Do You Trust Your Fellow Citizens?

[Narz]

More than you all seem to. Or but less than a year ago. There's an influx from a new subdivision and there are now far more little suburbanite colonists breaking into cars and sneering at people who wave to them.

Trust, like the stars of the sky, will disappear with them. Blotted out by thier... culture.

Reminds me of my dad, his favorite prejorative was suburbanite.

I believe it to be vestigial.

There was a time when a farmer saw his crops fail and his neighbor got him through the winter. The favor would be repaid.

Could you imagine asking anyone who waves at you for the money to get you through the rest of the month? Such things used to be done, but this is well beyond what could be reasonably expected today. You'd be thought a loon to even ask.

Deliberate degradation or civic life where people trust and require their neighbors less and less and corporations more and more.

It's therefore a holdover: without meaningful altruism, it is useless. The important thing is that our communities have lost that altruism, and being left with the impression "people are so nice here" detracts from that and keeps society closer to the place we presently are: everybody is miserable, but the superficialities are so omnipresent that nobody can really honestly evaluate just how empty it all is.

Fake friendly and useless is awful. Better to live in NYC where everyone ignores you and you can thereby assume if someone's talking to you it's for a purpose (not necessarily an altruistic one of course)

 

[Voidwalkin]

No. I don't think it means anything more than, "If we both got out of our car right now, I would start off with a friendly disposition toward you rather than neutral or hostile. You would have to earn a less favorable starting disposition by your own surliness or hostility."

Kind of a treasure in the primed-for-hostility world we live in. Glad Farm Boy has enjoyed some of it.

Hate begets hate. The ticky tacky empire strikes back.

So, I live in the only majority Amish County in America. They wave all the time, because they do have the sort of long-term proximity in which waving does lead to trust. If an Amish person loses their house, 30 guys will build him another, no real expectation of repayment(other than that he show up to do likewise if they get into a similar situation). If something was stolen from them, they assume its personal animosity, not financial gain: otherwise, why would someone risk the loss of being the beneficiary of altruism? Why risk that trust?

But the thing is: I've lived here one year, and I do not intend to stay. I've met others who are similarly in that position. If you've got roots in an area, sure. But more and more often, people are rootless. There really is no community in that situation, no altruism. The norms we use to build it just take too long.

What you need in the latter situation are norms that accelerate altruism, taking major, not minor, risks in the doing, or it won't form. To a dude who moves a lot, socially, I'm basically a ghost walking through a forest of meaningless smiles. I'm sorta OK with that. Grudging acceptance. But I'd prefer it if society adapts and gets to a healthier place and waving I don't think is gonna cut it.

 

[Farm Boy]

Everywhere and nowhere. All just the perpetual ever expanding pig sty. Disposable McCommunitites.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Waving won't do it on its own.

Not-waving will probably mean that the more significant forms of connection don't ever get off the ground.

When the Amish wave to you it doesn't mean the same thing as when they wave to a fellow Amish person. They won't rebuild your house. You're not in that community and can't ever be. And they're at the extreme end of the waving-means-significant-outreach spectrum, a positive outlier, in fact. If you judge against that standard, you will of course be dissatisfied. Farm Boy's neighbors probably won't rebuild his house. Their wave to him doesn't mean that. But they'd chip in an afternoon to help build a deck, if he provides pizza and beer.

Oh, by the way

 

[Voidwalkin]

Not-waving will probably mean that the more significant forms of connection don't ever get off the ground.

Agree, I'm sympathetic to it ending because I think it's probably finished in the long term anyway: something new is gonna come regardless.

I don't want that new thing to be this

Everywhere and nowhere. All just the perpetual ever expanding pig sty. Disposable McCommunitites.

...but I think we may be irreversibly on track towards it, without the norms that would effectively reverse it.

We congratulate ourselves on obtaining credentials that allow us lucrative economic specialization. You have to move to actually find employment in said specialization in many cases. The rate people drift apart is higher than the norms bring them together: if this does not change, we will see the McDonaldsification of American life.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, we aren't playing civ. We have hands, not disembodied narration.

 

[Voidwalkin]

Well, we aren't playing civ. We have hands, not disembodied narration.

I take your meaning here to be that we do what we can.

Sorta related to that is that I believe that Trump would not have been elected were it not for the breakdown in trust. Enough used their hands to cast a ballot for the guy who said things aren't great. I think distrust of neighbors and low social worth was the #1 factor.

