Perhaps you’ve heard of nightmare employees, who perform terribly and then, when fired or even reprimanded, become litigious. Or nightmare tenants, who are disruptive, don’t pay rent and, when evicted (sometimes after special extensions), deliberately trash the place where they’ve been staying. Obviously nightmare fans are a member of this genre: people who become obsessed with some public figure and wreak havoc on their lives.
Are these categories of people large? Probably not. Plenty of companies are never sued by a former employee, plenty of landlords happily collect rent without issues for years, and while very famous people attract a few stalkers by the law of large numbers, many of the merely slightly famous are rarely harassed.
Not only that, the “nightmare person” is not even the modal example of a bad person to deal with in a given context. There are plenty of merely bad employees for every nightmare employee - slackers who still get literally anything done, gossipers who tank morale but don’t harass clients in violation of contract, wounded ex-employees who post exaggerated negative reviews on Glassdoor. Most “bad tenants” are just late on rent once in a while, or try to hide moderate damage when they move out. And a “bad fan” might make off color comments on their idol’s social media posts. Would the idol rather be without them? Sure. But they aren’t nightmares.
The nightmare person does loom large, though. For those who’ve encountered one, and even for some who haven’t, they punch far above their weight class. The existence of few psychotic fans can force someone famous to move to a different house, hire a security detail, and travel under fake names. The existence of nightmare employees causes a mountain of HR paperwork to establish proof that nobody is mistreated, above and beyond what any reasonable person would require. And draconian rental agreements are defenses, to some extent, against nightmare tenants. You can roll with the risk of a mediocre counterparty in many domains. But the risk of a nightmare counterparty? Too much.
What About Nightmare Landlords/Bosses?
Oh, yes. I’ll get to them. Bear with me. But I see your point, and sympathize. In fact, your point is why I wanted to write this post in the first place. Let me take a crack at it first, though, the thing that I suspect you might be thinking (and if you aren’t, you can probably imagine friends who are):
This whole “nightmare employees” discourse is just a typical sham perpetrated by the powerful, and even more so for “nightmare tenants”. Bosses and landlords have it easy - they just sit back, enjoy their immense privilege, and let other people do all the work while they claim outsized rewards. A landlord literally does nothing but own property and collect someone else’s money; they often hire a company to do the property management (badly) for them! People with money and power screw everyone else, but they can’t stand being viewed as bullies, so they interpret the genuine pain of their victims as “acting out”. A landlord rents to a family of four who pays their rent for ten years, until one of them gets cancer, and then they’re out on the street. Why defend these guys?
Okay. I hear you. But if you’re thinking something like this (and yes, I am aware I’m putting words in your mouth), I think you’re jumping to a conclusion that makes this entire topic hard to talk about. Specifically, you’re making the inference:
You’re describing a problem a class of person faces. Therefore, you’re on their side.
There are good reasons to make that inference! Public discourse is really informationally dense, and we all have to use heuristics to make sense of it. So if someone says something bad that happens to a group you don’t like, it’s not insane to suspect they’re your ideological enemy and tune them out. But an unfortunate consequence of this is that sometimes, the problems your hated group faces influence their behavior, and until you understand those problems you can’t understand them.
It’s fine to hate landlords. Maybe for ideological reasons, maybe just because you’ve had bad experiences with them, or people you love have. Same deal with corporations, managers, celebrities, whatever. But if you don’t understand the incentives they face, you’re just going to end up confused. And the risk of nightmare people is a huge negative incentive.
Now For Something Even Sadder
Once, when I was in college, I hung out with some panhandlers for a while. They were of the hippy subgenre, and they had some stuff to make jewelry. I went and bought them a pizza, and they helped me make a small piece of amateur jewelry. I don’t really know or care if my behavior in this case was, taking the long view, ultimately prosocial. I’m sure many of the dentist pedestrians considered us an eyesore. But I had fun, and they had fun, and we all had pizza. It was nice.
Another time, I ran into a guy on a walk with a big, ugly looking scar across his entire neck, who was asking for a ride somewhere. Young and naive, I led him to my house, because that’s where my car was. I don’t remember if I gave him a ride or what, but I helped him out somehow. Later, he came to the house on Christmas looking for charity for himself and his girlfriend, and possibly (or maybe not, who knows) stole a can of tuna. It wasn’t super fun having a person of unknown stability coming to my house to solicit me for food, but it also wasn’t all that scary, and nothing bad ever really came of it. The guy was down on his luck, and on balance I’m happy enough to have helped. I’m also happy I moved out of that house.
Both these incidents were many years ago. These days, I rarely engage with people struggling on the street. Mostly, I think, because I’ve seen an uptick in really deranged behavior in a small number of them. There’s a guy who screams at and punches every stop sign he sees. There’s a guy with yellowed eyes who yelled at my dad in a parking lot for no reason, convinced he was being threatened. And worst, there’s the guy who was evocatively racist at the dollar store when my sister was there, was escorted out, and tried to run back in with a big knife - they locked the door on him just in time.
