When no one's looking

     A wise old dude once told me, when I was much, much younger, that it didn't matter what people did out in public.  What matters is what they do when they think no one is around.  I don't remember who told me that, but I do remember I was far too young to remember much of anything other than that I figured being somewhere else was better than listening to some old dude talk about shit I didn't understand.  I am glad I remembered what he said though.  It was long before sociology and psychology where the catch-all university credit and he apparently had some insights.

     I think now, they have fancy-assed terms like "authenticity" or the "authentic self'" for what the old guy was talking about.  In basic terms when you think no one is watching, you are for more likely, or completely likely, to act like how you really want to act instead of pretending to have a different behaviour or ideas or morals purely because of where you are and/or who you are with.

     The internet provides a unique twist to that process, especially an internet with an environment where instead of no one watching, someone with suppressed urges has lots of people watching, possibly with similar repressed urges.  The anonymity of the internet and its pseudonyms and avatars allows people to remain unidentified if they want so they have a big audience to show off to, yet at the same time feel the same kind of protection and lack of external pressures and accountability, just as if they were alone.  In that environment, where society, surroundings or other people/players can't really force them to be something else, like in real life, the real them comes out.

     In anonymous surroundings, or alone-like conditions, nice people are still nice people.  Latent assholes however, will pop up like daisies.  Out in life, these turds will wrap themselves up in gold leaf, and people think they are gold through and through.  In Eve though, they're just the pieces of shit that they always were, that they are.  Eve to assholes is like the dark to rats.  Turn on the light of the real world, and the rat assholes of Eve scurry off, cover their shit with gold leaf again and claim they're not really an asshole, they're just "playing" an asshole on the internet.  Sure, whatever you say.  So not only do the internet assholes have the problem of being an asshole, on top of whatever "issues" they have that make them vent in games like Eve, but they also have denial issues as well.  :)

     So yeah, with people, in the real world or on the intarpipes, an asshole is an asshole.  Whether they think anyone is watching or not determines how fast you see that they are actually a piece of shit.  It's actually a fairly simple concept and something that can easily be observed by any one, almost any time.