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Notes -
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?
Sub-state organization. Possibly sub-legal. Vigilance committees, neighborhood watch but tooled up. You saw this a lot in Hispanic neighborhoods during BLM. The Roof Koreans during the RK riots. You have to organize and strategize to defeat both retaliation and arrest.
The current failure is only of social pride and excessive legalism. People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more. Get realistic, look at your sub-legal options.
Go the other way. Find a group you won't snitch on. Teach each other, train each other, police each other. Street crims ain't shit to three guys who know what they're doing.
You know what? I might have a story for this.
Because once you've crossed that edge you can't cross back. You can be a white-collar professional, allowed into the good jobs and (maybe) the good clubs and parties, but to do so you have to scrupulously follow the laws which count (which include those against vigilantism). Break one of them and get caught and you're done -- your professional licenses go up in smoke, you're legally barred from various industries and (for many crimes) any jobs dealing with kids, and where you're not legally barred most companies will bar you anyway. At that point, you'll likely realize that you lack the skills to survive either in the part of the working class which accepts these things, or the precariat. So perhaps some of your former friends will cluck their tongues about the tragedy when they hear about your suicide... but most likely not even that.
The state is typically far more dangerous to those it protects than the rioters. (and I mean that in both senses).
And this is why people live in gater communities where they can outsource the "beat up shitty human beings" to security who stop shitty human being from entering inside in the first place, mostly made up of hardened members of the lower classes who're never going to get professional licences etc., so the security guards are fine if they beat up shit tier human beings.
Win win for free trade if you ask me.
I wrote a Dethklok-style song during the pandemic about that trend. It was cathartic to fantasize about burning those kinds of HOAs (and their contracts) to rubble.
The existence of keycard-locked and gated neighborhoods is a strong signal that most of the Americans that can afford them believe their surrounding society deserves low-trust interactions. This, in turn, earns a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy.
How does this at all possibly follow? The cart is before the horse here. People have bought into these communities because the surrounding communities are already so low-trust enough to force them into protective enclaves.
When was the last time you've heard of people making real decisions based on fiction they've read or seen? Or based on news articles from only one color of the spectrum?
If kids see a cartoon about bullies targeting people with glasses, they're less likely to wear glasses. Adults are nowhere near immune from that kind of false-positive threat modeling. They're just a lot more effective at overreacting. See: post-9/11 reactions to Arabs & Muslims, Japanese internment camps, Pizzagate, parental advisory stickers.
People can and do put the cart before the horse when making decisions on which neighborhoods to move into. It's common, and no amount of 'rational threat analysis' will change that.
Can you elaborate on what "putting the cart before the horse" means specifically, in this context? It seems you're claiming that crime and general social dysfunction isn't that big of a deal, and so organized efforts to exclude these things from one's immediate community are misguided, apparently because they only solve the problem for themselves rather than for everyone. Is that the general idea?
...But then here you seem to be claiming that the people doing this are mistaken about how low-trust and dysfunctional the surrounding communities actually are, that they've been propagandized into a fear response that is not warranted by the situation. Is this also accurate?
...But it seems these two points contradict each other. If the security they obtain is illusory, because it's really not that bad, then why does paying more and restricting oneself to gain this illusory "security" earn "a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy." If they don't need the security, then you and the others who can't afford it don't need it either, right?
Straightforwardly, and from direct personal experience as well as observed experience of those close to me, low-trust areas are in fact absolutely awful, and the crime and dysfunction they engender makes living a decent life far, far harder than a reasonable person should or will tolerate. The people who take positive action to exclude such crime and dysfunction from their communities are doing what they can with what they have where they are. Those who cannot enjoy such coordination could, if they wished, get the same effect through the powers of the state; not doing so is a decision that a majority of them have made and continue to make, because they consider the steps necessary unacceptable. I see no reason to consider your disgust toward the people who wall themselves off from such dysfunction legitimate in any way.
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