I suspect that, just like when I was talking about bosses and landlords, you may be tempted to vibe check me here. Something like:
Oh boy, here this guy goes talking about crime and demonizing society’s most vulnerable people. I’d better not lend any support to these ideas, because it’s only going to lead to, like, defunding homeless shelters or putting spikes on park benches, or something awful like that.
Again, I hear you. But actually, I’m not trying to go that direction at all. Rather, I’m trying to point out a very specific dynamic, which has nothing to do with the vast majority of people down on their luck and in need of support. And that dynamic is: the existence of a volatile and potentially dangerous subset of a vulnerable group, imposes costs on the rest of that group, and everyone who interacts with it. When I hear stories about the dollar store racist, I’m probably not about to make eye contact with anyone I see taking shelter under a building in that shopping center, for a good long time. It might be that guy! Iterate on this enough, and you end up withholding compassion from a lot of vulnerable people, because of the extreme negative behavior of very few.
Notice, also, that none of this requires that extreme negative behavior to be morally those people’s fault. A nightmare employee may truly believe they’ve been wronged, and sue with total conviction they’re in the right (and, obviously, plenty of perfectly reasonable employees sue abusive employers for good reasons too). A volatile homeless person might be in the throes of a mental health crisis due to an untreated, severe condition they contracted as a child. It’s not about assigning blame, or declaring that 95% of a less powerful group is downtrodden and innocent, while 5% is fiendish and guilty. It’s not a matter of guilt and innocence at all! It’s just that large groups often have tiny subsets that behave really badly, and that behavior has consequences for everyone.
Rich People Do It Too
I promised I’d get back to nightmare landlords and bosses. Time to make good. Because this dynamic actually isn’t limited to vulnerable populations. There are plenty of examples where a few terribly-behaving people in positions of power impose costs on everybody:
A boss doesn’t pay an employee on time, leading that employee to obsessively check their bank account for not only that job, but every future job they have
A landlord charges outlandish fees for spurious “damage” to a property, causing their tenant to obsessively document every place they move into from then on
A rich playboy lavishes gifts upon a girl to make her think that their relationship is serious when it isn’t, causing her to mistrust other men in the future
You can go your whole life without encountering a boss who doesn’t pay on time (or at all), or a landlord who tries to stick you with every bill possible, or a romantic partner who aggressively leads you on. Just like, if you’re lucky enough to be a boss or landlord, you can have a string of great employees or tenants. But once you encounter a nightmarish one, or even hear enough firsthand accounts of nightmarish ones, you have to keep your guard up.
The Costs
Imagine a society exactly like ours, but where nobody ever tried to break into anyone else’s house. We wouldn’t need door locks, or locksmiths when we accidentally locked ourselves out of our houses. We wouldn’t need to keep track of keys, and we’d never lose them. We lose a lot of time and money, as a society, because of the need to lock our houses. This despite the fact that even among routine criminals, very few would actually attempt a home invasion.
The same goes with everything else I’ve been talking about here. I feel more nervous in certain public spaces, not because of the prevalence of people down on their luck, but because of the small subset of those people who’ve actively been scary in front of me and my direct family members. When I was waiting for my wife to get her fiancée visa and had a spare room, I happily let friends stay there but would never have considered renting it to strangers, not because 98% of strangers would be bad to live with, but because the worst 2% would be so awful (and I’d heard nightmare roommate stories from my friends). When I’ve job hunted in the past, I’ve strongly prioritized referrals over cold applications, because I can trust that a referral won’t have a terrible company culture, and a terrible company culture can be so unpleasant.
This stuff comes up everywhere, and the downsides don’t just accrue to the person doing the choosing. All the perfectly acceptable stranger roommates I might have lived with lost out because of the possibility of a terrible one, for example. If the worst few percent of some group is really bad, there’s a strong distortionary effect, often making things worse for the whole group.
So What?
You might be wondering if I have some sort of solution, here. Or, more likely, you might be wondering if I’m about to sprout a villainous mustache and advocate that we cull the wicked, or something. But nah. I think the problem I’m gesturing toward in this post is one of the thorniest and hardest to manage in modern civilization, and most methods of throwing out the bathwater get the baby, too. We’ve just got to deal.
The point, rather, is one of empathy. If some system is trying to make you jump through hoops, entertain the possibility that it’s not about you at all, and that actually that system is guarding against exploitation by a class of person that, at some point, it ran into. Start seeing the megastructures around you as wounded animals, behemoths who once got a nasty infected wound from a particularly hostile mouse.
Or when someone, especially someone close to the dysfunction in question, seems callous about some group you’re protective of. It makes sense to push back against that callousness, but also to remember that most likely, the person’s feelings come from a brush with the left tail of that group’s behavior. A CVS employee ranting about a guy who came at him with a broken bottle is just traumatized, not mounting a crusade against all shoplifters.
You can still hate it. When it’s unjust (and it often is) you can still stand against it. But first, I think it helps to understand it: that society’s systems aren’t just guarding against you, or even against slightly bad actors. They’re guarding against the most nightmarish behavior you can think of. Or maybe worse.