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@TK-421 Challenged me to write a post about The Apartment before Christmas. I'm not going to use spoiler tags because this movie is a classic from 1960. It's an IMDb Top 100, and I think it deserves to be there. Great film, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The last paragraph paints this film in a worse light than it probably deserves. It's even a Christmas movie if you want to squeeze it in.
The Summary: Baxter works at a huge insurance company in New York and to accelerate Baxter’s career trajectory he lets junior executives and later Jeff a senior executive use his apartment to cheat on their wives.
I come from a Christian denomination that - in the not-so-distant past - banned going to movie theaters and all alcohol consumption. Watching this had me nodding my head, thinking I totally see why they felt that way about films like The Apartment. Released in 1960, it's black-and-white, so I think it comes off more risqué because I'm mentally bucketing it with '40s flicks, but Hollywood - always more progressive than the general populace - was already barreling toward the full-blown late '60s revolution. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot came out the year before and is just as (and in light of current trans issues) even more norm breaking.
I’m no film historian, but if The Apartment wasn’t the first, it must have been very close to creating the template for the bawdy office Christmas party trope. It's all there (short of nudity) full on pre-HR debauchery with people getting hammered, hooking up wherever they can find space. I’m sure Mad Men borrowed heavily for it's office culture.
You can, of course, make the standard progressive culture-war points: powerful men exploiting female staff, systemic sexism, etc. But flip the lens a bit, and this film could almost have been written by a modern manosphere/red-piller.
Baxter is a cuck in almost every sense of the term. He literally crawls into the still-warm bed after the alphas finish their trysts. Even after he learns that Jeff (married father of two) has been carrying on a long term affair with his love interest Fran, Baxter keeps letting Jeff go at his one true love in the apartment. When Fran attempts suicide with sleeping pills, Baxter nurses her back to health, all while actively trying to keep Jeff and Fran together. This isn’t Fran’s first rodeo; her previous beau is in prison. Since it’s the 1960’s she not just in it for the sex, she actually falls suicidally in love with the bad boys, and she doesn’t have any kids. But Fran only turns to the nice guy after she’s been "run through".
P.S. And small culture war take it's interesting to think about how much technology replaced thousands of jobs represented in this film
Great movie. Got very mad at brother in law for making me watch it last Christmas, actually, because despite my wife being subscribed to an absurd number of streaming services, he insisted on buying another movie through my Amazon account. Which struck me as an absurd extravagance, $4 or whatever totally unnecessary, but it did turn out to be amazing, so that shut me up.
No. That's how things were. It didn't create a trope through film, it represented a reality. Mad Men drew on that same historical set of facts. Christmas parties really used to be fun before we all turned our noses up at them. Go to any local bar association event, corner the oldest man you see, and ask him to tell you stories from the old days. This isn't to say that there isn't a cycle of art imitating life imitating art
And we're shown the alternative to the nice guy forgiving the harlot: she kills herself. The alternative to beta men being cucked is that women who make mistakes just, kind of, shuffle off camera and die. No one has come up with a scalable solution yet. Baxter is obviously the good guy here, in that he is saving her from literal or social death by swallowing his pride.
What's the really interesting cultural reality in the film is the overwhelming nosiness of all the people around everyone in New York City.
Why do the executives value the privacy of Baxter's apartment so highly as to consider its use a major favor? Because back then hotels paid attention to their guest lists, and cared if two unrelated people stayed there, or if people showed up in the afternoon and checked out that evening. A non-concern today, when hotel employees couldn't care less, and in a pinch you could always find a place where you check in and out online without seeing anyone. No corporate hotel property pries into the business of its customers, and no pajeet motel owner could come close to caring what the YTs do there.
Baxter lives in an apartment house where everyone knows everyone's business. The elderly neighbors around him are watching him. Everyone thinks he's a playboy. Nowadays, they might snide-post on twitter about how loud their nextdoor neighbor is, but no one would say a word to him however much he plowed. The doctor cares about how Fran ended up the way she is, today's doctors want to "tolerate" your lifestyle to make sure to do harm reduction. This all has no consequences for the executives he lets the place out to, but terrible social consequences for him, which is what they are more or less paying him for.
