The Face-Punch Theory

My friends, I would like to share with you the “Punched in the Face Theory of Interpersonal Contact”.

This is a theory I completely made up in order to explain why there seem to be so many complete and utter assholes around today.

Ok, let’s go back in time about 20 years.

Little Timmy is 10 years old. He’s playing a game with a bunch of other kids in the playground. First he blatantly cheats, and then decides to get right in another kid’s face gloating about how he won and the other kid’s mother has oral sex with goats.

What’s the result?

He gets punched in the face, none of the kids want to play with him any more and he learns a lesson: Acting like douchebag gets you punched in the face and leaves you with no friends.

Fast forward to today. Little Timmy is at his computer, playing a game or posting comments on other people’s websites. He’s acting like a total douchebag, and people tell him so. Timmy, hidden behind the anonymity of the internet, finds this fucking hilarious. He can act like a bigoted little shit in a consequence free environment.

Then, he talks to his ‘friends’ who are all people he’s never actually met in real life. He talks about how he ‘pwned noobs and bitches’ and his friends all tell him how hilarious this is and how ‘he’s the man’.

Result? Timmy learns that being a douchebag is amazingly fun and people will think you’re awesome.

He totally misses the fact that he doesn’t actually have any real friends, and that his online friends probably wouldn’t like him very much if they met him in real life. It’s easy to get on with someone who you only talk to for an hour or so a day, especially when you have plenty of time to think if ‘witty’ responses and can tell them anything you want.

Little Timmy is five feet tall, has bad acne and has never so much as touched a real girl. To his online friends, he’s 6 feet tall, works out for five hours each day, plays guitar in a band and ‘like, totally did five chicks last night’.

This results in him having zero social skills as he doesn’t actually interact with very many real people all the way through school.

Then, he starts his working life and acts like a complete and total douche. People who actually have social skills don’t punch him in the face because they know that in the adult world, punching someone in the face is likely to result in losing your job or prison time for assault. Timmy doesn’t realize this and thinks the reason he’s avoiding beatings is because he’s totally intimidating.

Again, he ends up with zero friends and ends up as a total outcast, but every night he goes home, goes online and tells his online friends that the people he works with are a bunch of stuck up pussies. His douchebag friends listen to him and tell him how hilarious he is.

Eventually, Timmy gets out of his car and screams at someone for cutting him off, or he pushes some guy in a bar a little too far and gets his ass kicked. Of course, he didn’t throw the first punch, because the concept of actually cashing the checks his mouth constantly writes is totally alien to him…and the guy who beat him up ends up getting sued or going to jail. All this does is reinforce Timmy’s idea that he’s awesome and better than everyone else.

He goes online again and updates his myspace page about how some psycho attacked him, but he totally kicked the guy’s ass, sorry those three guy’s asses, and the police got involved and they’re sending his attackers to jail…then he totally banged their girlfriends.

In essence, my theory is this. Getting punched in the face at a young age makes you a better person. It was impossible to be a complete ass when I was a kid without facing some serious consequences.

Today, when 90% of kid’s communication goes through the internet or phone texting, kids just don’t learn that being a selfish douchebag is a bad thing. They don’t understand the difference between thinking and saying something and actually doing it.

This is why it’s completely impossible to play an online game without getting screamed at by racist 12 year olds. It’s why there are so many suburban middle-class white kids who think taking a picture of themselves wearing a gigantic (fake) gold chain, holding an airsoft gun makes them a ‘gangsta’. It’s why there are so many pale, friendless virgins who think that 1500 myspace friends means they’re ‘popular’