Perversity Makes Us Do Bad Things

In 1981, when I was a freshman in college, my roommates and I returned from our spring break to discover that our dorm room apartment had been burglarized. The campus police arrived and went room to room dutifully writing down what had been stolen.

When they came to my room, they saw a naked bed with a bare mattress, its sheets on the floor. The floor was covered with dirty clothes and hangers and books and Hostess Twinkie wrappers. Album covers and records were strewn all over. The room looked like a cyclone had been through it.

One of the officers said, “Man, they really did a number on this one.”

The thing was my room was exactly as I had left it. Nothing had been taken. The robbers probably had assumed that a person who would live in such flagrant disorder would be unlikely to possess anything of value. As well, the odor may have kept them out, a perfume of sweat, of unstirred air, and of random pieces of decayed food.

I had recently purchased an expensive stereo system, probably the most valuable item in the entire apartment. But it had been hidden beneath my mess and had been left intact.

I tell this story not to prove that being an extreme slob has an upside, but rather to wonder at the perversity of how I lived back then.

One form of perversity is self-sabotage

When I use the word perversity, I mean the instinct to act against what is expected even knowing that what you’re doing is destructive. It is rebellion for its own sake.

In my case, my perversity was to self-sabotage. I was harming only myself by my slovenly habits, a rather meek and passive form of rebellion.

I was mostly unhappy during my freshman year. I was shy and had no clue how to be a success at college. I didn’t know how to approach girls. I didn’t know how to approach anyone. I was angry at being at UPenn and not Princeton, which had rejected me and where I thought I belonged.

That I was a talented student conferred no status. I soon discovered that I could miss most of my classes and still get straight A’s. Attendance was never taken at my classes, and the grades were determined by one or two exams that I could cram for efficiently. If I was capable of brilliant insight about the material being taught, I never gave myself the opportunity to display it.

My freshman twenty-five

My personal dissolution could have taken the form of drinking or drugs. On rare occasion it did, but only in the company of my two roommates who were my only friends. Instead, I set about living and eating like a slob.

For lunch every day I ate an entire pizza and drank a few Cokes. For breakfast and dinner, I indulged my sweet tooth with things like the aforementioned Twinkies. Plus unheated Pop Tarts.

I gained a great deal of weight, perhaps twenty-five pounds. I wore the same clothes and showered when the clothes felt stiff or upon demand from my roommates.

I remember having a TV dinner once. It was my first TV dinner and not knowing how TV dinners worked, I put it in the oven to heat up but failed to take the tray out of the cardboard box.

You may ask what I could possibly have been thinking. Perhaps I thought that TV dinners were so thoroughly automatic that the box might magically melt away or that the tray would remove itself.

In retrospect that crazed and careless act of “cooking” was part of proving how little I cared about personal propriety.

It was all in service of being perverse to my well-being.

By the next year, I had mostly cleaned up my act. I lost my freshman twenty-five and groomed myself sufficiently to be able to walk into a room and not immediately seek out the shadows. My self-harm had been very mild and reversible.

My misadventure as a college freshman troglodyte was a time in my life when I was most gripped by the spirit of perversity, a spirit that drives our actions far more than we care to acknowledge.

Perversity considered more widely

It is Eve eating the forbidden fruit, it is pressing our tongue against a sore tooth just to feel the pain, it is violating any “norm” because sometimes we feel our blood rise against what is expected of us. We are so often accused of going through life in lockstep according to the expectations of others. But really, we dream about being rebels. There is something horrible to us about conformity.

Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Black Cat is one of his most grisly tales. His narrator drinks to excess and then, in an alcoholic haze, tortures and kills the pet that will not stop loving him. He writes:

“Who has not a hundred times, found himself doing wrong, doing some evil thing for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Are not we humans at all times pushed, ever driven in some unknown way to break the law just because we understand it to be the law?”

I wonder what role the force of perversity plays in our current political moment. The temptation to exasperate the experts just to see how they might react. To inflict pain merely to see pain inflicted. Poe’s narrator gouged out one of his cat’s eyes because he was filled with anger and because no one could stop him. Not satisfied with that torture, he killed his cat the next night.

A dinner that foretold an era

I recall a dinner my wife Debbie and I had in 2015 with a couple who lived nearby. The wife and I served on the Riverdale Country School Board together. We ate at a neighborhood place on 86^th and Madison called Demarchelier, a French bistro that is gone.

I remember the four of us talking about politics, which was a lot easier to do in 2015 when Trump’s candidacy was viewed as a PR stunt and a curiosity. I remember my friend’s husband laughing rather evilly at the then outlandish thought of Trump becoming president. He said, “It would serve them right.” I was confused then as to who he meant by “them.”

Now I know he meant me and the other “libs.” We were his black cat. He wanted to see us squirm.

Today, ten years later, I wonder if the animus and cruelty directed at so many Americans, and so many people overseas as well, is at least in part the result of the instinct and opportunity for perversity.

This type of perversity is not self-sabotage. It is, however, destroying things––institutions, alliances, laws, and trade policies––at least in part for the satisfaction of seeing them destroyed. And the satisfaction derived from being the instrument of their destruction.

Capricious cruelty, whether to ourselves or to others, is nothing new in human history. Arsonists burn things to watch the fire.

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Question for the comments: Has perversity—rebellion for its own sake— ever tempted you into an action, like Eve below eating the forbidden fruit?

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Titian 1576