KEW Episode 147: 100% Asshole Free

If you’re familiar with me or craft beer (or maybe both?) you may be familiar with the phrase, “The brewing industry is 99% asshole free”. This quote became famous when Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery published his book “Brewing Up a Business”. This book was an inspiration to my brewery and a big part of the craft beer explosion.

The quote suggests that the beer business is more cooperative than competitive. It turns out this is not true. Like any business, breweries compete with each other. And as the number of breweries increased, so did the number of assholes. In the end, Sam’s quote is not true, and there are as many assholes in the craft brewing business as there are anywhere.

Surely you have assholes in your life. Maybe a boss or coworker. Maybe a family member. Maybe your president. What’s crazy is that these jerks seemed to be more loved than hated a lot of times. How did they get to be the boss in the first place?

In fact, in our white patriarchal plutocratic world being an asshole seems like a requirement. Many people in power are admired for their assholery. 

This makes me wonder how much we are all complicit in these assholes' success because we enable it.

Now, I get it. Many people are not in the position to refuse an asshole. When they are in positions of power over us, there is little we can do that doesn’t harm ourselves. We lose jobs, relationships, and money if we rebel against their poor behavior.

But enablers and complicit behavior don’t help drive assholes extinct. 

Have you ever thought about a time when there were no assholes? I often think (perhaps naively) that we didn’t have a lot of assholes until we had social hierarchies. Depending on when that began (and we’ll never know), there may have been a time when social groups had mechanisms to PREVENT assholes from gaining power rather than ENABLING them. 

In fact, I will suggest here that shame was one of these mechanisms. Shame is a terrible thing, and I have shared about this here and here. But shame evolved for some reason. I think groups of humans, and maybe other primates, used shame to call out and DISABLE poor behavior. So when our ancestors acted like assholes, they got kicked out of the tribe. The asshole genes were selected against, in an evolutionary sense.

As our societies modernized and became more numerous the asshole reduction behaviors have been forgotten. Most assholes needed to get punched in the mouth or otherwise publicly shamed but were not. I think some elements of modernity, including social hierarchies, power, land ownership, and money, created artificial evolutionary selection pressures FOR assholery.

In this episode I talk more about why it is critical we reverse this trend and rid ourselves of the assholes in our lives.

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