Running With Scissors

The Chapter Where Peter Finally Dies, And Stays Dead

Clickbait is one of those commonplace annoyances that, despite nobody ever really liking it, still plague our everyday life, like losing your car keys, or people having obligatory meetings when the information given could've easily been surmised in a brief email.

There's hardly any day when we're not tempted to click on that article that promises us ten different reasons why our spouse might actually be a furry, promising us that number four might be the most surprising of all, which is inherently silly. If number four is the most surprising, why isn't it number one? Who authorized such a poorly organized list? With such questions in mind, you click on it, only to be directed to a thinly veiled wolf costume catalog, and you're left worse for it, if not a bit aroused.

But we don't get mad because we actually wanted to know what that promised number four was, but because the article breaks the inherent trust we give it through the unspoken social contract between reader and writer. We, as reader, trust the writer to provide us with accurate information about the subject at hand. The writer, in turn, should provide such information, trusting we come back for more if we were to like it.

However, clickbait breaks that unspoken social contract by, instead of providing us with the advertised information, punching us in the genitals and implying it had intercourse with our parents last night, followed by other equally foul implications only suited for an Xbox Live chat.

To understand said social contract—and, interestingly enough, clickbait—we have to talk about the man who mastered both: Thomas Hobbes.

In his book, Leviathan—which actually contains zero leviathans and was only titled like that to make the vastly religious majority of the time buy it on impulse, thus inventing clickbait—Hobbes argues that humans are neither good or evil, and that there's no such thing as a common good.

Common evil, however, was something to be feared, as it was a state of supreme selfishness and violence—a war of all against all. Or as we like to call it: a perpetual Black Friday sale.

To avoid this state of supreme lawlessness, people must abide to a set of commonly accepted rules, decided and agreed amongst them and supervised by a sovereign of some kind—a social contract. "Don't kill each other" is one of the most popular ones these days, for some reason.

There are some small exceptions to the "decided and agreed" rule, however.

Most people surely haven't agreed that drinking and driving should be penalized, but if a person tries to explain the nuances of social contractualism to a police officer while blind drunk, you would most likely get tased. Even if you haven't tacitly agreed to that law, by virtue of using their roads and using their driving licenses, you're agreeing to them in the eyes of the law.

Social contractualism doesn't only apply to macrosocial systems like countries or planets, but also to small groups, like friends and families, each with their own set of implicit rules.

Perhaps it is against the social contract of your group of friends to mention that one time Greg defecated on the Bellagio Fountain while high on ayahuasca, or to remind Aunt Judy that she is pushing forty and unmarried, and that no, that cat is not your kid and it will most likely eat you when you die alone in your studio apartment.

As such, it is imperative for anyone wishing to be a part of a new group to understand the nuances of their social contract, lest they break it in such way that calls for people of said group to break their skull with makeshift weapons, as was the case of one Peter Katz.

The Normal-But-Incredibly-Unique-And-Talented People Circus—formerly Dr. Freak's Freaky Fair of Freaky Folk—once sat on a weird place of the social contract, along other similar enterprises, if they could be called as such.