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PaperclipPerfector  17hr ago (text post)   2236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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I’m ‘stolen valoring’ a post from the Sunday thread and reposting it here for higher exposure (ht @odd_primes):

This post on "izzat" an Indian cultural honor system, went viral recently. I know we have at least a few Indian users here - how accurate is this characterization? Of course it's probably hard to generalize too much given the fragmented nature of India along cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines.

Here is the text in a non-image format from /r/askindia - the wide range of responses is interesting.

Recently there was a viral explosion on Kiwifarms > Twitter about a nebulous low trust Indian cultural behavioural trait. This honor culture trait isn’t something that is unique to India. There has however been a huge influx of Indians into the West both through immigration and through internet presence that has left cultural ripples. The memetic word is called ‘Izzat’ even though this is an Urdu word that only vaguely venn diagrams against the concept.

I’m beating around the bush, but I’m pretty much talking about scam culture, being the winner, getting one up on the people that are outsiders to ‘my group’, and getting status points for exploiting my outgroup.

I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t an Indian only issue, but it’s a culture clash between high and low trust cultures and is worthy of discussion.

Edit: Don't drunkpost. This is a culture war issue that should have been given better care in an OP.

2nd edit: Actually quoted the post.

I continually wonder how anywhere developed a high trust society in the first place. All I see, everywhere around me, is low trust behavior destroying all the traditions and institutions that made high trust Europe great. I can scarcely imagine how the opposite process could have ever occurred. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world it even exists. I'm not aware of any other historical cultures one would describe as "high trust". Which is not to say there aren't any, I am just literally professing my ignorance. The existence of high trust societies has become something of a mystery to me, in light of everything I see around me.

It's increasingly difficult for me to even lay out in objective terms what I would define as a "high trust" society. Maybe a measure of how much state capacity bleeds off to corruption? Maybe the likelihood that any good or service you try to procure isn't fraudulent? The chance that any given person you meet isn't lying about who they are and what their capabilities are? An understanding of natural rights that are pro-social? Like respect for private or public property, or other people's time and effort.

But maybe that's a result of having grown up in a post-Demoralized society. You read about the billions of dollars of welfare fraud the Somali community has been doing in plain sight, and Tim Walz's administrations utter spinelessness and/or complicitness in it, and it's hard to see anything other than a civilization that has decided stopping crime is too mean. That taking any measures, no matter how one inarguably just, to secure it's continued existence, is just too cruel.

I continually wonder how anywhere developed a high trust society in the first place.

Perhaps by centuries of punishing even the most minor offenses by death?

I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world it even exists.

Japan comes to mind, but I'm no expert.

"We have agreed to abide by these terms. If you do not, I will kill you." "Excellent. We have agreed to abide by these terms. If you do not, I will kill you." "Good."

Carry this forward a number of centuries, where your word is your bond(or you die), and, well...

This seems likely to be the largest effect.

Social selection effects 'alone' seem insufficient. Gotta actually remove/filter the least cooperative/most dangerous defectors out of the gene pool for a few generations, allowing the cooperators to proliferate.

The other factor is probably there being even higher-trust subpopulations that were either allowed to live in isolation, or those subpopulations leave to a new land and form a society where everyone is extremely high trust (and defectors get burned to death or killed off by the elements). Then norms these cultures produce probably rubbed off on others they came into contact with.

Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."

Then of course winter itself forcing people to live in close proximity and anyone who was intolerable to be around would likely be kicked out of the house and would more than likely die.

A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.

Japan

I recently was reminded of the series they have over there where literal toddlers are sent on errands that require them to operate very independently and overcome some basic obstacles, and navigate the risks of the local environment.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z5GB-uiX4f4?si=7rg1ZGv38B4Ue86c

And nobody finds this odd, every single person does their best to assist without overly coddling the kid, and generally you get the sense the entire social structure of this community is designed for the safety of their children.

That's the dream, imho.

A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.

The Inuit have had some weird trust building exercises, but today, their culture is dominated by severe alcoholism, and there are probably as many living in slums in the cities of their ancestral lands receiving welfare as there are in the ancestral environment.

A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.

