In any case I was thinking about Carlin the other day because it gave me a way to think about my relationship to a colleague I very much admire, but whose ability to manage social situations, especially in relation to powerful people in my profession, makes me uncomfortable. This bothered me on and off for a week or two, and I tried to talk things through with my spouse, attempting initially to parse the specific difference that I felt separated the two of us, what made my various forms of socializing ok and this other person's somehow beyond the social pale.
I had developed a pretty clear theory of those differences before I thought of Carlin, whose effect was to put me back — rightly, I think — in a space in which I was forced to acknowledge that my anxiety about this person's social skils (accompanied, in their case, by genuine professional talent and labor) had much more to do with what I saw as its relation to mine than it did to anything else. To rewrite Carlin's rule: anyone who is more social in a hierarchical situation than you is a brown-noser, and anyone who is less social is an idiot.
The rule applies equally to all sorts of other things: Anyone who spends more time talking about their child than you do (or think you would) is an obsessive helicopter parent, anyone who spends less time than you do is a borderline child abuser. Anyone faster than you on the bike is narcissistically obsessed with working out, and anyone who's slower is a lazy bastard who needs to train harder. Anyone who has had more sexual partners than you is a “slut” (sorry to use the term, even in quote marks); anyone who's had fewer is a loser. Anyone who recycles more than you do is a granola-eating enviro-freak; anyone who does so less is an ugly American. And so on.
The nice thing is that once I saw this, I was able to completely relax about my colleague, who I didn't want to feel envious of. Because, let's face it, to call someone an “asshole” or a “helicopter parent” or a “slut” or a “narcissist” is always to indicate the wound they create in you by being who they are, the vulnerability established by the possibility of your choices or your abilities being somehow not enough. (Conversely, the “idiots” on the other side of the equation make us feel better about ourselves.) And when I saw us in a hierarchy that revolved around my own place in the world, I realized that, first of all, I was surely somebody else's brown-nosing asshole, and second, that it was not the case that there is somewhere a great chain of assholes, leading inexorably from the one supreme asshole at the top to the completely abject idiot at the bottom (a nice change from turtles all the way down, though), but rather that we're all caught up in a network of self-evaluation and desire that routes itself in all kinds of geometric forms through the social spaces in which we live.
Seeing that my anxiety about this colleague was a function of the network and my felt place in it, rather than something between us, allowed me to understand the differences I imagined between us as, first of all, the products of my own anxiety (which this colleague surely shares, if not in relation to me, then in relation to someone) and not anything that's exactly out there in the real, and, second of all, as expressions of a network that is relational and local rather than objective and universal. In this light, my attempt to decide exactly where I thought this person had crossed the line from acceptably social to brown-noser, which looks very much like a rational attempt to control and define the world by establishing strict categories for its objects and behaviors, turns out to be, first, the irrational projection of my anxiety onto the world, and second, the function of a non-rational system that organizes us all in relation to one another.
This felt, when it occurred, like enlightenment.
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