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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24286 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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This topic interests me greatly, but I doubt I have much to add.

I'm someone who seek outs kind environments. I come from a small village where everyone knew everyone, lived in a nearby small town where people are already almost entirely anonymous to each other, spent a few years in a much larger town in which I was pretty much a rootless atomized cosmopolitan when not on campus or at work, and eventually returned home to the village. My wife would like for us to move to her home village, but it's 10x the size of mine and people there are already much more closed-off than here. I now work at the largest company in the region (thousands of employees), and it has an aggressively kind culture in which you are required to use familiar second-person pronouns (a language feature comparable to calling someone by their first name in English) and everyone, without exception, greets everyone else.

So here are some random thoughts I take away from all that:

  • Even in the big-town apartment block, you can socialize and form fragile, tenuous but productive bonds with people you see semi-regularly. Immediate neighbors, gas station attendants, that guy you regularly see in the elevator, the fruit seller at his market stand, roommates of course. It takes effort and isn't as rewarding as in less urban settings, but it's still better than giving up and retrating into the mode of "cool guy who never interacts with anyone".
  • Socializing in the tiny village is so easy it does itself. Take the kid to the playground, meet other parents, bam. Walk out the door, greet your neighbor, have a chat. Go to the festival. Go to church. Work your garden. Talk to the neighbor. Fiddle with your car or bike, someone will come over and ask what you're up to and whether you need any help.
  • I have the social skills and graces you'd expect from an autistic German software engineer, but I do make every effort to be polite if not friendly with everyone I meet regardless of the setting. I feel it pays off immensely - for any one person who's put off by the directness or lack of isolation, there are at least two others who are glad to be able to skip the whole "let us dance around each other so that our bubbles may never intersect" anti-social game.
  • True urbanites aren't human. They don't return the politest of nods, in any setting in which normal people would share their observations of the situation you can bet your balls they'll pull out their phones put on their earbuds and ignore the hell out of the world, and if you ever are forced to interact with them have fun trying to establish so much as eye contact. Young people love this lifestyle because they're all damaged beyond repair by their all-encompassing doomscrolling addictions.
  • The top-down imposition of kind norms at the company I work at seems to have worked. There are some holdouts who refuse to use the familiar address with the top brass, and I can understand that it may feel forced if you've been used to the previous culture for decades, but overall it has a very open and humane atmosphere and I had no trouble assimilating within mere weeks.
  • Foreigners suck. The more foreigners there are in the area, the worse the norms get. Having a Pole, a Balkanian, a Russian, an Ukrainian, an Italian and a Frisian in the village is harmless. I wager we might even be able to absorb an additional Turk and perhaps something more exotic. This does not disturb social cohesion very much, because even if those people arrived relatively recently and aren't as deeply rooted here and still maintain connections to their countries of origin, you can at least seamlessly integrate them into the daily goings-on so long as they speak the language. But as soon as there are two foreign families of the same ethnic background, you've lost. It's over. They are now their own parallel community, will maintain their separate identity, will raise their children to speak their language, and will strongly prefer interacting with each other over interacting with the natives. Scale it up, see even just the larger villages with their Russian or Turkish enclaves, look at the towns with their Muslim quarters and nascent African ghettoes, and see how young people gravitate towards "migrantisch" culture once the Leitkultur is no more, and you can tell what the future looks like. The future is someone with sunglasses on, headphones over their ears and a smartphone in his hand, walking past everyone he meets in the street, forever.

Okay, so now let's speculate.

Can you engineer people to be more kind? I'd say yes, but there are some conditions that must be met and doing so may be very difficult.

  • You need a high level of preexisting social trust. I'm not sure whether this can be synthesized.
  • You need a high level of ethnic homogeneity, or else you just get parallel societies.
  • The social norms czar needs sufficient authority to order everyone to maintain eye contact, greet each other, use familiar forms of address and mandate other forms of highly accessible social interaction.
  • Profit. Everyone sees their quality of life skyrocket as a consequence.

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