In this case, I’m referring to the notion that we all make minor sacrifices in our daily interactions in service of a “greater good” for everyone.
“Following the rules” would be a simplified version of what I’m talking about, I suppose. But also keeping an awareness/attitude about "How will my choices affect the people around me in this moment? “Common courtesy”, “situational awareness”, etc…
I don’t know that it’s a “new” phenomenon by any means, I just seem to have an increasing (subjective) awareness of it’s decline of late.
Our communities have been destroyed by this cult of hyper-individualism.
The balance between society and the individual has been tilted wildly to the individual. Everyone is an island now.
Location dependent, but I would say it has always been like this. It’s just more visible when everyone can film it and comment on incidents globally.
I never expected 20 years ago to be seeing multiple pictures of people parking across 4 spaces in other countries, but here we are.
So much for “it takes a village”
Villages now available from Amazon, financed through affirm, for low, monthly prices!
It’s not a cult if everyone believes in it
You have to be willfully ignorant to think thats true
No, in order to believe that’s true I have to believe that the definition of “cult” is “a small religion”
The shopping cart test for a community. Or seeing trash on the ground in public places, tells you alot about a area.
The golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Culture is learned from your peer group. Feeling a investmemt in your environment and a sense of ownership in it’s condition change behavior. “This is our public park, so I won’t littler”, vs “This is their public park so I don’t have to clean up”.
I just want to live in a nice world, so I treat my world nice. Even when nobody is looking.
The shopping cart test for a community. […] Culture is learned from your peer group.
Perfect example… Germany universally has this deposit system for their shopping carts but bypassed the handling and inserting of a coin into the cart at the height of covid.
Since then I have barely seen any reversal there. People still return their carts although they don’t need to get their coin back where the system is still disabled. Or they just conveniently forget to use the system and still bring their carts back without locking them there where the system is operational again.
The actual deposit was basically only needed for the learning phase. After this it just works automatically.
As a former retail worker, I always slightly disagreed with the shopping cart test.
Going outside to get the carts meant going out of range of the radio system that they had all us techs and sales people hooked up to. So in my mind I was like: " fuck up them carts all you want, I’ll go outside, get some exercise, and some fucking peace of mind."
No excuse to leave the carts in everyone’s way and make parking difficult.
I was also a former retail worker, but I guess my experience differed slightly from yours.
My primary responsibility was not getting the carts. I had a lot of other things that I was responsible for throughout my working day that had to get done. But when we needed to get the carts, I would often be the one asked to go.
When people left the carts all over the place like animals, it made my job take longer. And that meant I had more to catch up on back in the store once I finished. Not to mention, being out in the hot sun, or the rain, or the snow was not my definition of a fun time, so I typically wanted to be done with it as quickly as possible.
People would just toss their carts into empty spaces or onto foliage dividers, even making eye contact with me and smiling as they proudly sauntered back to their soccer mom SUVs, as if they somehow believed they were giving me the gift of job security. Sometimes they also confused “shopping cart” for “trash can”. I hated those people. I honestly wished death on some of them. I still can’t stand people like that today and I make every effort to not be one of them now.
Generally speaking, consideration for others is inversely proportional to the desperation of a given community. Think about how hard people have to work these days and still can’t afford a decent place to live and food to eat. It makes perfect sense that someone who feels that the system is keeping them down, and wearing them to the bone won’t be conscientious of how their actions will affect others. That mixed with Western ideals of extreme individualism, and a political climate that promotes divisiveness, it’s truly a wonder that anyone has any consideration at all for their fellow countrymen.
Is it not true that struggling groups of people form the strongest communities?
It seems to go either way, depending on all the little local variables. Strong communities, or dog-eat-dog.
Also, you can have situations where if you “conform”, you’re protected by the growing-together, but if something makes you different, that community comes after you, out of fear that you being different will bring even more hardship down on everyone’s head.
My social group is made up of basically goths, queers, nerdy weirdos who grew up in fundamentally conservative and religious towns and families, and are (now as adults) generally very supportive and chill with differences–but we got a hell of a lot of bullying from our natal families/cultures growing up. Based on individual personalities, there’s honestly little reason we were rejected…we don’t go out committing crimes, or bully, or be mean. But the differences we do have seem to scare or make our families feel ashamed of us–so, rejection. And so we lose the protection that the community offers others.
I recognize communities supporting each other is important–but the bit where perfectly good people who are kind and smart and aren’t committing crimes are just thrown on the curb like trash because we don’t believe in religion like others do, or because we ask questions when things don’t make sense…I struggle with that bit, for obvious reasons.
