On assholes and such

I absolutely disagree that trying to fuck over your fellow men is a Bulgarian thing.

Sorry Jeff. I'll explain.

I am not saying that it doesn't happen. It happens a lot. A LOT. I simply do not agree it is a Bulgarian or East European thing. It seems to me that jerks are jerks, wherever you go. Also, some high pressure, cut-throat industries or economic environments produce higher levels of all-around jerkiness. So when you populate a high-stress setting with several natural assholes, you'll get the situation that Jeff was describing. The unique thing about natural assholes is that they tend to carry their asshole-ness across circumstances. That's why you'd observe exactly what Jeff was talking about: people trying to "fuck over their fellow man, whether its business, employment, property, the bill for dinner..." The reason why I think Jeff might have noticed that type behavior in Bulgaria (and we're talking mostly about the business environment, right?) rather than anywhere else is because of the country's relatively recent encounter with capitalism and private business ownership, undefined rules of the game, nobody to teach you, no time to figure it out on your own, relative economic instability and so forth. To put it simply, high pressure boosts general asshole levels.

Seriously, though, while in gradschool I've heard so many horror stories about graduate students being evil to each other (ripping off pages from books, stealing each others project ideas, presenting papers they didn't write as their own work), professors exploiting graduate assistants and tenured professors being assholes to everyone they encounter...that I'm quite willing to bet my life that high-stress environments bring out the assholes in all of us. And here, unfortunately, I am speaking from experience.