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Disincentivizing low-level antisocial behavior
There's a recent reddit post about someone, who contextually sounds like a woman in her 20s or 30s, living in an apartment complex and paying for a reserved parking spot. According to her, some guy has repeated parked his car in her spot, and she finally wrote a polite note and tucked under the wipers asking him to not park in the reserved spot. Minutes later, when she's inside her unit, the guy comes to her door and beats and kicks on it, and then leaves a note that says don't touch his car.
I'm sure billions such peccadillos take place every day around the world. I'd guess 95+% of these don't amount to anything consequential, and only result in hurt feelings, and that in turn explains to a large extent why they keep on happening, because it's unserious enough to amount to any consequences. People respond to incentives, and if you don't disincentivize peccadillos, well, they keep multiplying.
In this specific case, the reddit thread mostly has people suggesting she call the apartment complex to tow the car next time this happens, and to file a complaint so there is a record of potential violence and intimidation. Another upvoted comment says to put up a camera near her car so she'd know if he retaliates, maybe by keying her car or something.
Here's the thing, all this sounds like a major headache for the poor woman. It sounds like a major headache for a man who has a life he values, too. Most apartment complex reserved spots merely mean convenience, and if yours is stolen, you can just park in an unreserved spot and walk a few more feet. Inconvenient, and perhaps infuriating, but if the alternative is stressing over an angry man beating on your door or keying your car, I mean, is it really rational to stand your ground? If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.
There was a post high up on reddit featuring a clip from Jack Reacher season 2's opening, where a man deduces that a woman in front of him at the ATM is being held hostage by a carjacker. For extra morality simplification in case the audience is thinking too hard, her kid is in the car too. The hero then walks over, smashes the window, and beats the shit out of the carjacker. Very cathartic, and the reddit post is titled as something like this is every guy's fantasy.
Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?
My point is this: society has systems in place to disincentivize felonies, and to a lesser extent, misdemeanors. We don't end up with too many serial killers because it's so egregious. We suffer misdemeanors, especially in blue cities, because it's tolerable. We breathe in peccadillos because no one can be bothered to do anything about it. And that seems incredibly inefficient and unjust.
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. And the victims won't be the upper class or middle class intellectuals, but working class women, children, seniors, and any man who doesn't want to escalate at every turn, and also can't afford to pay to leave the failed environment.
The formal legal system is useless here. The guy's sticky note on the poor woman doesn't directly threaten violence. But she's now strongly disincentivized to escalate because there is an implication of retaliation. All the guy has to do is to come across as a little unhinged, and a little willing to throw his life away, and every rational man or woman backs off, and rightly so. This strategy works brilliantly in a society that's just safe enough--if the apartment is known to have multiple unhinged individuals, each unhinged individual may think twice about beating on the wrong door. But if everyone else is a law abiding citizen, well, it's free real estate!
How are you supposed to prosecute this? Cops and DAs have bigger fish to fry, and most apartment complexes aren't typically managed by brilliant problem solvers who go out of their way to attend to residents' needs. All I can do is to send thoughts and prayers to the poor lady.
I can think of three divergent environments that manage this problem.
Surely a rich society has a fourth option?
My fantasy is keeping myself out of trouble and to avoid injecting myself in such situations so that I can live to die another day. I rather enjoy living and having my body bereft of stab wounds and bullet holes. A random woman certainly wouldn’t reciprocate to provide free protection services if the situations were reversed.
I’m more than down with normalizing vigilantism against antisocial behavior in the spirit of a general “fuck around and find out”edness. It should be open season for motorists to provide mostly peaceful love-taps to groups of “teens” riding their bicycles dangerously in the streets, for storeowners or third-parties to Rooftop Korean-away looting flash mobs like the compound outbreak scene in 28 Weeks Later. In the current state of affairs, this is largely restricted by Who? Whom? concerns, as a certain NYC subway marine found out the hard way.