Usually, but that’s what the fierce individualism, and divisiveness prevents.
Yeah but it’s often in contrast to that which causes it. When everyone feels fucked by society they don’t feel a strong community with society as a whole.
Yes and no and also the people being “rude” or “not following the rules” see the people they are offending as not in their community, as they feel their community has been shrunken or destroyed
Yeah, desperation in a community does seem to break down a lot of social niceties, make people meaner, smaller, crueler. So focused on surviving personally that there’s no effort left to give to help anyone else or make things better for everyone.
(An aside below–but it’s related to survival turning people selfish and cruel.)
I follow Kamilkazani on Twitter. He’s a historian of Tatar descent (a minority in Russia), and I think did most of his scholarly studies on China and Chinese history originally, but when the Ukrainian war started, he did a lot of threads about Russia, and how we got here today from a historical standpoint.
He’s been very eye-opening for me, sort of demystifying what happened, and more importantly, laying out the historical and CULTURAL reasons behind it happening. Like, there’s cause and effect, even if it’s not the sort of cause and effect that I’m familiar with in my own country and culture. (His thread alone on “salt” is really astute.)
He looks at things from a very pragmatic historical background, and had a long thread that was the first thing that adequately explained to me why Russia was doing/saying the things it did, things that seemed quite bizarre if you’re looking at it from an American cultural lens.
Part of it is that there’s (and I’m paraphrasing my understanding–you guys should go back and read his threads for the original as I might have misinterpreted) an exaggerated individualism, far beyond what Americans do, in Russian culture.
Like, there’s a lot of “me and mine got ours, so you’re on your own”, or things like “sure, that guy is lying, but it’s MY guy lying so it’s ok.” Hyper-focused on the individual and their family and their local in-groups. And probably an artifact of how brutal the government has been for centuries.
And that “sheer struggle to survive turning people cruel, petty, and mean” has sort of been circling around my head, over and over.
It doesn’t need centuries. Just look at the nineties in Russia and you can easily see how someone would decide to not care about the greater good.
God damn you’ve verbalized so many things I’ve had in my head but haven’t had words for.
My spouse and I talk about this often. A very obvious example is how rude (and recklessly dangerous) people are while driving. And myriad minor things out in public in general. No sense of community and a complete lack of consideration for others is the new normal. It got worse during and after the pandemic.
It really has gotten worse since the pandemic, and I see it retry much every time I’m out. Earlier today I was out walking with my dog and kid. At one point we needed to cross the street at a four way stop. However, three cars in a row didn’t even slow down for their stop sign. It’s dangerous out there
Big time on the pandemic front! I made the insane move to travel to Norway during the pandemic and (being a born-and-raised Idahoan) I was SHOCKED and delighted to see 99% of people there wearing their masks at all time. The sense of community is so powerfully present there, it was a big wakeup call, seeing just how shitty people are to each other here.
I think people really only started noticing it during and after the pandemic.
I have always hated people’s lack of consideration. I have always been very aware of it and it has always stayed the same (at least since the 27 years I am here).
Yes, driving, parking–all manner of auto-related behavior are prime examples of this. But I would add that pedestrians are not faultless. Can’t count the number of times I’ve had to wait for a young, healthy pedestrian just taking. their. time. in the crosswalk while a bunch of us are waiting to complete a turn, for example. I always double-time it in a crosswalk–it’s not only courteous–it diminishes the likelihood of me getting run down by someone looking at their phone while they’re driving.
I hear you but is really that big of a deal? Out of all the many challenges in life, slow pedestrians affects maybe like 15-25 seconds of my day at most lol. Who cares if they trot or stroll?
This is the whole point of the post. Everyone should have an intrinsic desire to get out of each other’s way, be courteous, be thoughtful of other’s time, etc. The flip side is we ask our neighbors to be patient as we do our best in our day, and may have things slowing US down.
So the 1-2 punch is: be courteous to avoid bothering others, and be patient to understand that others are trying their best.
If everyone genuinely tries on both those topics, everyone feels pretty good about their public interactions.
When you work at a college you’d be amazed at how much time that takes up. Or kids just darting into the middle of a four way stop intersection on skateboards, or skating down the yellow line in the middle of the road. Or stepping out in front of a car without looking because they’re heads are bent down looking at their phones (which also happens when they almost walk right into you on campus). Or the people who rev their engines and drive as fast as possible through parking garages to see how many car alarms they can set off. I saw that twice just last semester. Or every single day dodging the people who drive on the wrong side of the road in parking lots and garages because apparently they really need those lines to tell them what side to be on. Living in a major city is even worse. And it doesn’t matter if the person deliberately runs out in front of you, it’ll be your fault because you’re the one in the car. At least in my state. Yeah, I’d say pedestrians are a great example.