Even in a city as large as New York, the very hub of anonymity for the time, reputation is important, and traditional morality still has its enforcers. Baxter is the very model of the lonely, isolated, atomized individual in this film, and he is still constantly worried about what other people think of him. Today's equivalent wouldn't know any of his neighbors. Traditional morality would have no grasp on him. He'd move out before he'd care what some old biddie thinks of him. And no executive needs a discreet love nest, he can just find a way to open a credit card online and spend $100 on a decent hotel room for the day where no one will ask any questions, if any of the staff even speaks English.
Where in 1950s New York, even a single man was subject to a panopticon of judgment, today a married man in the suburbs doesn't worry about it too much.
I’ve worked in weird corners on finserv/fintech. My first job out of college was for a company that for my first two years as a matriculated adult would remain privately owned by the founders.
Irish Catholics, and filled with the same spirit that animated old Fezziwig at that time of year. A restaurant would be rented out, open bar provided, and everyone would later pretend you didn’t do something embarrassing if you had. A rare holdout in the 21st Century. Norms change, and also there are jerks that take things too far that wreck it for everyone (I’m sure in the broad history of the office Christmas party there were a non-zero number of men who committed vile acts). But, that your coworker barfed in restaurant’s entryway, or, two people got caught making out in the bathroom, was truly a boon to office camaraderie.
Then they sold to a PE firm, and the Christmas party became a holiday celebration, which in practice was a meal catered in to the break room during business hours.
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I'm not the word police but what's with the easy use of the term pajeet? I don't have a lot of experience with the word but I've seen it around here a few times, though I have always understood it as a slur.
Of course I bridle at the term gaijin as well (a word which, incidentally, may not be uttered by policy on NHK or the Japan national public broadcaster) so maybe I'm oversensitive here. As I say I've probably never heard the word said, and I don't even read it much except on the Motte, which has its share of Indian haters.
It is a slur. I treat slurs the same as I treat any other kind of profanity, they spice up a sentence, and are useful to express or portray a particular slant or implication in a story. "Bob and Alice made love" is a rather different image than "Bob fucked Alice;" even though they are mechanically the same act. In the same way, "This store was in a black neighborhood" is different than "This store was full of niggers;" even though they're pretty similar phrases. I could refer to the same friend of mine accurately as white working class, or as a trailer trash redneck; the same person, different implications. A person might refer to me walking into Wawa for a coffee as a white guy, a middle aged white dweeb, or a faggot yuppie fuck getting a whipped cream latte. All would be accurate enough.
In this particular case, I use the word pajeet to refer to motel owners/operators and their cousins they imported to clerk precisely, not as a general article of hatred for Indians. I rather love Indians. By using the word Pajeet, I'm using the connotations of the word to paint a picture in the reader's mind: the motel operation is primarily extractive, with minimal effort put in to things like reputation or avoiding scandal, they don't take a ton of pride in the operation and just want to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Where a native owner might think of themselves as an upstanding member of the community and be suspicious of a married executive they see around, an Indian just doesn't care, there's no connection to care about what the YTs are up to. I use the connotations of the word Pajeet to bring that aspect to the fore, the foreigner, separate from the community.
Perhaps, much like other profanity, I shouldn't use slurs, or at least should use them rarely. But I suppose I'm juvenile enough to still find them both useful and amusing.
Thank you for the detailed answer. I suspected you in particular weren't just sloshing words around without having considered what you were writing. I'm not sure your intention hit with me, but maybe did with others.
It might have something to do with you living in Japan for however long, where you are the minority, while I sit provincially in Wawa country, confident enough to fly to Japan to see you and say "Wow, look at all these minorities they got around here!"
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Maybe this is a generational thing, but my friends and I are all varying degrees of weebs and have no problem calling each other gaijin (or gwailo when we're in a more Chinesey mood) all the time as a joking insult.
