It may help to first define “mean”.
The way I see it, you have a continuum - nice, netural, and mean.
Being nice is going out of your way, or expending effort, to bring someone joy.
Being mean is going out of your way, or expending effort, to hurt someone, or to take joy from them.
Depending on one’s point of view, the boundries between nice, neutral and mean can shift.
For example, if you’re walking down the street and you have a couple coins in your pocket that you’re not planning on using, and the bum on the corner asks you for change:
If you don’t give them anything, is that neutral or mean?
If you do give them something, is that nice or neutral?
Depending on your sense of obligation to others plus how much effort you’d expend in taking the money out of your pocket versus saying no, your answers could vary.
It’s probably worth noting here that this definition can count a lot of harmful actions as neutral, because although they hurt others, they require no effort.
For example, if you’re a typical American living in the suburbs who will drive their gaz-guzzling SUV to work everyday, and then come home to sit in your air-conditioned house and watch television, you’re indirectly hurting people by creating a lot of pollution with your energy use. But you’re not expending effort to do so. With this definition, if you decide to brave the Texas summer without air conditioning and walk 5 miles to work in a city without sidewalks, you’re a real nice person, but letting yourself be lazy isn’t mean… even if it does hurt people.
Of course, we could use a much more stringent definition of mean as “any action or choice that hurts someone”. Under this definition, one reason people are mean would be lack of energy - after a certain point, you run out of ability to help everyone. I think anyone who has ever worked a minimum wage service job (supermarket cashier, for example, or working at H&M during sales) knows that there comes a point after too many angry customers where it is just hard to smile and be kind and empathetic because you’ve spend the past 5 hours being yelled at by overpriviledged consumers with no sense of decency and you just want to go home and cry.
But if we restrict ourselves to the more narrow definition of “expending effort to cause pain”, why would someone do this?
Humans are empathetic creatures, so it seems, at first glance, illogical.
However, there are times when two people want one thing, and only one can have it. For example, if you and I both want the last slice of cake, well then it’s possible that I may do something mean like break your kneecaps to ensure that I get the last slice of cake. Wars could be seen as an example of this - from the point of view of the governments/kings who start them, two nations want the same piece of land, so they’ll compete for it. From the point of view of the poor fucks dying on the battlefield, the other guy is trying to kill you, so it’s probably a good idea to kill him first.
Of course, many times it’s possible to find a compromise, which, while it may require a little more effort in terms of patience and openess in the short run, saves a lot of effort in the long run.
However, I feel like if there’s one lesson that life made sure I learned this year, it’s that people are stupid, and they will trade short term gain for long term pain any day of the week.
Another reason for meaness could be because the person being mean is hurt. There’s a lovely quote from Calvin and Hobbes, which is my favorite comic strip: “nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around”.
I think the terminology ‘trauma’ is rather in vogue these days, but basically, people will, often through no fault of their own, get hurt sometimes. And when they’re hurt, they can express their pain in ways that hurt others. One classic example of this would be kids who have abusive parents and who become bullies at school.
Another source of meanness is the desire for status. It happens sometimes that pushing someone down can make you seem relatively higher up on the social ladder, and there are people who abuse this fact to their advantage, leaving a trail of pain in their wake.
Those people are often called cunts, and perhaps for good reason. In an essay on meanness, it’s important to note that calling someone a cunt is rather mean. This reveals another source of meaness- desire to maintain social harmony/and or protect loved ones.
Many otherwise kind, patient, peaceful people will have zero problem inflicting violent pain on someone if that person is threating someone they love dearly. Indeed, this is the plot of several Hollywood movies, notable Taken, with Liam Neeson.
Perhaps now that we’ve spent some time asking ourselves why people are mean, we can also ask ourselves how to make people less mean.
Because a big source of meaness is pain, not hurting people is probably a good place to start.
If the search for social status is, deep down, basically a search for love, adoration and attention, which I think it is, then being nice to people in general, paying attention to them, encouraging them to express themselves and welcoming their art and their creative endeavors is also probably a good idea. Perhaps inside of every sociopathic hedge fund manager buying a new boat every 10 years is a little boy who just wanted to sing in a choir or build a model boat but who got told ‘no’ by his mother.
There’s a quote I heard while listening to a podcast with the CEO of Home Depot, that resonated with me. > You get what you measure. You get what you celebrate.
Perhaps making a conscious effort to celebrate kindness in others can go some way towards making the world a nicer place.
🏡