Lol yeah I mean college pedestrians are the worst pedestrians by far, but that’s part of working at a college from my experience (as student and faculty).
In a larger sense, you’re right of course–but it’s another one of the “death by a thousand cuts” that I encounter every day…
Have you considered that it feels like this because of how you look at it? I used to feel like you do, aggravated at something that shouldn’t be aggravating. It took a lot to realize that these little things are just that. Little.
I’m sorry, but when I’m walking 2 miles to the nearest store, I’ll adopt a steady pace. When it’s my turn to go at the intersection, I’ll take the time I need to go through.
All these impatient drivers are sitting in their air-conditioned car anyway, I’m not breaking a sweat just so they can save a few seconds.
So what you’re saying is that you don’t care about others people’s time or convenience. Which then raises the question, why should others care about yours?
This attitude is the breakdown of the social contract being discussed right now lol
I can’t say I e ever been impatient at someone crossing the street. Unless they were purposely being spiteful, they should be able to go at their own speed. Then again, my street has a lot of elderly, so I know they can’t always speed walk
Actually, one of my most embarrassing cringe moments …. A jackass van driver parked diagonally across our street , blocking the whole thing. I imagine he thought it was a quiet street and he could get the van door slightly closer for his pickup. Effing rude as hell and there was no reason for it. So I was pissed off and using my horn to try to get him to move his effing vehicle ….,until I saw him go to the house and try to rush the disabled person he was picking up. Now I look like the asshole. Although I have to say he never did that again
So when ur a pedestrian cars should behave like you want them to and when youre the driver pedestrians should behave the way you want them to. Nice.
I don’t know, but I just spent two days at an amusement park, so I’m in the sort of mood where I hate all people everywhere.
Like why the fuck are you just standing in the middle of a walkway? No, your group of 20 can’t jump the line to catch up with the one 6 year old who’s been alone for an hour. And double fuck everyone in the wave pool.
An amusement park seems like the perfect hellscape to make me detest the world. That’s a great reminder of a place to avoid.
Family of 5 walks out of a busy door, takes two steps, stops to discuss their plans. There are literally a hundred people around coming and going. And that’s where you stop?
Happens on the daily in the city.
No one anywhere “cares” about anyone else. Don’t like it, deal. Or better yet keep quiet and leave me the fuck alone. Mentality of 95% of this world it seems.
My favorite version of the large-group-stops-in-the-worst-spot is when they do that at the top (or bottom) of ESCALATORS. 🤦♂️
I have been known to spread my elbows wide and then barrel straight through these groups to make space for the escalator riders behind me.
With a quick “oh hey, sorry. I wasn’t expecting someone to stop here.”
I feel a lot of this is just obliviousness. People are so sucked into what they are doing they don’t notice anyone around them.
It’s the reason shopping at Walmart can be so frustrating for me. People pause and stop at random spots (and I don’t mean to get items).
This comment gave me anxiety and reminded me precisely why I started vacationing to very quiet places
I just went to two amusement parks in Japan this week (Universal and Disney). It’s a different world here. People form orderly queues. They wait their turn. They don’t make noise. We all say thank you at the end of an interaction.
I see 20 metre single-file queuea for escalators. Back home it’s a chaotic meat funnel.
Some dude was chopping wood at 11 pm for at least 45 minutes at this camp site I’m occupying. I’d think that as neglect for others hahaha.
At least he wasn’t running a generator.
Blame his employer for forcing him to log in after hours.
Yeah camping is a perfect example. People listen to music on bluetooth speakers even while hiking, no respect for nature or for others. Since pandemic I try to avoid campgrounds entirely
What’s fascinating is reading about the social contract following WW2. It seems to line up that when that generation was in charge things like CEO pay wasn’t off the charts. Then the next generation it started to go up. And now the 3rd generation it’s completely bonkers.
Don’t discount unions though. And don’t forget that black people didn’t get the social contract.
Unfortunately, there are lots of situations in life where being a piece of shit gets you rewards.
That person cutting you off in traffic, grabbing the last item on the shelf when you were there first, cutting in line, cheating on their taxes, stealing the job you were in line to get, along with the infinite examples of this in the business and political world.
The vast vast majority of assholes never face real consequences, and those consequences rarely outweigh the benefits they’ve enjoyed from being an asshole.
I think about the “zero consequences” thing a lot. I help run the local farmers’ market, and recently our city has stepped up parking enforcement. (As a “rule-follower”, I celebrated the change.) Our customers are howling at the parking tickets they’re getting. They come to the market Info Booth to complain to us–as if it were our responsibility somehow.
