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The most unbearable thing in American culture is that disrespect is seen as high status and respect is seen as low status.
Today, if you are in a situation where you need to be respectful, you are in a very bad place. You are either in court, in a ghetto, or in prison. In court you must pay deference to the judge (who, being very high class indeed, is often very disrespectful- “I just can’t with that history.” I wanted to jump her too.) In the ghetto you must pay deference to the top dogs, the alphas, the crime mob bosses, whoever is in charge. In prison you must be respectful of everyone else or you’re going to suffer the consequences.
Outside of these places, you are free to be as disrespectful as you please. Indeed, the dream is that the richer you are, the more disrespectful you can be toward others around you. You want to get rich so you can go make fun of expensive stuff at Louis Vuitton and Bergdorf (and then buy it, being rude to the salespeople all the while.)
Where does this concept come from? I believe it’s an inherited trait from the English. It is downstream of entitlement. I am a midwestern American but have spent a fair amount of time in France. The French seem irritated by the entitlement of Anglosphere people. It took me a long time to understand why things that work in the Anglosphere are frowned upon in France, and as I’m still an outsider I’m still not sure I fully understand, but I have a theory that seems to explain the difference.
In American and English culture, we often show up to things seeming frazzled and sad and expect those around us to take care of all of our problems. We are owed this by society, after all, we are the sad and frazzled people! In France (and in most places) this is seen as entitled and crazy. If you show up like a weird diva, in England, people will want to know what’s wrong and try to help. If you show up like a weird dive in France, people will think there’s something wrong with you and roll their eyes until you can act like a mature adult who takes care of themselves.
Americans and the English, terrified of appearing slow or dumb, interrupt constantly. In other countries, people are not so afraid of appearing slow and dumb, and let each other speak, and then respond to what has actually been spoken.
The first time I visited Vienna I took a cab from the airport to my accommodations. The cab driver was polite and respectful, and I was nervously practicing my German with him. This being 5 years ago, I was still very much in the anglosphere cultural mode of interaction. So when we approached the accommodation, I said, “Hier ist gut danke,” and he sort of softly chuckled at me, in a way that was just condescending enough for me to be confused as to what I was doing wrong. It took a while to realize that it was I who had condescended to him as if he was someone incompetent at his job, while he was a professional who knew his city and his trade well and I was a tourist who just showed up. The English, and today the Americans, travel the entire world certain that they know the new city they’ve just arrived in better than the 60 year old cab driver.
As an American I can explain why we do this- or at least the rationale that we believe is why we do this. We want to be proactive and helpful, we don’t want to be seen as dumb or lazy, we don’t want to be taken advantage of. Americans go to a coffee shop in any part of the world, order their food, and then stand around waiting for it to be presented to them, staring down the staff the entire time. In most of the world this is seen as overbearing, impatient, rude, and weird. You order your things, then go sit down, because the staff will take care of you. In America we assume the staff to be incompetent or uncaring to the degree that we will never receive the order.
It’s hard to know, but I believe the cultural traits I’ve described have persisted in the American culture for several hundred years. But another trend emerged that has exacerbated the issue. Basically, class was invented for the Americans in the 1980s, or at least class as we understand it today. From the 1940s to the 1960s, there was mass upward mobility among all classes until the stagnation of the 1970s. People were largely of the same middle class in this period, or if not they were certainly living a better life than the generation before them at any rung of the socioeconomic ladder. It is not a popular view but I see the 1970s as the most beautiful time period of the 20th century. The Brady Bunch is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The grainy quality of the beautiful young blonde and brunet people in their rusty rainbow modernist home is the sort of fever dream you could build an ethnostate off of. The 1970s are the only era of history where the mass market, every day people clothes looked better than the runway fashions. (Compare the rainbow of pristine, printed and textured knits and denim in the Sears catalogue to the drab and underwhelming runway fashions of Halston and Anne Klein.)
The 80s is where everything went wrong. Class signaling emerged and ruined the fabric of American life. Reagan didn’t help things but I’m not pinning it on him alone. Indeed, there is classism in America on both the right and the left. Neither of them are good. Classism from the left looks like the snobbery of NPR and the ivies and east coast intellectualism. Classism from the right looks like midwestern golf and country clubs and HRH in her McMansion. Classism from both sides looks down on poor whites, and when pressed both sides are willing to self-flagellate in honor of the past horrors of the treatment of blacks and other minorities, while never daring to examine the motivations for these historical situations, and never feeling bad about the open and glaring hostility toward poor white people (the occasional Appalachian apologia aside which often feels either forced at gunpoint or the result of some strange 4d chess situation.)