Inuit cultures might not be a useful example, though they don't invalidate your guess either. They didn't grow crops, so the whole food supply thing didn't apply as much. Their survival is an amazing adaptation of opportunistic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to an extreme environment, but they could not sustain a large, growing civilization as we understand it that way. As for current, their population are still low, and any anthropoclimatologic (I'm proud I've actually legit used this word now) study of them, at least here in Quebec, is hopelessly tainted by their interaction with europeans and their descendants.

Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."

But this theory has to contend with Russia, which has been low-trust (by European standards, anyway) for long before Communism.

The thing to remember about Slavs is that they were (as the name would imply) slaves. They were in the borderland between the mongols, the muslims, the Germanics, and the Vikings, and constantly getting rolled and subjugated by all four. As you can see from other ethnic groups that were slaves for generations, it does not make you high trust. It makes you servile in the face of brutality, cruel when you have power, distrustful, melancholic, and constantly scheming for any advantage.

I'm actually unfamiliar with the criminal justice practices of Tsarist Russia, was the death penalty meted out with regularity?

According to that article, relatively few people were actually sentenced to death under the Bloody Code.

They were instead sentenced to a fate worse than death. To whit, Australia.

It seems the Bloody Code was only the tail end of it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13rojx5/henry_viii_executed_nearly_70k_people_maybe_more/

perhaps 0.02% of the English population suffered death by execution in the average year of Henry [VIII]'s reign

Compare with modern-day Oklahoma, which tops the US rankings with 3.101 executions / 100,000 / 48 years, roughly 1/300 of Henry VIII's score.

I don't know how this compares to other parts of the world around the same time, but the other aspect of this is that executions will only bring about an improvement in social trust if they're administered in a somewhat "orderly" fashion, as punishments for crimes of which the accused is more-likely-than-not to be guilty. (A comparable death rate brought about by indiscriminate mass killing will not have the same effect.) In England I'd guess the legal execution regime prevailed at least 600-700 years, starting from the time of Henry II if not earlier.

Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.

I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.

But then on the flip side you have Russia, again, where the frontier was where they sent malefactors for centuries, and things got worse.

And, you know, the US’s cartoonishly high violent crime rates.

You know, I probably should have thought of Japan. Especially with how much right wing twitter is idolizing them these days.

I've had a similar idea to this post floating around in my head for a few months now - just observing bits of the phenomenon without having a word for it. I think China has a pretty similar version, or at least, that's what shows up in their translated fiction.

Perhaps the common cause is a long standing, fully settled culture. If there's no "frontier", if there's no concept of "making money" in a Randian sense of creating wealth by the alchemy of effort and ingenuity, then wouldn't a fiercely zero-sum culture make perfect sense? If the only way to benefit is for someone else to lose, then wouldn't that explain a culture of scammers? The way visiting vtubers talk about sliding into a hatefully defensive mindset in a week because every cabbie and street vendor "accidentally" adds an extra digit to the charge? Or the prank videos where someone records "finding" a bill on the floor of an Indian-owned shop, and the counter-minder immediately goes all on on a bluff check, insisting that they money was theirs and they dropped it and "If you are a good person, you'll give it to me."

What would happen after a hundred generations of that?

And getting caught up on the murder rate thing is an error. China doesn't have a high murder rate for the sake of face... but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great. Doesn't India have a history of mass famines? How many of them were made worse by aristocrats refusing to acknowledge the problem because it would lose them points in intra-elite status games?

What would happen after a hundred generations of that?

One of the things I see people talk about regarding India is this superposition of hateful gloating blended with crying supplication, like code switching back and forth to whichever seems most advantageous.

Ironically, I see the same thing in black thug culture. A guy will act like the toughest motherfucker in the world... until he gets pinched. Then he flips a switch and turns into a crybaby bitch, begging for a mercy he never showed anyone else. Seems kinda dishonorable for an "honor culture", but maybe that's just an optimization for a matriarchal/matrilinear subculture. If there's no name to pass down to your sons, why not trade that honor/face for a shot at an undeserved mercy? Or at least a police brutality payout?