Arguably at least the example you give is different than the old man on the train hissing 外人や to his wife when you board.
I make similar jokes about the stink of gaijin or a gaijin ghetto, but that includes as part of the joke the notion that the word has become an epithet.
It's also reclamatory when used by Anglos (like @ChickenOverlord?) in Japan - like rappers saying "nigger".
Racial slurs (and other slurs) cut differently when the context means that the possible meanings include "You are a member of my outgroup and I consider you sub-human" than when they don't.
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Because due to the sexual revolution, unmarried people having sex is now socially acceptable. Back then, two unrelated people showing up for the afternoon was likely to be prostitution, and the hotel didn't want to get a reputation for tolerating such leading to prosecution by the police.
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Your comment reminded me that Dick Fuld, infamous boss of Lehman Brothers for the fifteen years before it collapsed, had a very harsh policy against adultery for senior executives. He fired the bank’s president for it (along with several others over the years) and warned every executive that any extramarital affair was an immediately fireable offense. He also policed their behavior around their wives. Apparently he even told the wives, on their annual executive family retreat, that if they came to him with an affair, he’d fire their husbands but make sure they were looked after.
>name is Dick
>CEO of a company called Layman Brothers
>massive Karen about his employees slinging dick and getting laid
What the FUCK was his problem?
I'd be weirded out and annoyed as hell to have a boss who were a fraction that invasive and controlling toward his employees' personal lives. Imagine if bro had channeled a bit of his managing-employees'-personal-lives energy into managing subprime MBS exposure.
Because guys who break their vows are just as likely to be diddling their employer. If they have no loyalty to their wife, why expect them to be any more loyal to you, and not be embezzling/selling corporate secrets/cheating on expenses, etc.?
It's "dishonest in a small thing is likely to be dishonest in a big thing".
Although I was obviously joking in the quoted part—the more I think about it, the more Fuld was indeed in the wrong.
It does not sound like he policed things such as gambling problems or household debt the same way he did affairs, factors that may be similarly predictive of disloyalty or corporate misconduct (and perhaps even more so). He could had easily warned executives about gambling or debt and asked wives to snitch about such things while he was at it.
It does sound like he was using his position to enact a personal view, in firing executives based on his sentimentality toward marital fidelity and/or sense of personal loyalty toward him. Many would say this is unethical, unlawful even—in breaching a director's fiduciary duty toward shareholders when it comes to maximizing shareholder benefit. And this is on top of the aforementioned weird intrusiveness into his employees’ personal lives.
Ultimately, it's a "just-so" story. One could similarly argue that male executives who have extramarital affairs are more valuable employees, as they have a Demonstrated Track Record in Leveraging Core Competencies to Think Outside the Box for Alternative Growth Opportunities.
Kind of like how some say negotiating an offer letter is bad because it makes you look difficult and not like a team-player. However, when in fact, employers tend to respect it when you negotiate the offer letter and often actually expect you to negotiate. If you'll fight for you, you'll fight for them. Indeed, except for my first job out of undergrad, I've negotiated every plausible-sounding offer letter, even for most jobs I didn't expect to take. This would include my current one.
Every bank I have worked for has a policy on employee gambling. It is policed, but it doesn't need to be policed noisily off trading floors because the sort of person who is at risk for problem gambling doesn't make a good banker. On trading floors it is mostly self-policed because all traders are gamblers, but all traders also know that a problem gambler is a shitty trader. Banks are also all over their senior employees' (and their wives') personal finances - they aren't explicitly looking for consumer debt problems, but I suspect they would notice.
Boards of Directors (as a matter of corporate law) and the CEOs they delegate to get a lot of discretion in how to be long-term greedy - the legal term is the Business Judgement Rule. If Fuld and the Board thought that creating a culture where the execs and their wives were part of a Lehman "family" (which he did - that Fuld ran retreats for execs' wives attracted a lot of bemused coverage after the bankruptcy) was the best way to align incentives at the top of a bank, they were absolutely allowed to do that. And part of that culture is prohibiting affairs.
