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Personally, I absolutely love this change and hope it persists. There's something so charming about for example a famous person walking into your store and still introducing themself with something like "hey, I'm Rob, nice to meet you." First name basis with people, more equal treatment, it's not even purely about trust per se, though you do bring up a good point about it. It's the logical continuation of the American disdain for titles and kings. Frankly even if I met someone who was knighted, I'd refuse to use Sir on principle, because I love that about us. To adapt MLK, "I have a dream that one day our children will be judged not by the brand or quality of their clothes but the content of their character." It's freeing. Just like when you realize that the rule of "it's not awkward unless you make it awkward" is incredibly powerful, and you can have difficult or sensitive discussions with people without hiding behind taboo, it also is liberating. As I like to say, people are just people, so the less we do to hide and obscure that fact, the better and kinder I think we are inclined to be.
I think it’s a negative thing. I think that a loss of respect for yourself and others is often shown by how we present ourselves in public. When you’re dressed well you treat yourself as a person worthy of respect and treat the rest of society as aplace worthy of being respectable for. When men wore suits it wasn’t just an empty signal but came with a statement of respect for others. A guy in a suit insisting on being called Mister and calling his boss Sir or Mister or whatever and who is teaching his sons to treat themselves as people worthy of respect and to respect others is contributing to a lot of very important and beneficial things for society at large. The practice of demanding excellence from ourselves and respect from other works to create a society in which excellence and respect are norms and that even those at the bottom of the social ladder.
When the rich choose to forgo those things it encourages others to do so when they can least afford the problems that come with it. A rich person can afford to talk back to his boss because he has enough cushion to weather a job loss. A rich person can be loud and proud about vices like drug use or drinking or casual sex because he can get access to things to fix any problems that come up. This often leaves a wake of people behind who emulated bad behavior without the means to avoid the consequences.
The other thing that happens is that it erodes the culture’s ability to demand good behavior. We lose the standard and the ability to enforce the standards. When you don’t feel the need to dress appropriately for going out, you also can’t say much about others taking it farther. You can’t get that mad about the people wearing pajama pants to the grocery store when you’re wearing sweatpants. You can’t say anything about being lazy when you’re lazy.
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I dunno. This doesn't check out IME. I think a bit of masking is actually necessary. There was an appeal to getting more intimate with the minds of others when I thought "people are just fundamentally good". While it's not like I believe the opposite now, I can't sign on to that statement as-is.
I have been low-key horrified at many of the utterances good friends and peers have made over the last decade. These are decent, nonviolent, funny human beings who turned on a dime and started expressing every cruel, nasty thought they had in the name of authenticity and 'speaking their mind'. I have not cherished this. I wish they had actually shut the fuck up and kept it to themselves. Our bonds were not strengthened, but frayed. They still are to this day.
That's with actual people I'm familiar with in my life. You can probably imagine how much more insufferable this is with celebrities. More irritating is how that class is allowed to express their 'authentic selves' as much as they want while being completely shielded from the consequences of their expressions, while others get no such protections. Pedro Pascal should be C-tier after all the crap he's said, but instead he soaks up more love, more accolades, and more roles. I guess him and his legions of fans are okay with this, and who am I to complain. But I do not feel inclined towards kindness at this state of affairs.
Maybe society needs masks, and kayfabe, and to be just a little fake and gay. Maybe we are better off with some illusions regarding others. Because just like with the global adoption of the internet that was supposedly meant to help us better understand each other - well, it worked. And I am thoroughly displeased with the results.
See Destiny and his ongoing meltdown. I actually thought he was closer to being 'one of the good ones' worth listening to occasionally, and he seemed to make a concerted effort to drop some of the low-effort gotchas that marked thie beginning of his career as a political streamer. Now I think he's telling us what he really thinks. While I believe this is somewhat of a public good, because now I know I don't ever have to pay attention to him again, it is still depressing and unfortunate. And I also now have in mind several friends who are exhibiting this same behavior to a lesser degree, which makes it doubly so.
I mean, humans being what they are, it's more like we need to give people a chance to be good. It may not happen automatically. I think part of that is searching for common ground and, maybe not values exactly, but starting conversations from a similar point. However, it's definitely tough out there. I had a conversation last month with my brother who I was absolutely shocked to see almost explicitly advocate for rage and violence as necessary to wake people up and get people moving (he is very pro-Palestinian). I still think and worry about that, frankly, radicalization and extremism. I was like look, MLK got civil rights done at the end of the day, not the Black Panthers. He still sort of thinks that whites needed to be 'scared' into it, but I strongly disagree. It was getting moderate whites on board by emphasizing our shared humanity and showing a human face to the suffering. Things like Selma, you know? Hard to ignore.
So we ended on what I felt like was at least an okay note, because I ended up saying hey look, I lean Israel here but it's fucked up all around and just a bad situation. But one thing I do feel strongly about is Palestinians are straight up not getting enough food to live. That, IMO, is and always will be on Israel, who controls the borders - it's not like Palestine can feed itself, and huge chunks of farmland were bombed or bulldozed or what have you anyways. So I'm like hey, we feel powerless and that really sucks, let's do something together and call and email our congresspeople, who actually do have someone read/listen to those. It's a small thing, but felt nice, and was something we were able to come together on. But still, it does still really suck and I get that. I really don't like seeing that kind of attitude so close to home.
Well I got a bit off topic but I don't see casual, equal, class-blind service and conversation as really posing too extreme a risk of people indulging their worst selves instead of putting their best foot forward. Aren't most of these mores really about respect and treatment of people short of friends, not friends per se? I think there's still some rules of politeness involved, it's just a casual politeness and not a formal one.
Yeah sorry, whatever your brother said about how the “Civil Rights” movement won its political gains is almost guaranteed to be more historically accurate than the extremely sanitized, simplified, mythologized version you’ve presented here. If this is the narrative you need to believe in to allow yourself to decry political violence and seek conciliation, then by all means please continue to believe in it. But it doesn’t actually bear much resemblance to the nitty-gritty details of how that particular sausage got made at the time.
They all played some part of course, that’s just the sausage of history indeed. But man, the 60s were ugly. BLM and a single assassination attempt is tame by comparison. Apparently the message LBJ used to carry the portion of Southern senators needed to break the filibuster was the basic idea “better you now than someone more radical later” - so the framing of people seeing some sort of racial equality effort being law was seen as inevitable, make of that what you will. But there’s at least some mainstream thought such as some research here including citations in the intro that suggests nonviolent protests were associated with both successful campaigns and shift in vote share more often and more strongly than violent ones. Of course, a funny fact is that at least per the polls, a good chunk of people thought the March on Washington even was counter-productive. MLK wasn’t actually super cuddly and moderate, he was dedicated to making whites feel uncomfortable, but there’s a difference between that kind of “troublemaking” and the more violent kind, even if you might plausibly call both radical or even maybe extremist.
But at the end of the day it was white politicians giving more advanced civil rights to Black people.
Nonviolent protests, especially back then, ran under good cop/bad cop where the violent protests made the nonviolent ones effective.
There's also the fact that "nonviolent" and "doesn't cause harm" aren't the same thing. Protests in the 60s were absolutely meant to cause harm to members of the outgroup. Telling your employer that you tweeted in support of assassination is a nonviolent protest (and so is firing someone for that tweet).
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