Your Fellow Americans: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know?

Savvy bumpkinism revisited.

Collage illustration by @loureedsnephew.

As the Pew Research Center reported last month, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty-five countries surveyed and Canada had the brightest. Only 8% of Canadians think their fellow citizens are bad.

Pew floats a few ideas about why this might be, the first being political polarization. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see their fellow citizens as bad, though this is consistent across countries for parties out of power. The study also considers that Americans are more judgmental than people in other countries, but finds that—on particular issues—this doesn’t seem to be the case. Americans are, in general, more lenient on acts—save for the perennial culture war weapons of abortion and homosexuality—but tougher on persons, which has the ring of truth.

Evidence that Americans have reached the point of irreconcilability abounds. Take the recent HBO docuseries Neighbors, a must-see for connoisseurs of what I call “hard cringe.” Soft cringe features awkward social situations but gives viewers occasional relief via punchlines and pratfalls. Curb Your Enthusiasm and the mad cap antics of The Chair Company are soft cringe confections. Hard cringe, on the other hand, comes from Sweden, dating back to Bergman’s Persona and erupting most recently with Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Force Majeure. Hard cringe gives viewers no lifeline and no cues; no permission to breathe, let alone laugh. Ironically, a Canadian—Nathan Fielder—is its leading North American purveyor.

Each episode of Neighbors braids together two unrelated disputes with the lyricism of Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Two sets of preppers in the middle of nowhere can’t agree about a gate. A Vietnam vet and a former male stripper can’t agree who is stalking whom. The creators say the series emerged from their pandemic obsession with watching neighborhood dispute videos on YouTube. It is difficult to watch, as American grown-ups try—and repeatedly fail—to establish the minimal common ground needed to resolve what appear to be incredibly trivial disputes. Violence frequently seems inevitable.

Such incommensurability also drives Bugonia, the Oscar-nominated bleak watch from director Yorgos Lanthimos. Teddy Gatz (played by Jesse Plemons) is an abused and conspiracy-addled worker who kidnaps pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) in an attempt to broker a meeting with the Andromedan emperor, who he believes has sent her to Earth. He sees Fuller as so manipulative that he goes to extraordinary lengths—including chemical castration—to be certain he will not be fooled. This seems like it’s shaping up to be misogynistic torture porn, until Fuller regains consciousness, understands who she’s dealing with, and locks in on Gatz with perfectly calibrated management-speak. Both understand how to distrust each other.

On the eve of Trump’s first victory—under the cover of pseudonymity—I first sketched a figure I called “the savvy bumpkin,” whose experience and subsequent worldview seemed to describe much of Trump’s base. Arriving in modernity just to be swindled, the savvy bumpkin—who could be a Tea Partier or a Whole Foods anti-vaxxer—devises a solution to make sure they are never swindled again: Don’t believe anybody, ever. This is the solution Teddy Gatz adopts in Bugonia and it’s what makes agreement impossible on Neighbors. Mutual suspicion—raised from hermeneutic to heuristic—is insurmountable.

In 2007, psychologists coined a term that gets at why that might be. Sugrophobia—literally ”fear of sucking”—is an attempt to name “the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re ‘being a sucker’— that someone is taking advantage of them, partly thanks to their own decisions.” This according to Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, whose book Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order—and What We Can Do About It, came out in paperback last year. (It was released by HarperCollins, where I used to work and—as fate would have it—I worked with Wilkinson-Ryan more than twenty years ago, before sugrophobia was even a word.)

Fool Proof details how various insights gleaned from behavioral economics play out in legal, social, and political frameworks, and how the high emotional cost of feeling like a fool puts its thumb on the scale. The simplest example is the Ultimatum Game—a cornerstone of behavioral economics—in which “proposers” are given an amount of money to split with a “responder,” and the responder can either accept the offer or refuse it, in which case neither party gets anything. While the responder “should”—according to a narrowly economic view of human behavior—take whatever is offered, they regularly choose to torpedo the deal when offered too little. As Wilkinson-Ryan says, they choose to “detonate” rather than “cooperate.”

The most surprising thing about this discovery is that it had to be discovered at all. Outside of science—if economics is to be considered such—there is an entire canon of modern literature (emerging alongside capitalism) detailing this refusal, from Poe’s “imp of the perverse” to Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” Still, this tendency continuously takes theorists by surprise, as it did the founders of the Frankfurt School when the failures of scientific socialism forced them into Freud’s waiting arms. It is the refusal that plays out in Bugonia, as Teddy Gatz disconnects from the reason game in direct proportion to how reasonable he is expected to be, despite the sweet counsel of his cousin Don, a chorus of one preaching compassion. Human behavior can never be made entirely rational, because the drive for freedom resists all systems. As Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, “Don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.”

Back to Neighbors. With violence waiting in the wings, the disputants sling half-baked legalisms at each other before eventually winding up in actual courts. The other party is not following “the rules,” even though “the rules”—and, in a Wittgensteinian twist, what it means to follow a rule—cannot be agreed upon. True to its “hard cringe” aesthetic, Neighbors provides little hope about what might happen when even “ruliness” is in dispute, leaving viewers with that sinking feeling that hell is, in fact, other people.

It is difficult to see how we can recover from what Wilkinson-Ryan calls this “sucker-phobic populism,” fanned by Donald Trump’s “furious refusal that neither he, nor America, would play the fool.”

What appears to be missing from American life is the figure of “the cooler,” first articulated in a social science setting by sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1952 paper “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,” a foundational text of sugrophobia studies. In the paper, Goffman considers confidence games as a model for social situations in which individuals experience loss of status. When they think of themselves as savvy, for example, but have to face themselves as bumpkins. Goffman notes that in addition to the con man and the mark, there is often a third figure—employed by the con man—whose job it is to appease or pacify the mark so they don’t go to the police. This person is called “the cooler,” and their job is to “cool the mark out.” The implications are rich, and Goffman pulls in examples of “cooling” from customer service to romantic break-ups. It is obvious, when reading it, that one of the duties of leadership is to provide such a cooling function—whether this is noble or merely manipulative—and that our current president is at best unaware of, and at worst antagonistic to, this function.

Self-cooling is always an option, often achieved via religion or other paths to moral superiority. As Will Rogers (probably) said, “I’d a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.” It is better to be the mark than the con man, in other words, though this is now largely viewed as another sucker play.

Goffman details, further, what might happen if the mark refuses to be cooled out. She can suffer a breakdown and become mentally disorganized. She can turn “sour,” and withdraw enthusiasm from her participation, or—finally—she can go into business for herself and turn the con on someone else.

In Bugonia’s Teddy, we see someone dealing with all three stages of refusal. He has become mentally disorganized, “sour,” and he has his own master plan. Attempts at cooling aren’t working, whether administered via Michelle’s corporate deflection—“stalling” in Goffman’s scheme—or his cousin Don’s moral purity. The movie itself—spoiler alert—provides redemption for Teddy, but it’s just a movie. “It is, perhaps, in this region of phantasy that the defeated self makes its last stand,” as Goffman says. The real-life disputants in Neighbors, on the other hand, seemed trapped apart—in irreconcilable fantasies—with not a cooler in sight.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )