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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   22433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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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.

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.

one sometimes guffaws at the preposterousness of the trusting behavior shown by e.g. victims

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.

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?

What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection?

The obvious reply is that they did not sustain it, see @RoyGBivensAction's reply below

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.

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.

It is true that Madame had her own system for managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty system it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it, in that small affair of turning my pocket inside out, and reading my private memoranda. “Surveillance,” “espionage,”—these were her watchwords.

Still, Madame knew what honesty was, and liked it—that is, when it did not obtrude its clumsy scruples in the way of her will and interest. She had a respect for “Angleterre;” and as to “les Anglaises,” she would have the women of no other country about her own children, if she could help it.

Often in the evening, after she had been plotting and counter-plotting, spying and receiving the reports of spies all day, she would come up to my room—a trace of real weariness on her brow—and she would sit down and listen while the children said their little prayers to me in English: the Lord’s Prayer, and the hymn beginning “Gentle Jesus,” these little Catholics were permitted to repeat at my knee; and, when I had put them to bed, she would talk to me (I soon gained enough French to be able to understand, and even answer her) about England and Englishwomen, and the reasons for what she was pleased to term their superior intelligence, and more real and reliable probity. Very good sense she often showed; very sound opinions she often broached: she seemed to know that keeping girls in distrustful restraint, in blind ignorance, and under a surveillance that left them no moment and no corner for retirement, was not the best way to make them grow up honest and modest women; but she averred that ruinous consequences would ensue if any other method were tried with continental children: they were so accustomed to restraint, that relaxation, however guarded, would be misunderstood and fatally presumed on. She was sick, she would declare, of the means she had to use, but use them she must; and after discoursing, often with dignity and delicacy, to me, she would move away on her “souliers de silence,” and glide ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every keyhole, listening behind every door.

... “I’ll go; I will be ready in ten minutes,” I vowed. And away I flew, never once checked, reader, by the thought which perhaps at this moment checks you: namely, that to go anywhere with Graham and without Mrs. Bretton could be objectionable. I could not have conceived, much less have expressed to Graham, such thought—such scruple—without risk of exciting a tyrannous self-contempt: of kindling an inward fire of shame so quenchless, and so devouring, that I think it would soon have licked up the very life in my veins. Besides, my godmother, knowing her son, and knowing me, would as soon have thought of chaperoning a sister with a brother, as of keeping anxious guard over our incomings and outgoings.

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.

What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection?

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:

On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.

But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

You beat me to the reference.

Little Billy the roving teenage delinquent wasn’t something that had always existed, he was a new phenomenon of the 1950s.

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.

The fifties actually saw a decline in female labor force participation, because housewives are a luxury good and male incomes were rising fast.

If there was a new problem in the 1950s

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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