Your just-so story sounds entirely plausible and a Silicon Valley startup which regularly needs to break laws or act immorally would probably do well to preferentially hire rakes, with Uber being the proof of concept. A bank is a different type of organisation and needs to have a more small-c conservative corporate culture.
On the merits, execs having mistresses creates conflicts of interest (particularly if the mistress is employed by the bank or a client) and avoidable complexity. I understand why banks would want to discourage it. Managing conflicts of interest is part of the core competency of a bank (for both client trust and regulatory reasons) and the simplest way to manage them is to avoid the ones that don't come with a profit opportunity. Allegedly (I am not senior enough for this to be visible at my level) banks don't like exec spouses having careers that could create the impression of a conflict of interest, and mistresses are more trouble for multiple reasons.
Personally, I favour the mafia rule for mid-to-senior employees of high-trust organisations - you can shag your wife or a whore, but shagging respectable women you are not married to is verboten.
It is not policed I imagine you mean, except by self-policing via honesty policy in an "I am 12" kind of way.
Financial institutions also have policies—enforced by honesty policy—on some combination of things such as drug use, domestic or foreign political connections, gift giving and receiving, outside business activities, and reporting of convictions including misdemeanors (with a special focus on DUIs, financial corporations are highly booze-cruiser-phobic). Many or all of which likely correlate with corporate misconduct or company (dis)loyalty, but would be irritating to infuriating if your boss was all up in your grill threatening you about, and pulling your wife aside to tell her she can snitch on you and he'll take care of her. This goes back to the unusualness of Dick's isolated boner for marital infidelity and the way he expressed that boner.
The focus is on the investments side for insider trading and fair markets reasons. Supposedly, some institutions will run periodic soft credit checks on those with direct ability to transfer Treasury or customer funds, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were largely apocryphal or rare—or if executives were exempt (whether because they're "above-the-law" or because they themselves may not have the actual direct ability, technically-speaking, to transfer said funds).
There is still plenty of demand for rakish-type personalities in modern day banks, where aggressive morals-agnostic individuals can be quite value-add in finding opportunities and staking first mover advantages. Banks still need directors and executives willing and able to poach star employees from other banks, cultivate relationships with domestic and foreign politicians, help win the larger sell-side deals, be a driving force in new lines of businesses that better help transfer money from the company's clients to the company.
This was up to eleventy in the pre-2008 era—the era of which we're discussing. It was even more of a Wild Wild West before Dodd Frank and the mergers/conversions of the large investment banks with/into bank holding companies, an era where investment banks had much greater latitude in pursuing their ambitions. Lehman Brothers was an investment bank in 2008, not the Bank Holding Company XYZ that we're used to in 2025.
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It's even worse than that. Cheating on your spouse is "dishonest in a big thing". When someone shows you that they have no integrity, you should pay attention and not just ignore that revelation about their character.
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You state this so confidently but you actually don't know what you are talking about.
Loyalty is not some single monolith that you either have in all areas of life or lack in all areas of life. It's surprisingly context dependent.
I disagree. If someone shows no loyalty to their spouse, someone they literally promised to stick by no matter what happens, I have zero expectation that they will show loyalty to me or anyone else. It is a huge character flaw to be disloyal to your spouse.
I mean I'm sure there's a moderately strong correlation among the general population, and a weaker but still significant one if you control for socioeconomic status (not intended as a euphemism, although lol), but I think this is worded too strongly to be true. Plenty of people are relatively honest in business dealings but have a strong sex drive and not a strong desire to be loyal.
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You disagree that loyalty is not a monolith...? Your expectations might be wrong or emotionally reasoned. The research shows something more nuanced. People compartmentalize. They can be loyal at work and disloyal to their spouse, or vice versa.
