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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.

You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.

Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.

A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.

Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.

High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.

High conscientiousness bubbles don't need a low level bossman. Highly religious communities and certain firearms-centered communities do quite well with minimal lower management, despite being broadly average in IQ and SES, because they're high in conscientiousness.

The trouble is we have a major ideological tendency which objects to the concept of conscientiousness and labels it as "whiteness", and other ideological tendencies which think that's ridiculous but do nothing to promote conscientiousness per se.