That's another culture that openly celebrates "hustlers". Have you ever been hustled? I have, in my quokka days. It took more than a half dozen times, feeling like a fool for offering help and charity, before I internalized the rule "If a black guy asks you for help that even touches on the concept of money, he is a piece of shit scammer. Fuck him, fuck his "sick" mother and fuck his whole sick culture."

but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great.

...I would like to think that I am not inclined to take a rosy view of the crimes of communist regimes, but I generally adhered to the narrative that the CCP "let millions of people starve" until a recent conversation here resulted in another commenter quoting details. Paraphrasing: "Mr So-and-so and his wife were accused of hoarding. Their fellow villagers beat them to death. Their children were turned out and denied food and shelter by the rest of the community until they starvced to death", repeated over and over again, leaving the distinct impression that this fate was routine for unfortunates in the period in question. In my view, that's pretty clearly murder.

Doesn't India have a history of mass famines?

Not since the end of the Raj.

In significant part because the end of the Raj split off famine-prone Bangladesh (the main site of the Bengal famine in 1943) into a separate country.

Bangladesh continued to have serious famines long after independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974

The postwar advent of intensive agriculture and chemical fertiliser presumably also helped.

I think China has a pretty similar version, or at least, that's what shows up in their translated fiction.

As a Chinese, I think this isn't true at all. China has toyed with the idea of meritocacy since ancient times, and despite the fact that communism was a stain on its history, it was reversed quickly. To the extent that blood feuds exist, which isn't that much, they must be repaid in blood and aren't some silly status game about humiliation.

Chinese will certainly lie, cheat, and steal, but not more than people from any other western country. Meanwhile Indian scam farms celebrate and party every time they ruin someone's life, and they love it.

I have fewer interactions with China outside of, as I said, the fiction, which likely plays up certain elements for drama. But the zero sum thinking comes up often, in a way that makes it feel like I'm listening to a fish talk about life, and just inferring the presence of water. In my impression, the Chinese are less "scumbag war of all against all" compared to India, but there's a consistent notion that your gain is someone else's loss - and your loss, someone else's gain. I've seen a few different sources suggest that wisdom is accepting that during your life, you'll be on both sides of the situation and that wickedness is going too far in the war of all against all.

What about Chinese scam farms (1 2)?

Every society has some evil people, but it's telling that nigeria is synonymous with advance fee scams, india is synonymous with tech support scams, and china is synonymous with ... abducting people to work at the scam center because nobody wants to do it.

Meanwhile millions or even billions of indians would jump at the opportunity to work on a scam center.

I'm reminded of one of Bryan Caplan's multi chapter reviews of the Malcolm X autobiography.

Malcolm never distinguishes between victimless crime (drugs, bootlegging, prostitution, gambling) and regular crime (burglary, robbery). For him, it’s all “hustling” – one person preying on another. Indeed, Malcolm appears to regard all for-profit business as “hustling.” While he’s clearly aware that mutually beneficial trade exists, the fact that trade is mutually beneficial isn’t morally significant for Malcolm. Purely charitable motives are the only ones he sees as admirable.

Basically this "hustle" culture seems equivalent to "Izzat". Caplan also goes on to point out how Malcolm has a lot of self destructive behaviors:

Still, Malcolm is well-aware of the importance of self-destructive behavior among the poor. Indeed, he’s a perfect example of the syndrome:

[A]ll the thousands of dollars I’d handled and I had nothing. Just satisfying my cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes…

Once he starts experimenting with Islam, Malcolm becomes puritanical – and predictably turns his life around. But he somehow manages to avoid the lesson that he was a major – if not the main – source of his own problems.

Imagine if Malcolm had stayed sober, stuck to victimless crime, and conservatively invested his money. He would quickly have surpassed the typical standard of living for contemporary whites. Yet the devil’s to blame for everything wrong in his life – and the devil is the white man

I think the idea of a sober Malcolm X sticking to victimless crime and conservatively investing his money is nonsensical. You are what you do. And Malcolm did petty crime so he also did all the petty criminal things. If you want to not do petty criminal things you need to not be a petty criminal. Malcolm instead became a religious leader and started doing all the religious leader things, which included a lot of righteousness and puritanical beliefs.