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"Shows no loyalty"--if this were true I'd agree with you. I'm not sold that extramarital sex is showing no loyalty. It's certainly a violation of trust, a breaking of a vow, to be discouraged, potentially soul-destroying, etc. And a full-blown affair where the dude is now in love with his mistress, that's an even more egregious violation. This gets down to whether you feel a man who supports his wife and family financially and (as much as possible) emotionally but has had illicit sex with another woman (once or more times) has therefore abdicated all his responsibilities to his wife and family. Arguably he has failed on one front only--granted potentially disastrously. But still one front.
This is similar to saying all lies are equal. Maybe they are. That if you tell any sort of lie, ever, of commission or omission, your pants are on fire. I find this oddly naïve as a view of the world. Possibly I've internalized more of Japanese cultural norms than I usually imagine.
Fair enough - "shows no loyalty" was too strong a phrasing. That said, I don't think my post substantively changes if it were to say "shows disloyalty". Sleeping around on your spouse is just about one of the worst things you can do to someone, short of criminal acts. I think it makes perfect sense to use that as a marker of character and act accordingly. It seems to me that not wanting to have an adulterer in a position of responsibility in your business is just another application of the ancient wisdom "bro, if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you."
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„If I can save their marriage, I can save their mortgage“, thought Dick Fuld. It had been another long day. A lawyer had called, and a cop. The clock on the wall counted down the hours until another tranche defaulted. He lit another cigarette.
"AFFAIRS could be here" Dick thought, “We've never had our retreat at this resort before. There could be AFFAIRS anywhere." The cool air-conditioning felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE AFFAIRS" he thought. Sweet Dreams are Made of These reverberated his suite, making it pulsate even as the $900 wine circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of employee extramarital affairs after dark. "With enough leverage, your balance sheet can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
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It's the Drake meme.
upper panel: screwing around on their wives
lower panel: screwing the market and causing a global recession
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There is textual evidence in the film that this was either real or the characters believe in it enough to alter their behavior. Specifically, at the end of the film Baxter has his big hero moment when he refuses to let Sheldrake use the love pad. That's not important. Sheldrake is insistent that he still be given access to the Apartment Of Anonymity - even though his wife left him after she overreacted to him being a popular guy and laying it down. He says that he's going to go after Fran now that his wife is out of the picture.
But he still is not willing to risk doing so outside the safety of The Apartment if he can help it.
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There's a tendency to overstate both the moral judgement on successful men having affairs in the past(often there was none- and even if there was, it was a lot less than we'd expect) and the panopticon in practice. You could just go somewhere no one knew your face(the other side of the city, say) and use an assumed name. Nobody would know.
I was required to read, in high school, memoirs of a fifties child from a 'broken home'(they did exist). And hoo boy did he tear through a high-trust society. He nearly gets molested by his dad's gay friend, tells someone about it, and is handed a war trophy rifle and told not to let it happen again. On the word of a fifteen year old boy. Based, you might say, but this is the same society where he opens a checking account in someone else's name with no ID, because he's tall for his age(due to shoe inserts. He also has fake glasses to make him look older) so it's plausible he looks like an adult, who's gonna question. He uses the same hack to get ahold of booze, condoms, change his grades, etc. When he's living with his mother(in elementary school this time) she converts to Catholicism(a very serious commitment at the time) to try to get an exit strategy from her abusive, deadbeat boyfriend. The nuns who are supposed to be taking care of him so she can work are unable to, because he just... leaves, and then fakes correspondence between the two(he doesn't want the abusive boyfriend gone, he lets him skip school to work on cars and run around in the countryside). Eventually the nuns distract the boyfriend enough for his mom to take him and leave cities, he never finds them again, and she leaves the church(too many rules, I suspect) and marries a dickhead who beats him for not getting A's. So he just... never goes to class, except to change his grades. Manually, with a pencil on his report card. No, they don't type it up, who would lie? He did, as it turns out. He uses the same trick to get a scholarship into a prep school, which he promptly fails out of, and celebrates this achievement by drinking in a bar at 17- nobody asks for his ID, he just claims to be 18. That incident is prompted by his friend group knocking up a local girl, but nobody knows who did it- so they just argue with each other until someone folds and claims to be the daddy, and marries her with the explicit intention of divorcing after two years.
A high trust society makes it really easy to get away with stuff by just... lying all the time. His dad also tells just cartoonish lies all the time, the few times we see him. The high-functioning and successful older brother, when we see him, is mostly believing the two pathological liars in his life claiming blatantly implausible things to beg for favors and money. So are the other responsible adults. The kids fight, drink, shoplift, smoke cigarettes, borrow cars to go joyriding, have early sex(some of this is implied to be rape), skip school, etc etc. When they're caught by authority figures, they just lie about who they are, and the cops call the wrong set of parents to ask their kids to beat them. Men have to marry the girl they knock up, but most of the female characters in the story- except his mom, who might be some rose coloured glasses but also has an abusive partner of some description for most of it- are promiscuous, so it's more about which man gets caught holding the bag than who the actual dad is. The main character's stepsister is strongly implied to convince her 'good boy' boyfriend to sleep with her after she discovers she's pregnant by a half-caste townie she was cheating on him with so she can blackmail him into marrying her. Everybody is scamming each other absolutely all the time and everybody falls for it in a way that just seems totally implausible. Teachers, cops, bank employees all accept unlikely stories of sudden changes with no verification or supporting evidence.
This is what high trust societies are like. You can totally just tell not the truth and get away with it. There's discussions of izzat on the motte- I don't know, but it's hard not to see similarities in the worst examples of jeet behavior our anti-Indian racists come up with- to my mind the issue with Indians is less lying and more 'they don't like to pay their bills and they treat their workers like crap' than outright dishonesty. In the fifties, you could totally just tell the hotel employee you were married but the name change got caught up in paperwork. This wasn't 90's Ireland where honeymooning couples need a copy of their marriage license to rent the same hotel room. People just shew up out of nowhere and did whatever they want with flimsy excuses and everyone let them. I'm curious as to what our resident Japanese have to say about life in notoriously high trust and homogenous Japan- is just... saying stuff going to get you your way all the time, even if it's obviously untrue?
Would you mind sharing the name of the book memoirs of a fifties child from a 'broken home'
It was something generic like ‘a boy’s life’ or ‘this boy’s life’ or something by an Anselm Wolfe or wolf.
Ai gives This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff? I assume Also a 1993 film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. I'd never heard of it. I'll check it out
That sounds right. I think anselm was a fake name he used once.
After googling, yep, that was it.
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I read a good post a long time ago about how the main effect of the 70s serial killer wave culturally was not only (as is widely noted) to make way for a lower trust society in general - teenagers don’t hitchhike much anymore, etc - but specifically to make way for the end of a society (the Protestant European America, Canada, Britain, and much of the rest of Northwestern Europe of, say, 1890 to 1965) in which sociopathic behavior was uniquely easy to get away with compared to almost any other time and place in human history. You can see this even in period crime novels, at which one sometimes guffaws at the preposterousness of the trusting behavior shown by e.g. victims, but which was in fact seemingly accurate for the time.
Countries like Japan and Spain are relatively high trust, although less so than say Denmark, but they’re high trust in a completely different way to the kind of ‘sitting duck’ societies that the NW Euro Protestants had constructed in places like England and Minnesota by the 1950s. There’s still an inherent sense of friend and family and tribe and the stranger. As you point out for Catholic Ireland (and the same is true in Islamic countries as in North Africa), the same social stipulations worked or work on a much more ‘objective’ level that at least attempted to guard against the possibility of lying.
I’m sure many veterans who returned from WW2 were obviously traumatized and turned into violent, dysfunctional fathers. This in turn meant that many of their sons grew up to be violent, traumatized young men. This was all exacerbated by ubiquitous lead poisoning and the overall upheaval of social norms. And what happened to many WW2 veterans also happened to Korean War and Vietnam War veterans obviously. To the extent that the serial killer phenomenon proliferated, I imagine it was mostly due to these factors. All this also had the consequence of driving a huge number of teenagers, including many girls, to run away from dysfunctional and traumatizing households, permanently or intermittently. Also, pop music turned into a huge and commercialized cultural phenomenon, plus rebellious behavior and drug use was socially normalized in the ‘60s. It was also much easier to have a transient lifestyle before the digital age.