Yeah there is a reason why stories or videos or movies showcasing justice are so popular. It’s because very rarely in your life do you see real justice.
You need those movies and videos to show you the good guys winning because most times in life the bad guy wins.
Holy shit this is so true.
My husband and I discuss this regularly. The loss of the social contract.
It is so sad to see so many people respond with “not my responsibility.” Why isn’t it? If you want to be a part of society then it is your responsibility. Part of being “civilized” is the strongest helping the weakest and most vulnerable. Our truest measure as humans is how we treat those who need the most.
Bringing other people up to a dignified level increases your value, not decreases. It doesn’t take away from you to let others have dignity and respect.
A great deal of people don’t view society as theirs. When someone stands outside the system, what is there to lose or care about? Personally, I believe i see your larger point, but many people don’t consider the social and responsibility this way.
What really gets me is the little stuff.
Major asshole stuff you can just write off as that person being a cunt by nature. But the dude on the bus playing tiktoks at full volume with 0 disregard probably isn’t some irredeemable asshole, he’s just a normal guy that doesn’t give a fuck. Same with people that put their bags on seats or park in the way of traffic, or litter etc.
I am with you on this. Also when the effort requires feels so small relative to other situations, it hits me worse too
Everyone in this thread is ignoring all of the invisible things we do everyday as part of the social contract:
-Every time someone stops at a red light
-Every time we accept a piece of paper and in return render some service or surrender some treasure
-Every person waiting in line everywhere
-Every person who pays taxes
-Every time we go to the grocery store and just take it for granted that there will be food at the grocery store
I get it some a-hole cut you off in traffic. But we rely on our social contract to literally stay alive. It is a miracle and the pinnacle of human achievement. Maybe just say thank you?
I don’t know if it’s actually real but I feel like since Corona and the Lockdowns many people are even nastier than before.
I’m looking forward to research on that.
I’ve an impression that “people are even nastier than before” has been a result of Trump era politics which reveled in nastiness — which itself appeared to be a pushback from nasty people about Obama being president. Basically its been a growing divide and was made a lot worse when such a prominent political group doubled down on divisiveness as a tribal identity.
I think it predated covid, which certainly made things worse, but I don’t really know what the cause was.
I’d agree that it started pre-covid. Trumpers really were/are vile and despicable. Their leader was pure garbage during covid which brought out even more outrageous reaction against science and those who tried to do the right thing.
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For example, many people consider homeless or unemployed people barely anything more than “parasites” or “leeches” because they supposedly don’t uphold their part in the social contract
Just gonna hit back on this and say most people probably consider the total utter degeneracy and petty/violent crimes they witness the local homeless population commiting as them not upholding the social contract. Here in my city they’re shitting on a busy sidewalk in broad daylight, or blatantly stealing packages or openly assaulting women. Endlessly harassing people on our public transit and making it a nightmare to use.
I made that sound bad, I’m sure there’s plenty that likely aren’t acting this way. I’m sure I’m only seeing the worst of the worst. Their lives have undoubtedly been rough and I can only imagine what happened to them as a child. They’re regularly looked down upon and we gutted our mental health institutions long ago. Heroin and fentanyl are omnipresent.
But to imply that most people view them as not upholding the contract because they don’t have a job is probably incorrect. We’re at a time where empathy is at its highest concerning systemic/collective issues. But if we’re not careful this also leads us to ignore and excuse away individuals who are blatantly in the wrong and have the least empathy towards others because we’ve blinded ourselves to be unable to see the trees in the forest. Just because your life sucks doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to abuse others to make yourself feel better.
I agree this is a problem but I don’t think it’s more often than not.
I think many people just have a fundamental misunderstanding that they are indeed a part of something larger.
For me its less of a contract and more of a built-in instinct. I feel physically ill if I think I unfairly annoy or hindering someone. I dont get why others feel like its only a contract, one which they can break if they want to. But they can and I have accepted it. So I dont despair, they are only human (and so am I).
This comment resonates with me. We should proclaim the good treatment of others as rightful, not an expectation to follow for anyone else’s benefit. Spread Mudita, it’s a contagious feeling.
The social contract is simply a more formal explanation and exploration of exactly what you just described. It is sort of the bridge between basic human behavior and a codified set of rules governing society. The golden rule is great and all but it is actually really difficult to codify that in black and white legislation. There’s been tons of speculation about it over the centuries. Guys like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke for example; and then their work heavily influenced the american founders like Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, and other political titans like them.