Anyway, I pinpoint the emergence of America’s class system to the 80s because it was truly the decade where equality was thrown out the window. Suddenly you had girls like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club (who I never thought could really pass for a pretty popular girl- all the redheaded girls I grew up with were goths and poor, but this was the midwest) asserting her class superiority by eating sushi and sticking up her nose at anyone who didn’t get the vibe. 70s Marcia Brady would never resort to ridiculous class signaling like this- she didn’t need to. She was just hot. The 80s were the decade where sex became undignified, and status became the name of the game. Now you didn’t just wear Levi’s from Sears to get laid, you had to wear Yohji Yamamoto- never mind that the silhouettes made you look like a hunched over creep, or that the Kansai Yamamoto jumpsuit you bought made you look like a Goomba from the Mario movie (not even the video game) and that it didn’t get you laid at all.
Please look at the films Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) directed by John Waters. I first watched these around 2010 while I was in college. I truly was very confused by the conceit of these films. Basically, they are meant to depict very “filthy” people (in the words of the director.) The filthiest people alive, even. But visually, these people look very put together and classy and elegant to me, compared to the people I see today. The Team Rocket-esque main villains in both films (see here) may have unnaturally dyed hair, but she wears crystal jewelry, draped silk blouses, secretary-looking eyeglasses, and thoughtful makeup. He wears button up shirts, well fitted trousers, and sharp blazers. It blows the mind that there was a time in America that women who looked like [this]((https://prod3.agileticketing.net/images/user/fsc_2553/fs_female_trouble_800.jpg) were considered trashy. Ok, the bra is showing through the sweater, but my god. Pleated plaid skirts, pencil skirts, button up blouses- who are these women, CEOs?
Today people dress very disrespectfully. Indeed, the Silicon Valley flex is that the billionaire wears flip flops and hoodies everywhere. Ugggghhhh! Sorry to mention France again, but there is something called noblesse oblige. In earlier societies, the rich gave so much to the poor. They dignified the existence of the poor by giving them something to aspire to, something to look up to, a guide for their lives and their choices. The rich today have abandoned all noblesse oblige in favor of looking worse than the filthiest people alive. They believe they owe those around them nothing.
Now, it may feel glamorous to owe those around you nothing, to disrespect the people around you, to degrade yourself and pull down everyone you see at the same time. But what it really betrays about the person who does this is that they feel so small. HRH, the strange right wing woman internet famous for ranting about eating a potato, once said that she loves to visit luxury boutiques “looking like a pile of trash.” (She meant that she goes in wearing leggings or sweatpants and flip flops, not in proper clothing.) She must feel so small about herself that she needs to grab back some power from her situation and the only way she knows how is to disrespect the people around her through disrespecting herself.
By the way, disrespect is an extremely feminine trait. When I’ve traveled in the Middle East and Greece, men are extremely respectful of each other. They never talk poorly of their local community and those around them. If you try to speak poorly of your culture, even if it is America, they see you as strange and indeed, disrespectful. They expect you to speak highly of it because they feel proud of where they are from for the most part. Of course they don’t have the luxury of being from the most powerful and richest place on earth as I happen to be from, and being in a more turbulent area prone to war and generational blood lust they have more motivation to respect themselves and their communities. Women, who American men allow to set all cultural mores and public opinion, do not have the egos to enact a sense of dignity and respect toward their community or nation.
Speaking of the wealth of America, it was a shock to me that midwestern America seems richer than even Switzerland. My nephew’s high school in the rural midwest just spent $20,000 on costumes for one play this year. An old man in the woods recently told me medicare paid for his $400,000 penis implant to correct ED. The waste and excesses of America are insane. Perhaps if we were more exposed and aware of the richness of the US compared with any other place men and women would both feel more respect toward it. The fact that we can afford absurd luxuries in the middle class but we have no appreciation for it- and even feel entitled to it- is staggering to me.
It must be noted here that respect in the US can vary widely between regions. The Northeast is by far the least respectful region in the USA. This creates a very bizarre dynamic in certain places, such as in NYC where I interned for several months in the fashion industry. The garment district is full of people who come from all over the world, mostly outside of the anglosphere, from places with very strict codes of respect. Being a midwestern transplant and an American through and through, I could tell I was pissing off every single macho Egyptian gay fabric trader and Jewish notions dealer and Korean dragon lady every time I talked to them and had no idea why. In the stress and discomfort of Midtown Manhattan I was a lost cause, I just mostly didn’t make friends there and moved on with my life. But in reflection I can only imagine they felt my bratty midwestern personality clashed with their dignified expectation of respect that I was frankly oblivious to.
Northeastern cultural norms seem to be creeping east into the midwest and the Great Lakes regions. It seems like people were a bit more patient and friendly with each other across these areas when I was growing up 20 years ago than they are today. I would blame this on people seeing the East Coast as classier and more aspirational compared with the Midwest. Appalachian people have their own codes of respect and are a bit cliquish compared with other regions of the US but I would say are somewhere between the Northeast and the Midwest in terms of the baseline expectation of respect. The south is actually very respectful and I am one of the few northerners who prefer southern people over northerners. People in the north want to paint all southerners as racist and bigoted while never examining the bigotedness of this belief. Indeed when I travel in the south I am always struck by how sweet and kind and thoughtful people are in the south compared with the mean, snappy nastiness of the northerners. I’ve spent very little time on the west coast but people seem great out there, it’s hard to be in a bad mood with such great weather and climate and beautiful scenery in California. It seems in the media like people constantly complain about crime and other issues in CA but the vast majority of those problems are so much more unbearable in the east than in the west, so I am confused by the culture and the perception.