He sort of invented the role of black muslim religious leader. There was a great deal of flexibility in what he could have chosen for that role to become in society. It seems he made it more of an "anti-peti-criminal" role than anything else. Instead of no morals about anything, he had all the morals about everything. Instead of a life of debauchery and drugs, he chose a life of puritanism and sobriety.

Anyways, I think this "Izzat" culture is likely screwing itself over as well. Being a scammer would be a shitty life. Everything and everyone would feel fake all the time. You'd probably end up viewing all the victims of yours scams as pieces of crap that deserved it, and it would make you absolutely paranoid about being scammed yourself (so that you are not also a piece of crap that deserved to be scammed). You'll view many things that could be mutually beneficial exchanges as instead just scams waiting to happen.

If "Izzat" culture at all looks appealing its because they are running a scam on scammers. Probably recruiting for some sort of pyramid scheme. Think of it like a recruiting message for a company where the top salesman shows off his cool company car and brags about his company vacation. Meanwhile at that company most of the sales people joining are just doing cold calls and feeding that salesperson at the top promising leads, and then earning close to nothing on the commissions.

This happens a lot, where something that is basically a hyped up recruiting message gets translated by outside people as "this is how things really are". I remember a while back Stephen Colbert did some kind of expose on trailer park landlords and found this video about a guy bragging about how you could ruthlessly exploit trailer park renters. He claimed you could rent it out, immediately jack up the prices and they'd be screwed and have to pay cuz they'd have no where to move. The obvious thing that Colbert missed is that the guy saying this was selling trailers to trailer parks. The advertisement was trying to scam the scammers. Every point the guy made in the advertisement clashed with reality. The writers of the Colbert show didn't care though, they found this perfect little snippet of a guy being the most scumbag landlord you could imagine.

So yeah we need a category of things for "Advertisements between scammers getting mistaken for reality", and then we can hopefully avoid making this mistake again and again.

Lack of izzat is a massive problem among westerners if you ask me. The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?". Same with how westerners send their own flesh and blood parents off to a care home when they start becoming too much of a burden on them. The lack of respect here is galling: your parents took care of you when you were nothing more than a little shit machine and this is how you repay them???

The kiwifarms post is a half truth (well actually more like a quarter truth), which makes it worse than a total lie. Some elements of it are correct, but others (like how you can rape and murder with impunity if you have enough izzat) are totally 100% false (rape and murder are the number 1 way you an destroy your whole extended family's izzat in a very short space of time for generations).

The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?"

Can you give examples? What does lower classes disrespect so much?

Breaking ahead of me in queues, generally acting rude when asked simple clarification questions, asking me if I speak English (this has happened multiple times, I kid you not, from people whose command of the English language is worse than the level I had at age 9), taking my money (via taxes) and then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness) etc. etc.

Now I must say this doesn't happen all the time or even most of the time or even with much regularity in my interactions with the lower class. It happens in fewer than 5% of such encounters I'd say (and in reality probably fewer than 2%), but when you have to live around and amongst such people the total number of interactions gets very high very quickly so you get exposed to a fair amount of such low human capital behaviours.

taking my money (via taxes) and then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness) etc. etc.

This may be the single most ironic sentence I've ever seen. Nearly every single member of this forum pays taxes, whether they are a native or foreign member of their country. You paying taxes is not a favour - it's table stakes.

Lack of izzat is a massive problem among westerners if you ask me. The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?".

God in Heaven, the discourse is actually "oh rly? yur low class shitbags are scummy too, my low class shitbags aren't even that bad, lol".

I don't mean to pick on you BurdensomeCount. Many other posts in this thread are as bad or worse from the other direction. I'm not Indian (dot or feather), this thread is the first I've heard of this izzat concept. The gist I get is that it is an extremely broad and nebulous concept akin to prowess / craft / vigor / doing the needful. Indians being asked to comment on izzat as though their opinion means anything would be like me trying to provide an accurate, non-controversial definition of rizz.

