The modern approach to gentility espoused by many millennials and Gen Z-ers is often defended as just being the ethos “don’t be an asshole”. This is a great bumper sticker slogan that no one would immediately disagree with, but the moment you dip below the surface it becomes obvious that there is no shared universal definition of what it actually means to be an asshole, so in fact this winds up turning into “don’t be anyone’s possible definition of an asshole”, which is overly draconian and often impossible to achieve, as in certain situations you are guaranteed to offend someone no matter what you say.
The pivot point between these wannabe thought police and the rest of humanity appears to be the rise of the belief that one’s personal feelings are just as valid as any objective truth, and that those feelings do not have to be justified to anyone for any reason. If you feel offended, then that offense is automatically valid, even if it’s based on your own ignorance or lack of context, or refuted by objective evidence, or just isn’t based on anything at all. “I didn’t like what you said, therefore you’re an asshole.”
This absurdity then gets amplified into the notion that no one should ever have to feel offense, so anyone who does something that happens to trigger a response of offense in someone is automatically in the wrong and needs to either apologize and strictly refrain from that behavior going forward, or must be forcibly shut up and/or punished for daring to do something which happened to offend someone. Whether the person had any legitimate reason to be offended is immaterial — offense was felt by someone, therefore the offender is an asshole and must be dealt with as such.
This is marketed as just asking people to be more considerate of others’ feelings, but in truth it’s a supreme act of selfishness on the part of the triggered individual. In essence they believe that their feelings of offense are so important, so special, that the rest of the universe is required to bend over to work around their personal insecurities. Sparing themselves from self-imposed offense apparently trumps everyone else’s right to free speech, as well as any requirement to credibly justify their own offense before demanding that others change their behavior. So who’s being the asshole now?
I’m sorry that your bulldozer parents never let you hear any constructive criticism as a child, and kept telling you that you’re the best in the world at everything and can achieve whatever you want, when by definition that won’t be true for almost all of you. I’m sorry that stepping out into the real world has been such a shock, with people so unfairly expecting you to actually prove your worth instead of just taking it on faith, and expecting you to be able to defend your dubious opinions rather than just automatically treating them as equally valid positions without critical thought. I’m sorry that someone talked about how being fat is objectively unhealthy, and almost always the result of poor personal choices, because that happened to remind you that you’re fat and it’s your own fault, and you don’t like thinking about that. I’m sorry that you didn’t know the definition and history of the word “niggardly”, so you incorrectly associated it with a racial epithet and got a professor fired for it.
Most of all, I’m sorry that you’re just so fucking fragile that you can’t get by in this world without trying to force other people to change their behavior to avoid accidentally breaking you. Maybe if you put more effort into fixing your own issues rather than trying to project them onto everyone else, you might be able to stand on your own two feet for a change.
* To be clear, this rant is not directed at any specific person.
