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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time

That's the point I'm trying to make. If you tolerate fraud, or even promulgate "well the chance of fraud is better than a world with no fraud" (which is different from "there will always be a risk of fraud"), then what is tolerated becomes commonplace. Once the water changes, the fish change too. Once the bedrock assumptions of "be honest not criminal" are weakened by lack of social reinforcement and no longer passed down, you'll get more and more people willing to be scammers, which in turns mean fewer people opting to put their trust in others, and the costs of protecting yourself against fraud rise because now you have to either spend time and effort on not being scammed, or risk being scammed and losing very badly what you can't afford to lose.

"There's always going to be fraud out there, just be careful and be aware" is not the same as "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise it's the Panopticon and economic stagnation". That second message is an encouragement to be fraudulent - after all, everyone else would do it too if they could, and you are just filling your role in the ecosystem!

I think you really aren't understanding the argument I'm making. I'm not saying "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise there would be economic stagnation"; I'm saying "a certain amount of fraud is unavoidable, and the price we pay for a functioning economy". Claiming that the latter is equivalent to the former, or that the latter is an encouragement to defraud people, seems to me tantamount to saying "a small number of car accidents every year is an unavoidable byproduct of widespread car ownership" or "carbon emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of an electrified society". No one would say that by acknowledging that you can't create electricity without producing carbon dioxide, you are therefore encouraging the production of additional carbon dioxide - likewise with the argument I'm making.