To answer your rhetorical inner voice: no, of course their parents didn't teach them better, they are low class shitbags. Often their parents were also not taught better. Many such examples in every culture through every period of every time on every corner of this earth. Encountering a low class shitbag should produce zero units of Surprise. Low class shitbag is the human default, you should only be amazed that there exists anything better.

If I may now be part of the Problem, this entire line of inquiry is based around the lived experience of the individuals sharing their opinions. If I'm not mistaken, you are an Indian immigrant to the UK? It's possible that you are treated extra poorly across the spectrum, but especially by the low class shitbags, because many people in the UK sincerely believe that you - personally - are part of a serious problem straining their society. (If you began thinking of reasons they are wrong, please stop. You are only sabotaging yourself This is not a factual question. The actions of a human being are rooted in their beliefs, not something as abstract and fake as a "fact".)

I can only answer for my own experience and cultural milieu. Coming from a conservative part of the Southern United States, though born in the mid 80s and therefore only getting a watered down version by that time, I can tell you the expected response my culture would have for an individual encountering you in the context of your presence being part of a phenomenon widely believed to be harming my community's culture / prospects / lives / etc: to treat you poorly. That is what would be expected of someone raised correctly and making their parents proud.

Perhaps some of what you're encountering is good behavior within a society / context / culture / folkway of which you are not a member.

Edit: To clarify, I've heard my grandfather ask aloud your "but where were their parents?" question about people in his community who are kind and welcoming towards Yankees. The same behavior can be a signifier of low class, high class, or even completely class neutral contextually.

If I'm not mistaken, you are an Indian immigrant to the UK

Thats the greatest insult you could have given him, he's Pakistani

My apologies. That is a significant difference; unspeakable pains have been inflicted, huge numbers of human lives have been cut short based around those identities. It is a legitimate horror that such things occur.

The great news is that for the mindset I'm describing those differences are washed away. These people, assuming they were raised right, will not piss on the Pakistani or Indian immigrant alike to put them out if they were on fire and they'd make absolutely sure the immigrant in question knew it. There is no Us without a Them and the details of whatever makes one of them Them are only meaningful to better craft insults. To do otherwise is trashy.

The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people

As in their lack of immediate obsequious submission for the better person (for he has money for he gets to armwrestle in the zero-sum Finance fields, unlike those peasants)? I wouldn't consider Indian culture especially defined by inter-class respect, at least going downwards, but if the Western culture didn't have a peculiar glitch in which lower classes were afforded a minimum of respect and voice and given an opportunity it'd be hard to imagine modern immigration existing as it does.

I do agree with the parenting thing, but I'd argue a confluence of factors (Small family sizes, Westerners tend to be more mobile both for work and for Florida in their dotage, housing is brutally expensive, modern medicine allows for stupefyingly long armwrestles against mortality by people with massive care requirements) means that the equation's a bit different than in a more-settled setting where labor is absurdly cheap and families are large.

The reason I'm willing to believe that post is hitting on truth is simply interacting with the Indians in my local community over the course of years now.

And the tendency to try and 'get one over' on others, even when it is detrimental to the relationship is nigh-universal. Sometimes this is benign. But I'd be reluctant to put anything meaningful at risk in a deal that might go sour because of this factor.

I had a potential client with a 2.5 million dollar net worth (if I assume he was honest on this point) balk at paying me $1200 to fix a problem for him. This was already steeply discounted! I also noticed that its about 50-50 that any given Indian-American potential client I actually work with will follow through on actually finalizing their work, since, I suspect, that would mean handing money over. And I get the sense that the act of handing over money is seen as somewhat of a 'defeat' unless the amount you hand over is much less than the amount that was agreed to.

I'll still work with them, of course, but it has colored my expectations across the board. I would NOT take one on as a business partner unless I had a pre-existing extensive relationship with them.

And these are all otherwise decently smart, well-presenting, well-off individuals.

My conclusion is basically one of two things.

#1 Either the Indians who actually make it over here are 'the best of the best' to some degree, and in theory the best-suited to adapt to Western Cultural norms, and even they are acting on this 'defection-based' cultural baseline... which indicates such culture is endemic in their home country...

OR

#2 The Indians who make it over here achieved that by cheating the hardest and fooling the gullible Westerners intentionally... which indicates that this culture is so endemic in their home country that it is the ONLY way for them to get ahead.

