The decline continues

Posting has been light lately, I know. Inspiration is harder to come by when you’re juggling a lot of big things at the same time.

Where I live, there’s a constant hum of demoralization going on in the background. It’s analogous to the electrical hum from a power transformer. If you are unlucky enough to live near one, you “get used” to the low-mid-level annoying, discordant hum. Enough to get through your day, but you’re never unaware of it. And it enervates.

So it is in Burlington, Vermont. Holly chronicles it well here; if you want to know what it’s actually like in this city that looks great on postcards, read her article.

TLDR; Burlington is the Victorian small town version of San Francisco. Beautiful to look at on the surface, from a distance. When you get close enough to see the detail, things sour.

Twenty years ago when I was new to Vermont, it had already become a leftist state. Since I was a leftist, it suited me. And it wasn’t extreme then the way it is today. You had your hippies, your vegans, your community activists, your middle class NPCS, sure. But even accounting for the fact that I was blind to the problems with this political and cultural outlook two decades ago, it wasn’t like it is today.

Demoralizing is what it is. This city and its people sap your mood, your outlook, and your hope.

Holly’s above-linked article gives stark examples. But even leaving aside increasing shootings and street altercations, the volume of everyday incivility, rule-breaking, lack of any shared etiquette, and the general sense of being morally surveilled is enough to make it an unhappy place to live.

The societal decline scales, both up and down. Underneath the dramatic public incidents is a deep river of everyday apathy and indifference (sometimes contempt).

I’ve written many posts here about the decline. The disappearance of road rules, public conduct rules, basic courtesy. The everyday-more-numerous people who blast their music from their phones—or scream their domestic conversations into the phone right out on the street—the people who refuse to take turns at intersections, the store employees who treat you insultingly because your presence means they have to work.

It’s been a long decline that started years ago. But just as the “learning loss” public school kids are suffering accelerated overnight during the “pandemic,” so did the unraveling of civic and harmonious life in my liberal city. What has occurred in the past three years would have taken 20 years or longer to happen at the prior pace.

Shock is what it is. I was looking for an alternative to “demoralized,” and the word is “shock.” You could be forgiven for imagining that some Dr. Evil figure turned on a social death ray that zombified your neighbors overnight, because that’s what it seems like.

The pace of the decline has not slackened. Even inflation has at least slowed; social devolution has not.

In the past three days:

-Three cars took red lights. By this I mean that they sailed through them even at four—way intersections of major thoroughfares. They have lots of cars all lined up waiting to go; it’s not a country road at night where it’s safe to blow a stop sign.

These drivers didn’t push a stale yellow light. They saw that they had a red light at least five full seconds before they arrived at the intersection. They just kept going, even if cars with the green light were already accelerating at right angles.

In the past, I might have experienced this once a year, or twice. Now it’s several times a week.

-I’m pretty sure my car is going to get hit in a parking lot, and I need to prepare my mind for that. It is now—it wasn’t this way three years ago—surprisingly dangerous to back out of a parking spot in a lot. No one stops. No one. They don’t even slow down. Most people are traveling 15 to 20 miles per hour, dangerously fast for a parking lot.

If you’re backing out, you inch so carefully, stopping and then creeping, stopping then creeping. Of course, if you don’t drive an SUV, you’re blind because you can’t see around the luxury trucks on either side of you.

People not only won’t stop to let you out, they swerve aggressively, sometimes even speeding up. It’s as if they’re angry at you for being there and needing to reverse.

-It appeared that a road rage incident might happen around the corner from my house. This is a residential, small-street part of town. There’s a church on one corner, and houses on the other three.

Four of us pulled up to the four-way stop about the same time. No one knew what to do. One person would inch, then slam the brakes on when the car to her right started inching too. This went around the intersection roughly clockwise (which, of course, is the rule that would have helped if anyone remembered it) for what seemed like an eternity.

One guy started to gesticulate and appeared to be yelling inside his truck. I’m sure we were all frustrated. I was. I was also frozen. All of us were. There was no way for any of these drivers to know what to do. I finally took the chance and accelerated quickly through the intersection after what seemed like at least two or three “creep/brake/inch/brake” cycles. But these things leave me rattled.

This is a direct consequence of the abandonment of etiquette and rules. The abandonment of order. ‘Order,’ both in the sense of ‘done in a predictable, routine way,’ and also in the sense of ‘hierarchical order with one party having the first claim/primary prerogative.’ Order is both of those things. It is what happens when we mutually agree to adopt the same routines; many of these routines also assign places to the parties in a transaction. Someone will be first in line, for example.

I’ll call these dual senses ‘basic order,’ and ‘hierarchical order.’

‘First-come, first-served’ illustrates both kinds of order. The ‘basic order’ part is our collective agreement that there will be a common rule that we are all subject to that will structure how we transact in public given that we have individual interests that must be reconciled to social reality (other people’s individual interests).

We see the ‘hierarchical order’ aspect in the fact that ‘first-come, first-served’ creates a line, a queue, for people at service counters. It is a rank-ordered queue, but it’s an objective and disinterested rank order. The first person to enter goes to the head of the line, and she is entitled to be waited on first. She has priority. The prerogative travels down the line of people. Everyone gets a turn at being ‘first in line.’

We agreed to this—and we’re barely hanging on to the custom of ‘forming a line’—because it is fair. It is objective. It gives no person ‘royal privilege’. It has nothing to do with our sex, income level, skin color, or religion.

I think it’s a pretty good solution, don’t you?

Every day, fewer of our citizens seem to agree. Collectively, we seem to have an issue with order. We don’t like it, not one bit. It offends us. We believe we’re above having to hew to convention if that means not being served first.

”Bring your whole self to work” was the terrible idea that helped turn modern offices into emotional daycares and Broadway-equipped stages for mounting social dramas that end in bloodbaths. “Bring your whole self out in public” is just an extension of it.

All that above? That’s a lot of words to define ‘narcissism.’ That’s what all this is. Narcissism. Solipsism (with a healthy dose of nihilism).

I’m still thinking about those three people at the intersection. The most plausible assumption, I’m pretty sure, is that we all felt paralyzed and jammed up in the same way. No one was ‘at fault.’ None of us could figure out what to do, and what to do safely, because we had no way to know what other drivers might do. This is the penalty for societies that abandon etiquette, and rules: social collapse.

How can we talk to all of the ‘people at intersections’ about this? Imagine a magical world where all four of us were whisked out of our cars and put at a table together with beer or coffee. Imagine that we could all breathe a sigh of relief, realizing we were all confused together, and wouldn’t life be nicer if we could talk this through and find a common way to live again?

That can’t happen, but is there something else we can do? Complaining is a specialty of mine, I know, but I’d really rather find solutions. That’s where so much frustration comes from; the sense that it’s all inevitable and that we’re powerless to change it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.