eanness is strikingly easy to define: Paradigmatically, it consists in taking delight in causing another gratuitous harm.  The mean person is not someone who just happens to cause another gratuitous harm and the laughs at the pain caused to the person.  No, the mean person actually looks for the opportunity to cause another gratuitous harm.  To be sure, this may often be accompanied by some form of rationalization.  But the transparency of it all is so evident that the meanness of the moment is lost on no one.  Relying upon a simply cost-benefit model, I want in this essay to explain the attraction of mean behavior. 

One does not have to be clairvoyant or particularly perceptive in order to see that meanness is on the rise.  People have become shameless in their meanness.  What?  Shameless meanness?  What on earth does that mean? 

There have always been mean people around.  But time was when people were at least subtle in their endeavors to be mean.  That is, meanness was considered to be bad and not even mean people denied that they were being bad. 

Those were the good ole days, of course, when the idea of an objective right and wrong made sense to all.  To be sure, people quibble about this or that.  But the general idea of moral objectivity had a rather secure footing upon the moral landscape. 

Not incidentally, I suggest, the idea of moral objectivity went hand-in-hand with the idea of self-restraint or self-command (to use the language of Adam Smith); and the exercise of this virtue entails exercising foresight. 

Now, wherever self-command and foresight prevail, then unadulterated self-gratification is masterfully curtailed.  Once upon a time, people routinely refrained from acts of self-gratification by offering such simple explanations as “I can’t afford to buy it” or “It is my duty to support my family.  Indeed, if anything is striking, it is striking just how much self-command people exercised, given that the conditions under which they lived were far more stressful than they are now.  The amenities of life that we enjoy today were not even dreamt about a half-century ago.  I am not interested in a trip down memory lane.  So I shall stop here.

I think that I have said enough, however, to speak to the prevalence of meanness nowadays.  In a world that privileges self-gratification, which I take to be an outcome of the rejection of moral objectivity, meanness stands as an ever readily available means of self-gratification. 

Again, one does not have to be clairvoyant or particularly perceptive in order to see that self-gratification is very nearly viewed these days as some sort of right—a perversion of the idea that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right.  It would never have occurred to the founding authors to think that forgoing self-command is a good thing.  But people think that nowadays.  Indeed, self-command is seen as downright burdensome.

Now, there is no end to the ways in which people can be unequivocally mean towards others.  There are subtle ways and there are horrendously brazen ways.  Meanness can come as a form of indifference or it can come as a form of punctiliousness.  The way in which many use cell phones nowadays can easily be countenanced as a form of meanness—an utter indifference to the humanity of the person at the counter, for example.  The application of a rule in a way that defies all reason and that is out of step with ordinary practice can be a case of meanness as punctiliousness. 

I maintain the very simple thesis that in a society that privileges self-gratification, then we should expect to see a rise in meanness, precisely because meanness is a very easy way to achieve self-gratification.  Employing a cost-benefit model, meanness is highly recommended on rational grounds.  On the one hand, it takes very little to be mean; on the other, the impact of mean behavior, by comparison to its cost, tends to be very high.  When it comes to being mean, there is always a sale, if you will.  That is, there is always a little piece of mean behavior that will in fact be highly gratifying because it will be quite harmful or disruptive. 

Mean people divide easily into two basic categories: the transparent folks versus the masqueraders.  In their treatment of Jews, the Nazis were typically of the transparent kind, in that they were out to be mean to Jews and this was known to everyone including Jews. 

Administrators tend to be masqueraders.  They are mean, but they tend to hide their meanness behind some endeavor to support the good or integrity of the institution—something generally seen as a good thing in and of itself.  Of course, forms for a job or a grant or whatever should be properly completed.  A masquerader, however, will pay uncanny attention to details—almost to the point of derailing the process—in the name of assuring the integrity of the form that has to be submitted.  Or, in the name of not creating untoward expectations, a masquerader will withhold either a compliment or even a perfunctory congratulation.  Instead, the masquerader will counsel caution because things can go wrong no matter how good they seem.  Needless to say, there is no gainsaying this truth. 

There are overly optimistic people and it can, in fact, be a good thing to rein in their expectations a bit.  But even here, congratulations are in order first.  It is simply cold not to do so in the name of warning a person not to be too optimistic.  After, there is no incompatibility in doing both ! 

In my assessment of mean folks who are transparent versus those who masquerade, I am torn.  Transparently mean people often do enormous harm to others.  Just so, one typically knows precisely who they are and where they.  Accordingly, it is easy enough to avoid them.  Masquerading mean people rarely do as much damage; yet, they tend to be much more difficult to avoid.  What is more, there is the issue of expectations.  It takes next to no time to have the very deep, deep expectation that a transparently mean person will do one considerable harm.  With a masquerading mean person, by contrast, there is a tendency to be charitable for awhile, to think that the meanness on her or his part won’t happen again.  Painfully, one is disappointed time and time again. 

There is perhaps a fascinating irony in all of this.  With the exception of Nazi-like situations, it is relatively easy to avoid, and so to protect oneself, from folks who are transparently mean.  So from a statistical point of view, the transparent mean people may be less of a catalyst in undermining the will of decent people to remain just that—decent.  Masquerading mean folks, by contrast, are everywhere, and so are well-nigh impossible to avoid.  One untoward consequence of this may very well be that it is masquerading meanness, like rust to metal, that is more likely to undermine the will of decent people to be decent. 

The point can be put quite poignantly in the following way: If a KKK person should call me a “nigger” this would not be a surprise.  It would in fact be rather silly of me to be disappointed.  If, on the other hand, time and time again one beloved student after another would treat me with great suspicion in the name of exercising caution, their doing so would be devastating, though she or he never used a single bit of hostile terminology.  The former is imminently more preferable than the latter.

Of course, if everyone is mean and moreover everyone is transparent in her or his meanness, then what we have is something akin to a vicious State of Nature, which by definition is a social environment entirely shorn of moral law and where only animal instincts rule.  This truth, in turn, underwrites the connection between the absence of moral objectivity, self-gratification, and meanness.