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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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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.

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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