Humankind's Greatest Threat Is SOBs—Same Old BSers

Many baby boomers spent their youths outraged by this or that tyrannical ruler. When they failed, we would say good riddance. Ding Dong the witch is dead. Now things will be better forever. We assumed that if good people like us were in charge of the world, we’d live in happy harmony.

Many people date that way too. Fall for someone and when the partnership fails, say a bitter good riddance. Declare your ex a tyrant. Next time you'll get a good one.

But the tyrants kept coming. As playwright Bertolt Brecht put it: Don't yet rejoice in his defeat! Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

About 20 years ago, I started to notice that, though the tyrants had different lifestyle brands— fascist or communist, theocratic or atheist—the branding was all a distraction.

Different brands, same strut of absolute infallibility, all based on bullshitting, often defined as not caring what’s real, though more accurately defined as caring so much more about posing as eternally right, righteous, and mighty that reality doesn’t matter.

Reality does matter. Ignore it and you die. Ignore it collectively and we go extinct. Reality is our one master and we’re doomed if we hold any master higher. Reality rules. Reality always wins in the end. Adapt to reality or die.

I’m convinced that humanity’s biggest problem isn’t nukes, pandemics, or climate crisis, huge though they are. It’s the endless stream of tyrants. We can’t make progress on our huge problems if tyrants keep running and ruining things.

Our biggest problem is that we remain naive about the general nature of tyrants. We keep dealing with them one by one as if we’re encountering our first and last. We’ve built no immunity to them. The gullible keep falling for them. The opposition keeps cycling the same impotent responses.

SOB is a wasted acronym. It should stand for Same Old BSers. Human survival depends on more of us recognizing that, despite their differences, it’s the same old BS every time. The bitch is in heat again.

Posing as god is much easier than being human, if they can get away with it. How then to keep them from getting away with it? The challenge, as I see it, is figuring out how to humbly humble SOBS, all of them addicted to absolute arrogance. If we don’t come up with better answers to that question, humankind won’t make it.

Here’s something rarely tried: Don’t debate them. They’re just masturbating to you taking the bait. Expose that’s what they’re doing. Just hammer away at how they’re jerking off in public. Don’t let them drag you into their brand’s talking points; they’re irrelevant. SOBs don’t care about what they claim to care about so much it trumps all other considerations. To them, moralizing is just another way to pose as God.

They scold you for failing to meet their fake moral standards and, in the same breath, laugh at you for caring about morality. Never use the words think or believe when describing how they act. This isn’t thinking or believing. It’s closer to animal braying.

They never think about what their words mean and they don’t have beliefs. To them, words are just weapons for posturing at heroic dominance. Yes, they are playing three-dimensional chess, but only in one dimension. Nothing they say is grounded in reality. It’s all about climbing up and putting others down. They’re sado-narcissists, elevating themselves by demoting every challenger.

These days, the U.S. is dealing with yet another of these SOB epidemics. You could call it a scamdemic. The followers aren’t brainwashed. It’s more like brain laundering. They volunteer to humble themselves to their tyrant demagogues so they can lord it over everyone else. Same old BS from the same old BS cults.

Maybe you’ve dealt with a local SOB, a tyrant boss, partner, relative, associate, or neighbor. Mind you, they aren’t SOBs because you disagree with them. They’re SOBs only if they have a response to all challenges that makes them feel eternally, right, righteous, and mighty. Maybe they’re deifying some imaginary name-droppable ally, a God they claim to represent. Maybe some tyrant cult leader. Or maybe they’re just self-deifying. It doesn’t matter—SOBs all the same.

Gaslighting Essential Reads

Rescuing the Term "Gaslighting" From Overuse

How the Meaning of Gaslighting Has Been Diluted

If you have dealt with an SOB, I hope you’ll generalize from the experience rather than just escaping them, saying good riddance, and thinking from now on you’ll deal only with nice people. We need you thinking about how to humbly humble SOBs. It’s our civic and human duty to figure it out. If we don’t, we’re dead. And it won’t be climate crisis, nukes, or pandemics that got us. It’ll be the SOBs.

It takes language to be an SOB. To pose as God you have to be able to imagine, conceptualize, and idealize That’s the practical definition of intelligent life, a species we could communicate with. Lots of critters are predators and parasites. Here on Earth, only humans can be SOBs.

Ultimately, the challenge is language. Words give humans a way to claim the last word. We have to get better at depriving SOBs of the last word—or the last word about humans will be that we didn’t and, as a result, went extinct.