(The third option is that those are the same thing: the 'most talented' Indians are also the ones best at playing that game, and that's maybe the scariest possibility of all, we're inviting the 'superpredators' of their society here.)

I have also had some perfectly delightful, non-scammy/defection interactions in various contexts, and in most cases they're pleasant to interact with when money isn't on the table. And I have a few Indian dishes that I really do enjoy, I would never say their culture is without its pros.

But as I've stated before, I have little problem, zero discomfort looking at the broader, population level stats and drawing the obvious conclusions from those. One of the big ones that still sort of puzzles me... how does a nation with 1.5 billion people produce so few Olympic-Caliber athletes? They've won 41 medals... TOTAL. That's one-third of what fucking KENYA has, and Kenya started competing in 1956, compared to India starting in 1900. Granted Kenya is a bit specialized in which events they win.

And my 'theory' is that that whole area of the world assumes that defection/low trust is 'normal' and act accordingly, and when introduced to a high-trust population, they're more inclined to view these folks as potential suckers (in the P.T. Barnum sense) than they are to realize they can achieve much greater things via cooperation here.

So that reading pretty readily confirms my priors... which makes me suspicious enough to want some independent verification.

If you know how I feel about high-trust societies... you probably get why I find this concept disgusting and mildly terrifying if true.

And the tendency to try and 'get one over' on others, even when it is detrimental to the relationship is nigh-universal. Sometimes this is benign. But I'd be reluctant to put anything meaningful at risk in a deal that might go sour because of this factor.

Consider for example the way the current President of the United States treated employees, contractors, lenders, wives etc. in his pre-political life, paying no meaningful price for it. "Hustle" (used upthread as a term for what high-trust societies don't do) is an American English word for behaviour that is as American as school shootings and trillion-dollar software companies (American old wives in my social circle blame PT Barnum). There was an American culture which told white boys from good families that hustling was beneath them. Now you can get >$10 billion in VC money for a company with the motto "Always be hustlin" (Ebonic spelling in the original).

Northern Europe (partially including the UK) was high-trust by default in a way which makes us quokkas when dealing with untrustworthy immigrants. America was high-trust by choice and effort (a British snarker would ask "why do you think they need so many lawyers?"), and it feels like you stopped trying starting at some time during the Clinton administration*. I don't know enough to know if the book about how it was done or how and when it stopped being done has been written, but I suspect Tanner Greer of Scholar's Stage has a better idea than most.

* High trust is of course still the default in some closed or semi-closed social circles like individual small towns or the Silicon Valley elite. That doesn't mean society as a whole is high trust, but I suppose it is a big improvement on real low-trust families where only kin can form that kind of local trust network.

I think much of the decline is explained by the cost and time of travel being reduced. Disparate populations are still easy to reach, but before we had mass communications, information about unsavory individuals might propagate slowly.

Snake Oil Salesmen are a well known trope in Westerns, where it was possible to arrive in an isolated town, scam the relatively trusting townspeople, leave before they realized the scam, and arrive in another such town before word actually spread.

Even today, it can be hard to punish a scammer if they stay mobile. Or simply operate outside the jurisdiction of the people they're scamming (oh look, India again).

Dunbar's number is probably pretty closely correlated to the largest community you can operate the runs solely on trust, rather than introducing contracts, mediators, and other dispute resolution systems.

Still, there is something 'magical' about being able to leave your garage door open, your car unlocked, and expect to find your Amazon packages left unmolested on your doorstep, and likewise be pretty certain that if someone DID try to take your packages or steal your car the neighbors would either intervene or call the police, who would in fact take it seriously enough to try to catch the miscreant.

One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage. It was (is?) an epidemic, and I really can't see how you maintain trust in a system when the people tasked with enforcing the rules are the ones violating them flagrantly. And, oh dear, I have to note that A Majority of the Security Screeners are nonwhite.

One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage.

In 1987, 40 Heathrow baggage handlers were arrested in a single week for stealing from checked bags. There were also major problems in France and Italy through the 70s and 80s with this, back when their handlers would have been mostly indigenous.

