arsehole of Kent.
In the USA you say “asshole,” but it means the same thing.
The phrase “a conspiracy of arseholes” first came to me when talking to a friend last year. He’d been involved in a very pleasant sporting exercise. I won’t tell you the sport as I don’t want to compromise him. He posted about it on various sites, expressing his excitement. I asked him how it was going? Was he still enjoying it? He gave me a resigned look.
“No not really,” he said, and told me about the malignant machinations of the captain of the team who’d taken against him and was refusing to pick him to play, despite the fact that he was skilled, and had a very decent track record. “He’s an arsehole,” my friend said.
That’s when it occurred to me: the explanation of all that’s wrong with the world. It’s a conspiracy of arseholes. It’s not the bankers, the ruling class, the Illuminati, the globalists, the communists, the Freemasons, the liberal elites, satanic forces, atheists, Christians/Muslims/Jews (delete according to your preference) or the Deep State who are responsible for the dire state of the world, it’s the fact that wherever there’s a position of power, an arsehole will want to inhabit it to lord it over everyone else. Arseholes get great pleasure from making other people’s life difficult. It’s their defining quality.
Everyone who’s had a job will know this. Supervisors are almost always arseholes. Or if they’re not arseholes to begin with, they soon become arseholes. The job forces them into it. Their own supervisors put pressure on them which makes them put pressure on everyone else. The supervisor’s supervisor will also be having pressure put upon him, who will be having pressure put upon him too, and so on, up the scale: arseholes on top of arseholes. And on top of the arsehole tree (to mix my metaphors somewhat) is the arsehole of arseholes, the super arsehole himself, the ruler of the business, the CEO, whose only purpose in life is to make efficiency savings in order to increase profits, in order to pay maximum dividends to the shareholders, all of whom are arseholes, looking to earn as much money as possible, with as little outlay of commitment or energy, riding on the back of the working class, who they view as factotums, mere wage-slaves to be exploited for their labor. It’s called capitalism, the conspiracy of arseholes made manifest in the world.
That’s Marxism 101 for you, the Communist Manifesto in a nutshell. But what I realized while talking to my friend is that the conspiracy is taking place in all walks of life, even the supposedly pleasurable ones such as playing sports. There will always be arseholes, and arseholes will always move into positions of power in order to enjoy inflicting punishment on other people: punishment the privilege of those who obtain power. Everyone in a position of power is an arsehole of some sort: or every position of power creates its own arseholes to occupy it.
I think that’s a much better way of understanding the world than trying to imagine a particular group of overly-privileged people meeting in rooms to plan out the future to their advantage. That does go on. In fact, one of my objections to the conventional notion of conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy theorists underestimate the number of conspiracies. There’s not just one, great, overarching conspiracy at work, trying to control our world, but a million conspiracies all vying with each other for control.
Everyone’s engaged in a conspiracy, trying to do the best for themselves and their loved ones. The way that capitalism works is that there’s a premium for lack. People pay more for what’s rare and necessary, which means that those that control the system will try to ensure that there’s not enough to go around, making everyone else more desperate to get their hands on whatever it is (food, clothing, shelter, security, peace of mind) and willing to pay a premium to get it. In the scramble for survival, we all become arseholes.
But the ruling class are engaged in a range of conspiracies against each other as well as against us. No one’s in overall control. It’s arsehole vs. arsehole all vying with each other to become the biggest, the richest, the most powerful, the shittiest arsehole of them all. Arseholes don’t have friends, they only have other arseholes to contend with. Big arseholes want to swallow smaller arseholes who want to swallow even smaller arseholes, all the way down the line till they come for you and me and our pensions are gobbled up and our jobs replaced by robots. The robots will be programmed by arseholes to be arseholes, which means that even our tech will be infected with the arsehole gene and there’ll be no escape.
I was talking about this on a well-known social media site. We were discussing conspiracy theory and I used the phrase “a conspiracy of arseholes” to explain my understanding of the way the world works. It took about 15 minutes to compose my comment, but after I posted it, it disappeared. I assumed that it was the use of the word “arsehole” that caused the site to censor me but, in further discussions with other commentators, “arsehole” was used again and again with no apparent consequences.
What this suggests is that it’s the whole phrase that’s been censored. Somewhere hidden within the site’s algorithm, the words “conspiracy” and “arseholes” have been conjoined and flagged. I think this is deliberate, which implies that our arsehole overlords are aware of its meaning and they agree with me.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The world wasn’t always ruled by arseholes. There must’ve been a time when kindness was the rule. Most people, when they aren’t being forced to be arseholes by the nature of their job or religion, are decent and well-meaning. Most don’t want to be arseholes. It’s the nature of the system that turns them into arseholes. But there are also some people who are simply unreconstructed arseholes. They'd be arseholes regardless of the nature of the system. They love being arseholes.
There are less vulgar words to describe these people. We can call them narcissists, psychopaths, or sociopaths, depending on the circumstances. These are people who’re simply wired differently. They don’t have empathy. They derive pleasure from other people’s pain. They feel entitled in their privilege. They enjoy their status. They want other people to acknowledge their superiority, and they want those people to act accordingly: to bow, crawl, act in a submissive manner, to be their subordinates in the hierarchy of arseholes.
I’m not sure what the solution is. Maybe legislation would help. We could create an anti-arsehole law—a law against being an arsehole—except that, arseholes being arseholes, someone would take advantage. We’d have to create an arsehole police force, which, I suspect, would be full of arseholes.
I think excessive wealth has something to do with it. The greater the wealth, the greater the arsehole. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Does wealth create arseholes or is it that arseholes are attracted to wealth? We could reduce the level of the world’s arseholes by reducing the arseholes’ wealth. A wealth tax. Tax the assets of all those who are excessively rich, and share the proceeds. Build schools, hospitals, museums, art galleries, amusement parks, libraries, theaters, music venues, parks and sports facilities. Create resorts where nature can thrive. Share the wealth around. Don’t lower taxes, increase them. Only arseholes want to lower taxes at the expense of the poor. The rest of us are happy to pay a little bit in tax so we can have good things to share.
The great historic countermeasure to arseholes is community. Create good, strong, resilient communities and the arseholes will be isolated in their own enclaves, forced to inflict themselves on each other, and leaving the rest of us alone.
—Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone
