[578] Worst Person in the World

What if you are the worst person in the world?

“It’s an absurd question!” you protest. “I never killed anybody! I don’t steal! I even returned a wallet, went to church, and helped a duck cross the road!” A growing list of examples continuing to flood your head as if you’ve grasped the point of the question. The worst person in the world could have simply done one less good thing than you by your math and method. We’ll let aside how we’d disagree about your church attendance, and refrain from speculating if the duck you helped was a cousin of the one you ordered at a fancy restaurant.

In order for the question to make sense, as we reflexively take for granted does or doesn’t happen based on how we feel about it, we’d have to agree on what a person was. We’d have to try and do a moral calculus that spoke to perceived goods and bads and multipliers given specific acts. Then we would proceed to imagine the consequences of being the worst person and if they even mattered. It’s because I ask the question about myself I bother to ask it of you. It’s my brazen acceptance of its premise that makes me wonder how you’d rationalize accepting or rejecting it.

I’m, of course, the worst person in the world because I “waste my potential.” When I could be learning, often I’m not. When I could be helping, I’m happier to pass along the article or, maybe...maybe click a donate button. I can argue away the value of my contributions as easily as it suits me to justify time on my ass or time sacrificed in services to exploitative ends. I’ve broken people’s trust, including my own. I’ve lied with the fluidity of the most pathological. I’ve charged headlong into the most petty and immature woods to provoke police responses and maybe soon a judge’s as well.

In my imagination, the worst person in the world is a standing betrayal to what they presume to know. For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as something special. Hardly thinking I was born that way, I’ve merely received “extra” attention or “different” comments regarding my behavior. I speak wrong. I take too much pride in how I allocate my time, somehow without irony if you read the last paragraph. I assert almost daily, now that Byron is vegan, that I’d absolutely shoot a cow in the head or cut off a chicken’s in order to own my complicity. My murderous soul placated with a layer of cheese and side of fries. And while I’ll never claim jokes are necessarily malicious, I rarely hold any regard for how they make you feel.

I’m a sex maniac! I can use someone like an object and feel nothing but the ingratiation of a special meal. Hell, the meal might even register as better. I spit in the eye of even the most humble of your gods. I litter the temple of my body with sugar and alcohol and let my muscles atrophy as I wait around in front of the television until the next party. I viciously attack my microbiome with products that soften my hair and dry out my skin. I pick and dig at every bump on my skin until I look like a child who had parents that put cigarettes out on him.

Petty, superficial, judgmental, animal-killer, non-believer, tactless, self-harming, dishonest, lazy sociopath. “What a mouthful,” she said. It’s a wonder what I’m even doing here were I not a hopeless despot on top of it all happy to call myself an accident of naive self-indulgence. What a depraved and black ego it must take to prop up that mess of horrifying circumstance and derive any sense of worth or responsibility. Whatever you want to make of life, it certainly dictated my cancerous malaise traveling through the bowels of existence eager to be excreted into oblivion.

There’s a but coming, right? We’ve been playing a game with a theoretical question. Well, the question exists, but every answer can only be inferred or inductively reasoned to conclude I am indeed the worst person in the world. Do I need to know everyone or what they’ve done or think of themselves in order to falsify the conclusion? Do we have to agree on a dozen moral premises for you to trust my assessment? Asking too many questions would be to miss the point, because I am the worst person in the world.

But what if you were instead? Would you contact me and brag or insist I add one more adjective to outpace you? Should we start a club and sew .000000001%-er patches on our jackets and explain that we’re not super rich, but part of an even more elite club? Maybe we could get together and trade pills to help us cope with our subconscious that always seems to betray the braggadocio of elucidating such fine details of our positions in the hierarchy. I got it! Suicide pact in the spirit of the last and ultimate act of defiant irony, ridding the world of our cosmic stain in the bedrock moral act that shifts the universe back to a new positive trending energy. I can see the headlines, “Worst People in the World Save Humanity!”

I suppose the question would be easier if I even knew what it meant to be human. “OH THE HUMANITY!” is constantly thrust in front of our faces. Resilient! In the face of endless, historically insisted upon, oppression and exploitation. Violent! In defense of its ideology and resources. Depressed and anxious! If surveys and pill sales are to be believed. Loving! Per dose of Hollywood or artistic cliche. Idiotic! From the vaunted mouths of pop stars, athletic babes, and leaders of superpowers sans heroics.

It seems to me we’ve done next to nothing in figuring out how to agree on what it means to be a person. Sure, philosophers yada yada and science says you’re 50-65% water blah-didly-blah. What’s a philosopher’s words in a language we can’t understand? What makes us water worth drinking? We stopped standing with Standing Rock. We’re flooding Florida and islands only VICE seems able to discover. We’re drowning in debt. Wave after wave of lies come from our highest offices and representatives. Awash in celebrity culture we wipe away the basis from which to form a fundamental opinion of who we are, in spite or relation, and whether we’re the worst person in the world.

So are you? A person, that is. Because we have a lot of work to do on getting to which of us is the worst.