But change is important in an interesting way. Technological advancement papers over the cracks in a failing society. So gang violence and drug crime increase, but huge advancements in emergency medicine mean that the homicide rate still falls. Ubiquitous CCTV, plate detection and cellphone tracking slightly reduce residential burglaries, even though the neighborhood as a whole seems shadier and less welcoming. The numbers on paper look good, but everything feels worse.

Yep.

Technology fixes social problems which, I would argue, allows social 'rot' to spread underneath since now certain traits that were selected against on the population level are now still present but less noticed since we just use the tech solution (apply this logic to AI if you wish, lol).

When I first moved to my current area, 10 years ago, I was in the cheapest apartment I could find that still allowed pets. This was my first apartment after living in a College Town.

After years of no problems with Amazon deliveries, I started getting about half of my packages swiped off my stoop. I wondered for a bit if it was Amazon Delivery drivers being incompetent, but nope. I did the classic approach of filling a cardboard box with trash and leaving it out, and that, too got taken.

But a few months later, Amazon introduced An Amazon Locker at my local mall. So I could ship items there and pick them up at my leisure.

Problem solved! Except now it was a 15 minute round trip to pick up stuff, so I would have to schedule it around my other errands. The whole POINT of Amazon delivery is to NOT have to leave the house!!

And of course, I had to live with the knowledge that some of my neighbors were wanton thieves, which was the real issue. Can't leave my door or my car unlocked ever, knowing that. I did own a large dog at the time so I was relatively certain they'd not try to break into my unit.

(They've since added a locker at the convenience store w/in walking distance from that apartment. I have to assume they track package theft and use that as a basis for where they put the lockers).

Yes, I'm GLAD that technology solved a social problem... but it didn't actually solve the problem. Just routed around the symptom. I VASTLY prefer my current neighborhood, where not only can I leave Amazon packages sitting out for days, the Neighborhood facebook group will actively coordinate to find misdelivered packages and, if packages are going missing, immediately use the doorbell cameras to figure out if there's a thief about.

And we do that without using that classic bit of technology known as a gated community, so I can feel reasonably good that my neighbors are actually being neighborly.

One way to determine if a piece of tech is an 'unalloyed' good or if its just a hack borne of 'necessity' is whether people still choose to use it/pay for it when they genuinely don't have to do so. I never use Amazon lockers these days since the technology of bringing items to my doorstep in two days is the one I actually want.

The very obvious rebuttal to this is India's murder rate. If the subcontinent is truly a hellish honour culture where maintaining face is prioritized above everything and pursued with fatal resolve, it's odd that its murder rate slots it in between Kazakhstan and Turkey. Obviously one could maintain that there's some massaging going on, but it's fundamentally tough to hide bodies and I can't believe that the official rate is that far off the actual rate.

I might be inclined to accept that there is a nugget of truth the post has been built around, this kind of petty zero-sum honour culture is not exactly uncommon in developing nations. But it seems greatly exaggerated.

But a conventional honor culture(like in America’s black ghettos or parts of the Balkans or the rural south) is not exactly what’s being described- the idea is that Indians find scamming and lying admirable as long as you aren’t hurting your buddies. The really rough parts of New Orleans or rural Albania don’t work that way, going back on your word is worse than murder.

I've worked with probably a dozen or so Indian coworkers over the years and this does not describe any interaction I've ever had with them. I am also deeply skeptical that a kiwi farms post from a thread entitled "The India Menace - Street shitting, unsanitary practices, scams, Hindu extremism & other things" which cites no evidence is going to contain accurate generalizations about Indians.

I have worked with hundreds of Indians and I can count on one hand those who I could trust to do what they said without double checking every single thing.

My guess is you were working with the creme of the crop and not your average bodyshop contractor.

From the Indians I have worked with I'd say India follows a particularly brutal version of the 80/20 rule, call it then 98/2 rule. There are a few who are really, really good. The rest are so bad I don't know how they got through their interview (though I have heard having your friend do the remote parts of the interview for you is common amongst that community).

This very strongly goes against the cultural relativism arguments, which a lot of left ideology is built on, imo.

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