The social value we have is low, and getting lower by default. Economics play a role in a person's own estimation of what their value to society is, but it's not the only thing. The people feel pretty isolated and therefore worthless, and it's gonna manifest in a buncha weird politics until it turns around. I don't think Trump is gonna fix any of that, but I don't think it's politically tenable to continue advancing narratives that American life is hunky-dory, because even if material estimates of a person's worth or spending power raise, they're gonna continue in unhappiness or at least discontentedness if their social value is so low.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, that's not wrong. But it's more that we are what we do.

 

[pob]

I'd find it a sad state of affairs to not be able to trust a stranger by default, and that's not too say I'm unaware that there are bad people out there, just I'd rather hope for the best in people.
My allotments uses an honesty box and shares produce by leaving it out for people to take despite being repeatedly targeted by thieves breaking into their sheds and stealing their tools.
My current street is weirdly split in that one side is friendly and looks out for each, helping each other with basic tasks, while the other side is completely isolationist, barely acknowledging each other's existence.

If crime is so bad that you can't trust your neighbors, would you look to move to a more hospitable area if you had the means to do so?

 

[warpus]

Depends on where I am. On a scale of 1 to 10:

(1 - skeptical about everything, do not trust anyone)
(10 - no need to be skeptical, trust everyone)

1.2 - Donetsk
3.7 - Detroit
4.5 - Peru
6.3 - Toronto
6.8 - My hometown on an average day
7.4 - Nepal
8.5 - Norway
9.3 - Japan
9.8 - Taiwan

In Taiwan you can seriously leave your bag with stuff in it on top of your bike and people will leave it alone for hours if not days. This blew my mind when somebody I met there was doing this .. I had to ask about it to make sure I was understanding right that this was happening. Supposedly you can leave your wallet somewhere and come back hours later and it will still be there. I did not test this theory, but it leads me to believe that in Taiwan you could have any sort of communal kitchen you can imagine and people would respect the rules. Unless the rules were confusing, and/or somebody was really hungry

In Donetsk I don't think it would work. In the town where I live, it probably depends on the neighbourhood.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Better to live in NYC where everyone ignores you and you can thereby assume if someone's talking to you it's for a purpose (not necessarily an altruistic one of course)

You should read the NYT Metropolitan Diary weekly on Sundays to get a better picture of NY life. It is not perfect, but it is much less impersonal than you might imagine.

Metropolitan Diary

Reader tales from the city. Illustrated by Agnes Lee.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Narz]

You should read the NYT Metropolitan Diary weekly on Sundays to get a better picture of NY life. It is not perfect, but it is much less impersonal than you might imagine.

Metropolitan Diary

Reader tales from the city. Illustrated by Agnes Lee.

www.nytimes.com

I'm from NYC and lived there for almost 10 years in adulthood (and New Jersey for another five).

I much prefer it to the suburbs.

 

[Yeekim]

Few scenarios here.

You go camping. There's a communal kitchen, 2 refrigerators and a deep freezer. Woukd you put booze in the fridge to keep ot cool. How about steak and chicken in the freezer? Unsecured anyone can help themselves. There's a sign up with the price.

You produce something in a rural area. Might be meat, vegetables, fruit, fertilizer (bags of poo). You decide to sell it via honesty box. There's a box money can be dropped in and the goods are on a table or something
Help yourself drop cash in the box. People can steal the food orbreak the cash box.

Similar to previous one. Cashbox, honey. Vegetables, fruit etc but it's in your neighborhood. 5 minute walk from your house.

Yes and yes.

Honesty boxes are a thing around where I live, and I'd rather take the infinitesimal risk of having my booze stolen than drink it warm.

I don't even bother locking my front door when I leave to walk the dog or grab something from the store.

 

[Verbose]

I'm with the it-depends-crowd. I wouldn't try it in China, the US, South America, or large parts of Europe. Might try it in Japan or the Nordic countries. Still would make quite a distinction between large urban settings and countryside.

As for the fridge experiment things – that depends entirely on the clientele, and my ability to judge the situation. If it's a situation is a resort where a well-off middle class assembles, and there is an age factor to weigh in (thirsty young people short of cash and spirits will tend to make a party), I could well decide to trust these people.

 

[Bamspeedy]

An honesty box just sounds like a dumb idea.

But I'm not a particular fan of the whole "pay what you want" in general. As I think you're goading people into basically giving charity, without saying that that's what it is, when most aren't going to be receptive to that and simply steal [I say that versus "pay less than what it actually costs to make"].

