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Polite society ceased to believe it needed to offer a benefit to observing its standards. Most have noticed.
"Standards on polite society" impose noblesse oblige over the sum of societal actors who control what politeness is. Cancel culture was their effort to keep things in line.
What benefit did accepting cancellation or playing by those standards offer anyone else? Financial ruin, felony charges, and death.
So we can't have standards in this age. Much like the ozone layer, the societal machinery that enabled them has been damaged and will take some time to regenerate.
'noblesse oblige' only worked in societies which adhered to the concept of 'noblesse'. Modern society, on the other hand, does not believe that the ruling class assumed its status through hereditary privilege, consequently it does not believe either that the ruling class is obligated to anything by its status.
The ruling class in modern society assumed its status exclusively through age (and to a point, gender, but it's the vaguest possible one as it's a whole 50% of the population).
This is orthogonal to actual merit (which is generally what hereditary privilege implies), which is why the standards this class imposed as they came to power were destructive.
What merit does it take to be born to the right parents? One of the major and common failure states of hereditary privilege is that the failson of someone with merit inherits all the power and fucks everything and everyone up (generally combined with fuck-all recourse).
The ruling class in modern society has no Noblese Oblige because they are extremely mercenary. Noblese Oblige requires a recognition of the common man as part of your tribe/society/culture. A rootless cosmopolitan mercenary who feels no ties to any one society or tribe is of course not going to feel any oblige to the downtrodden.
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This is a post-import the third world belief. I definitely believed that I had obligations for my gifts and elites had obligation to society up until like 2018. Younger people just don’t understand how things use to be.
Morally I completely changed somewhere between 2018-2022.
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The kayfabe of standards is that it signalss politicians play on a level field, when the standards just end up being movable goalposts picked up and used as clubs to hit each other over the head. Similarly the MAGA and now Chapotraphouse-esque dirtbag left where calling people names and having an unkempt Real Man Image is meant to signal ability to act unbounded by protocol as if protoco was what constrained delivery instead of rank incompetence.
Neither having standards nor abandoning them is delivering on the promise of Being Real and Getting Shit Done. Being Real is a signal of original intent which is why Kamala and Newsom and Cuoma being lizardpeople with bad skinsuits stinks of disingenuity because people can't trust that these reptiles wouldn't find some sophistry to explain why actually letting in a million migrants is Good For Your Culture. But at least Being Real let the root cause for failure to Get Shit Done be assigned to the "correct" causal origin. I do wonder if everyone just keeps underestimate rank stupidity as a constraining variable. Perhaps only the actually brain damaged seek out politics which is why lawyers seem so overrepresented.
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