I’d conclude that the number of teenagers who hitchhiked (and were then victimized by serial killers and other criminals) probably surged enormously in the ‘60s and ‘70s and later fell back to its normal level. It was probably all a relatively short social anomaly.
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Another thing to remember is that those people were very very stupid. They believed straightforward ads. They were shorter than we are. Didn‘t get enough to eat, especially with the great depression. Flynn effect. Some vietnam/korea conscripts had three meals a day for the first time in their lives.
They weren't "stupid" they were "trusting". As @hydroacetylene observes, the defining trait of a "high trust society" is that you can just say shit and people will believe you, or at a minimum give you the benefit of the doubt.
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What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection? Are these just small-community mores being applied to larger places that hadn’t yet come to terms with their size?
The obvious reply is that they did not sustain it, see @RoyGBivensAction's reply below
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Well yes, but the defection level was probably manageable; declines in social trust were from multiple waves of bad news(serial killers being a major topic, for example) rather than from direct experience.
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Ooh, I'm thinking now of Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette where, among other things the deeply Protestant narrator (mirroring the deeply Protestant author) is contemptuous of the Catholic insistence on having girls chaperoned. An English girl, on the other hand, can be alone in a room with a man because they just would not indulge in any hanky-panky. Why not? They just wouldn't, that's all! These Continental girls are all flirts, because they haven't been brought up in good Gospel religion which would give them sound moral values so they wouldn't even dream of misbehaving.
That's funny. I was thinking about a time I traveled with a woman friend and we had separate beds in the same room. There was no hanky panky or intention of any, but our trip was made simpler and more pleasant because we didn't have to prove it to anyone. If either of us had been married we'd probably have made different arrangements for the spouse's comfort – but we weren't, so we won a bit of convenience from our liberal society.
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They didn’t. Little Billy the roving teenage delinquent wasn’t something that had always existed, he was a new phenomenon of the 1950s. It was the first sign that the newly industrialized, urbanized, anonymized society was starting to fall apart at the seams. Twenty years later it had gone from Billy to burned-out urban wastelands, hard narcotics, and feral gangs of murderous super-predators. Society had to adapt. Which is what lead to our low trust quasi-police state of three strikes and that’s life and helicopter parents cowering in walled off suburbs.
The 1950s were an alienated, degenerate time, it’s just that you don’t notice because everything that came after was worse.
See also Scott's review of On the Road:
You beat me to the reference.
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I very much doubt this. Don't have a source offhand but I suspect if I spent half an hour digging I could find people freaking out about this in the 1840s or 1870s in major urban centers like Boston or New York City. Industrialization in the US of A far predated the 1950s. If there was a new problem in the 1950s, it might have been due to the war making the practice of women working more commonplace and acceptable, thus increasing the number of unsupervised kids. But obviously women working wasn't invented during the Second World War.
Sure, there were always some neighborhoods of some cities that were always dicey. The Five Points in New York was a slum hellhole for 200 years straight. So was Whitechapel in London. Chicago has been infested with crime from about 1880 to today. Very rural areas could always be risky to travel through. But it wasn’t bad enough that you had to totally reorganize society to deal with it until about the 1970s. I think it was a lot of factors caused by the industrial Revolution, but the 50s was kind of the hinge point when society really started to fall apart.
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The fifties actually saw a decline in female labor force participation, because housewives are a luxury good and male incomes were rising fast.
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The scope of the roving increased greatly in the 50s. Automobile ownership was much higher in the 50s than in the 20s-30s.
Good point!
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Your points about the relative privacy of the modern era are well-founded. On the other hand, in the fifties, if you checked into a hotel under an assumed name to bed your mistress and your wife's best friend spotted you in the lobby, it'd be her word against yours. If it happened today, she'd take a HD photo of you.
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