However, I don’t like the gender-biased nature of it. Women already feel entitled to random men serving as their white-knights, meat-shields, and bodyguards; I’d prefer not to exacerbate that. If women are to be regarded as Strong Independent #GirlBosses with the rights and status of men, they can solve their own problems and fight their own battles. Fists, knives, and bullets hurt men too. I’m not a fan of Schrodinger’s feminism, where women are #GirlBosses one moment and damsels in distress the next, depending on what’s more beneficial and emotionally convenient for them.
If the Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s were instead a small man in his 20s or 30s, hardly would anyone call for a “hero” to step-up on his behalf. Beating on some hot-head’s door may result in it opening for a fist or knife fight. Who knows what might happen to your defeated body if you lose the fight. If you win, it may result in protracted legal, social, and professional troubles, especially if the hot-head is a member of a favored class. It’s also a great way to get yourself shot right through the door. You’d deserve it too for white-knighting, fucking around and finding out, when you’re not a peak human with borderline supernatural powers like Jack Reacher.
Yes. To paraphrase Steve Sailer, the tough part of being poor in Western countries is not for lack of essentials or material goods, but rather having to live next to other poor people. And violent, low impulse control, and generally antisocial behavior is far more common among the poor.
If moving is not an option, these are reasonable solutions for a woman (or a man, for that matter).
The cure might be worse than the disease here. The surveillance and social credit system could be readily turned against you in anarcho-tyrannic fashion.
Without mass deportations (or something more... drastic), the ship has already set sail on this front in the United States and Europe. Eugenics would work, but might take too long depending on what degree of eugenics is deployed, even if it somehow could be.
Tempting, but escalating when you’re less crazy and have more to lose than your opponent is a risky venture, to say the least.
Calling for and voting in a manner for politicians, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. For a Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s, chances are this is a leopard-eating-her-face situation.
I don’t think you need anything that dramatic. You just need to coordinate society such that people who are rude and do disrespectful things are shunned. If he’d lost friends for doing that he wouldn’t be doing it. And as long as it’s tolerated it continues to get worse. My guess is, based on observation, that this isn’t the first time he’s done that. More than likely he’s been pushing on social norms for a long time and not getting any negative results. And if we stop tolerating it, it stops.
"Just"? Pardon me, but you might as well say that to lift mount Everest you just need to push up very hard.
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Hmm? My suggestion was to call for and vote for politicans, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. Hopefully that's not considered that dramatic in ${CurrentYear}, but Cthulhu swims left...
I don’t think anything he did amounts to a crime in most jurisdictions. The DA can’t do anything if it’s not illegal to bang on a door.
Banging on a door for the purpose of threatening the occupant is absolutely a crime in most jurisdictions. (In England and Wales, it is legally an assault).
But even that isn't necessary. The point of banging on the door is to claim escalation dominance by sending a credible signal that if she escalates to calling for a tow he can counter-escalate to a beatdown. The appropriate response by the authorities is to send a cop to the guy's house to politely inform illegal parking guy that actually the Westphalian State has escalation dominance round here and that if he escalates to a beatdown the cops will counter-escalate to a jail term, felony record etc. If that threat is credible, then it doesn't need to be followed up. And if the cops tell the unfortunate lady what they have done, then she now has escalation dominance in the original dispute. This is easy police work that a rookie cop could handle.
In a place with minimally effective policing (which, for example, included 95% of the UK in the nineties and 99% of the UK in the noughties, and in the present non-ghetto neighbourhoods of most Continental European or Australian cities, and all of 1st-world Asia) a threat of a beatdown by one adult neighbour against another is empty. I haven't seen the Reddit post that the OP is referring to, so it isn't clear to me if this was a case of a place where there is no effective policing (far too much of the US because the US is, for reasons that are not clear to me as a Brit, shockingly bad at basic police work) or whether this was a case of a woman scared into submission by an empty threat (in which case someone who knew the local situation should have told her to call the cops).
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