Jeremy Sherman, PhD is a “cradle to grave researcher” covering the span from the origins of life to today’s grave situation. For 25 years he has collaborated closely with UC Berkeley biologist Terrence Deacon on developing a scientific explanation for how beings are trying to emerge within nothing but chemistry (and by extension how they disappear at death). He is the author of an introduction to this research, “Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves” (Columbia University Press, 2017). He has written 1000 blog articles for Psychology Today grounded in this research.

Tell me about your recent book What’s Up With A**holes?: How to Spot and Stop Them Without Becoming One.

Well, about 25 years ago, a question came to me – what is an a**hole since it can’t be just anybody I happen to butt heads with. I found myself in pursuit of an objective definition of a**hole, as a**hole seems to be a broader category that includes narcissist, psychopath, and dark triad.

I noticed that while there are lots of parasites and predators in the biological world, there are no a**holes; being an a**hole is a human thing. And I think it’s also a product of having language. Language has two primary effects on our psyches. One, is it makes us a whole lot more anxious than other organisms. If you compare what your dog could worry about at night to what you could worry about, it’s just no contest. The other is that it enables us to deflect or deny or escape anything that’s inconvenient to us. It’s a great tool for rationalizing. So we’re a hyper-anxious hyper-rationalizing organism.

To pull something from the origins of life research – organisms have to regenerate themselves faster than they would otherwise degenerate. That’s the fundamental thing that we all do in common: we have to rebuild ourselves faster than we fall apart. So we have to be very selective in our interactions with our environment. We have to protect ourselves against the energy that will degenerate ourselves and we have to take in the energy that regenerates ourselves. And so we eat food, not poison. Well, in the realm of symbols for language-using-organisms, that becomes confirmation bias. Now normal decent people mostly recognize that confirmation bias is a problem that they have to manage. A**holes treat confirmation bias as the solution to all of their problems. So the second half of the book is about how to make it cost a**holes to be a**holes. I end up working towards a better, more accurate term than a**hole; I think they’re trump-bots. And that’s a lowercase “t.” I mean, he happens to be a good one, but the point about it is that trump is a double entendre, it means bullshit, it means trumped-up, and it also means beats everything else. I actually don’t think they are narcissistically self-obsessed. I think it’s a robotic habit, and if it works, there would be no reason to ever leave that habit behind. So it’s robotically playing trumped-up trump cards.

Do you think that being an a**hole relates to death anxiety in some way?

Oh, yes. Though, I would say I think we’re primed on death and death-adjacent experiences all day long. Little deaths. This has been my theme for a while – you wouldn’t have to prime people on death. You just have to disappoint them and they’ll already get anxious and will dig in their heels and reach for whatever immortality campaign happens to be close at hand. It can be a very short-term immortality campaign. I think that there is a tendency for any of us when challenged to pull out whatever primary moral imperative serves us in the moment, and then drop it five minutes later for its opposite. I don’t think the immortality campaigns have to be coherent at all. From my perspective, Becker opens the window to this broader concern.

I don’t stop at Becker, but I certainly am there in two ways. One is that I think that he really named the fundamental move, that any sense that you’re perishable will terrify us and move us towards self-assertion. And the other thing, the most fundamental of all, is the connection between the symbolic species or what we call in Astrobiology, intelligent life. We mean organisms that can use language. These organisms would be dealing with exactly the problems we’re dealing with. I’ve been reading A History of Science by Arthur Kessler, and you get a sense that we have always operated on the assumption that there is an eternal universe, that we are eternalists. And I think it’s because we have pan-necrophobia; we are just afraid of decay. So 200 years after discovering the laws of thermodynamics, that everything decays, you still get AI people who are creating these non-degenerate algorithmic models of consciousness. So I think there’s a culture-wide aversion to facing the fact that good things pass.

I’m arguing that there are further implications or extrapolations from the theory. Death anxiety plays out in all sorts of ways that are more local. And so too, are the immortality projects. Really, I mean, an a**hole will pull up with the absolute immortality project, and within a half a breath will move to an opposite imperative. What counts is the insistence; the content doesn’t matter at all to them. It’s the insistence that “I stand for something permanently good.” Perma-winning is the object of the game. It’s this idea of having arrived at a plateau. And it’s easy enough for a person to fake that through a combination of selective interactions; through confirmation bias, you become like a self winding watch. You’re like God this way. This is a fundamental recognition in the book – that God wasn’t made in man’s image. He was made in an a**hole’s image. He’s got perfect eternal integrity. He’s eternally right, eternally righteous and eternally powerful. The idea I like the most from the book was recognizing how the dark triad personality type, which is what we’re calling a**holes in psychology these days, is actually a shell game between those three things: omnipotent, omniscient, and the claim at perfect integrity (perfect selfhood, perfect wholeness). This is to say that “I never contradict myself,” and then you contradict yourself all the time. You just have to be consistent in your declaration that you have integrity.

I noticed that while there are lots of parasites and predators in the biological world, there are no a**holes; being an a**hole is a human thing.

How do you spot an a**hole and how do you make being an a**hole costly?

I think of them as fake and fallible, that is, that they’re posing as invincible. One of the two techniques I emphasize is flaunting your fallibility. As humans are fallible, all organisms are fallible, the world itself has winds shift, things change, and we have to change in order to try and keep up with the changes. So life is like driving on a winding road. And you can’t simply go in one direction and expect to get anywhere.

But the much more fundamental technique I suggest is that you never engage with a**holes on content, because they’re not paying any attention to content. It’s three dimensional chess where they’re playing on a completely different dimension, where all that matters is maintaining their self impression of heroism. You expose that and since it’s the only thing they’ve got, they’re one trick ponies, they have only this trick. So you simply keep on pointing out do you see what he did there? This guy will say or do anything to feel heroic! So the only way to deal with that is to actually call them on the game itself and not to do it in a way that shames them for it but simply ridicules that it’s extremely boring.

Ideally, what do you see as the impact of this work?

I’m going to say at a personal level, nothing is more freeing than the kind of ironic stance that you get out of reading Becker, even though it’s a serious book, and what I would call ironic fallibilism. Life has always been guesswork, only humans with language would think it could ever be otherwise. We’re the only creature who could even imagine the alternative to dying, which is eternal life. So that’s what makes us “Gods with anuses.” So nothing has been more liberating for me. In fact, my idea of peace of mind by now is to worry equally about opposites. My equanimity, my setpoint in the middle, is to be equally worried, for example, that I’m too assertive or not assertive enough for the situation. And if I’m off, I can adjust. It’s no longer being thrown out of the Garden of Eden or whatever my immortality project is. It’s been a total delight; for the last 30 years, I’ve been living more or less in this space. And it’s so much easier than trying to meet the standards of some immortality project that happened to catch my mind.

I’m arguing in this book that ironic fallibilism is the adaptive response to that. Is that my mortality campaign? Yes, in a way it is. I am fundamentally anti-fundamentalist. And if that looks hypocritical, well, that’s the point. I think that ideally, if humans could come around to fallibilism, if it got some more popularity, it’s an alternative to both fundamentalism and cynicism.