A Theory of Being “Surrounded by Idiots”

The barista is slow.
The driver in front of you is clueless.
The coworker asking a question is wasting everyone’s time.

You, meanwhile, are alert, capable, painfully aware of how things should be done.

This experience is common. Comfortingly common. And dangerously seductive.

Because there’s a possibility hiding inside it:
if everyone around you seems foolish, maybe the problem isn’t them.

Maybe it’s the way you’re seeing.

There’s a particular mental posture that turns the world into a parade of obstacles instead of people. In that posture, strangers stop being full human beings and become delays, annoyances, noise. They exist only in relation to your schedule, your patience, your plans.

This posture doesn’t usually announce itself as cruelty. It arrives dressed as efficiency. As realism. As “I just don’t tolerate nonsense.” But over time, it flattens the world. Nuance disappears. Curiosity dies. Everyone else becomes interchangeable.

And once that happens, something breaks.

When you assume others have nothing valuable to offer, you also assume you’re already right. You stop checking your own blind spots. Disagreement feels insulting instead of informative. Feedback feels like an attack. Even small inconveniences feel like moral failures on someone else’s part.

This is why irritation compounds. The more certain you are of your own clarity, the more unbearable everyone else becomes.

What’s interesting is that this mindset doesn’t distribute evenly. It tends to flow downward.

People rarely treat those above them with open contempt. Bosses, authorities, gatekeepers, these people are granted patience, politeness, careful listening. But clerks, waiters, students, strangers online? They absorb the frustration.

Power narrows empathy.

The higher you climb, socially, professionally, economically, the easier it becomes to believe that your time matters more, your opinions carry more weight, your mistakes deserve more forgiveness. The world starts bending around you, and that bending feels like confirmation of your importance.

But importance is a dangerous drug. It dulls perspective.

One of the clearest signs that this is happening is a shrinking capacity for embarrassment. Embarrassment requires imagining how you appear through someone else’s eyes, and caring. When you stop caring how you look to certain people, shame disappears. So does humility.

And without humility, self-knowledge becomes nearly impossible.

Ironically, the people most worried about being inconsiderate are usually the least inconsiderate. They replay conversations. They wonder if they spoke too sharply. They notice discomfort in others and feel compelled to repair it.

That discomfort is not weakness. It’s evidence of perspective.

By contrast, the person who never wonders whether they were out of line is not morally advanced. They’re insulated.

There’s a cruel trick here: the mindset that makes someone dismiss others also makes them incapable of recognizing that dismissal as a flaw. Any criticism can be waved away, people are too sensitive, too stupid, too biased to understand.

It becomes a closed system.

We can’t answer this by introspection alone. We’re excellent lawyers for our own behavior, capable of justifying almost anything with the right story.

A better test is external.

Look at your default view of people.
When you enter a crowded space, do you see individuals or obstacles?
When someone disagrees with you, do you feel curious or threatened?
When something goes wrong, do you immediately search for incompetence?

Most of us recognize flashes of ourselves in these questions, which is precisely why they’re hard to ignore.

The goal isn’t to become saintly, endlessly patient, morally pure. The goal is smaller and harder: to resist the temptation to turn the world into idiots so you can feel like the only sane one left.

Because once you do that, you may win the argument in your head,
but you lose access to reality.

And reality, inconveniently, is full of other minds.

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See you on the next stair,
Alastair