The respect dynamic also creates problems between American people who have grown up here and more recent immigrants. If you grew up in a place where respect is expected, and are suddenly in a culture where respect is low class, you’re going to feel weird and disrespected by the locals and like you are taking a huge drop in status among the community because you don’t understand the local norms.
The low status of respect is a very strange cultural trait among the Anglosphere but also leads to certain asymmetric advantages. For example, our impatience is a natural positive when it comes to creating efficient computer programs or cutting bureaucratic bloat or refining fast production in food or manufacturing. Having no expectation for respect lets us skip formalities and focus on more important tasks or matters. Mild disrespect could raise the bar for engagement from people who don’t adopt the local norms as readily as an in-group signal.
If you are from an Anglosphere country and want to understand how we come across to other people I would recommend the YouTube channel Mikeokay ( https://youtube.com/@mikeokay ). He is a sweet and friendly guy but he is also very British, talking over people, being oblivious to social cues of respect and so on, though he does try to fit in to the extent that he can. I sometimes feel cringe at things he does that he doesn’t realize are rude but people are usually understanding enough that he is a foreigner and are forgiving even as he retains his fringe British traits.
The most insufferable result of the respect issue in America is the treatment of people who are seen as stupid. Americans believe that we are seen as stupid outside of the US. I doubt this belief. We have been brain draining Europe and a handful of other regions for decades or centuries. People respect American institutions from law and universities to science and the humanities. It seems like a very American invention, and a facile one, that we are seen as stupid outside of the US. Regardless, because of this insecurity of intelligence, we see one of the darkest impulses of the American people, which is to dogpile on people who appear dumb. The other day my mother was looking at her phone, scrolling Facebook, and read a post where someone asked a question about the weather. I forget what it was exactly, but it was seen as a dumb question, and she said that all the comments were dogpiling on this person for asking a dumb question. She was on the side of the mob. I felt so bad for the person who asked the question, and thought less of my mother for siding with the pile on. Sometimes we ask questions that are easily answered and should still be afforded the dignity of having a kind and educated response. That we jump to flaming someone seen as dumb is horrible.
This also is a terrible hypocrisy of the American people. A year or two ago, I went to a somewhat close relative’s wedding. In the ceremony there was a person related somehow to my relative’s new husband. She visibly had some mental disability, perhaps downs syndrome if I had to guess. There was a moment during the ceremony where the relative gave a sort of short speech, and it was a nice moment, but the reaction from the crowd was a massive and extended clapping that felt like a mass group guilt catharsis to forgive themselves and each other of all their other hypocrisies through one moment of kindness toward someone with a disability. These are the same people who will dog pile on a “dumb” question online, or spend decades blaming social ills on the poor, but want to feel good about clapping for a disabled person? I don’t want to be so trite as to say I felt like I was in a room full of nazis clapping for a Jew, but I at least felt like I was in a room full of people who openly dislike dumb people and spend an awful lot of time trying to signal that they are not dumb people who were all clapping for a very “dumb” person. I do believe that they would genuinely be kind to and accepting of this person if they were a close family member, or at least attempt to do so, but I’m not sure if that makes them more or less hypocritical.
Anyway, the same people who flagellate themselves nonstop over the massacre of the Native Americans or the history of slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no capacity to see the problem of being terrible toward less intelligent people or poor whites today. The hypocrisy to me is glaring and incongruent. Ideally we would take a more nuanced and understanding view of history as well as our current bigotries and prejudices, but it’s more likely that we deal with the current bigotries with the same embarrassing self flagellation as we deal with other historical grievances if we deal with them at all. Unfortunately due to the bigotry of the intelligent over the dumb, and the classism of the elite over the poor, anyone advocating on the behalf of either group is too embarrassed to speak out for their interests.
In conclusion, when I was young, my father used to give me a piece of wisdom. He would say, it’s nice to be smart, but it’s smarter to be nice. He is correct. To embrace kindness and respect would help improve public life in America today.
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I have been meaning to write this essay for like 5 years but never tackled it until today. I will say that I think we’re past peak rudeness as exemplified by the Karen video rage of circa 2020, but there is still a fundamental energy of disrespect inherent in Anglo-American culture that I think is worth examining.
Being nice to the help is a status marker for good breeding in America. Presumably other cultures that care more about breeding care more about that status marker.
There are three classes of this: mean to the help (nouveau riche trash), explicitly nice to the help (lesser gentry), and "why would you be mean to the furniture?" (true money).
It would be bizarre to go out of you way to be polite to a dog or a horse, and the act of a despicable varlet to be deliberately cruel to one. Why should a servant be different?
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