But see there's this thing called "free samples" which piques people's interest in what you're doing. If you offer that and they like it, you could make them reliable customers and keep them coming back.

Honesty box is so a person doesn't need to be there at all times. It's not necessarily "Pay what you want", as often there is a price posted. The honesty part comes in that they trust you are putting in the correct amount into the box. Yes, this only typically works in rural areas where (if you a local), most people aren't going to risk being caught ("my neighbor saw your car pull up to my pumpkin stand, and was the only car that did so all day, and there was no money in the box").

Of course with cameras being everywhere nowadays, the farmer could very well have a trail cam fixated on the stand.

Free samples, yes, those are still occasionally done in stores. Even the gas station chain that makes hot food does this at times. These are manned, with a person to answer questions about the product.....and to make sure one person doesn't grab the whole table of 'free' product.
Thirty years ago I worked at a gas station that had a diner attached to it. Lady would come in and just get 1 cup of coffee and maybe one slice of toast. Every table would have a bowl of these jelly packets for people to put on their toast. This lady would not only slip into her purse all the jelly packets from her table, she would do the same to every table in the diner (that didn't have someone sitting at it, but she often came when there was no other customers). If we saw her coming we had to hide all the jelly packets from every table.

 

[H4run]

I can't speak about myself because I haven't thought about it, nor will I think about such things. It's a wide concept filled with elusive generalizations and self-admiration or hate at a masturbatory level that we project onto our surroundings.

However, here is the twist: I can share my objective observations on Morrowind Ordinators. They are highly suspicious and prejudiced toward "outlanders" but naively trusting toward "citizens". Even though the City of Vivec is filled with roaches and filth, the culmination of its corruption is the House of Hlaalu, and the source is its own idol king. Why can't we all be like Khajiits? They're all chill folks and anything but pretentious. They would never ask a silly question like, "Do you trust your own citizens?", they're out to make money and make friends and never give a single damn about plastic term like "citizen", like any good person should be.

 

[Samson]

The how much do you trust others thing that surprises me is the tendency for people to get deliveries while they are not there, with the expectation that it can be left on the doorstep and will still be there later. I do not think I have ever lived somewhere where I would choose to do that, and I do not think I have lived in the worst places in the UK.

 

[danjuno]

Yes, and if that trust is abused, then the issue will be dealt with by the group. A group which lets something basic like food go will not survive. So it's a matter of evolutionary success. The bigger the scale is, the more smaller issues crop up, but societies live or die on their ability to guarantee the basics for most people.

 

[The_J]

Few scenarios here.

You go camping. There's a communal kitchen, 2 refrigerators and a deep freezer. Woukd you put booze in the fridge to keep ot cool. How about steak and chicken in the freezer? Unsecured anyone can help themselves. There's a sign up with the price.

This here depends on a) how many people b) have I met them c) do I trust them?
If it's only a couple and they seem nice people, then yes.
If it's a ton of people, or some seem suspicious, then not.

You produce something in a rural area. Might be meat, vegetables, fruit, fertilizer (bags of poo). You decide to sell it via honesty box. There's a box money can be dropped in and the goods are on a table or something
Help yourself drop cash in the box. People can steal the food orbreak the cash box.

Similar to previous one. Cashbox, honey. Vegetables, fruit etc but it's in your neighborhood. 5 minute walk from your house.

Again depends on where.
My home village of 1000 people in rural Germany: Yes. In one of the next villages one of the farmers sells eggs like that.
My current place of 500k+ people in a not-so-great neighbourhood? No way lol. I had a bike wreck without saddle and with broken rear axle, which I left unlocked with the hope it would get stolen. I doubted anyone would, since it was completely useless. It was gone within 12h.

 

[Voidwalkin]

The how much do you trust others thing that surprises me is the tendency for people to get deliveries while they are not there, with the expectation that it can be left on the doorstep and will still be there later. I do not think I have ever lived somewhere where I would choose to do that, and I do not think I have lived in the worst places in the UK.

I can't imagine not.

I leave my road bike and my e-bike on my porch. Both are valuable, and I've actually had a different bike taken before. I still leave em both out.

It doesn't make sense to take them to my garage. The effort and time spent physically walking to my apartment from said garage probably exceeds the loss. It takes 2 minutes to and from, which adds up to 8 minutes per day. 8x720=5760÷60=97(hours)x16.5(present wage)=$1584.

That's actually more the the value of both bikes, and that's before calculating the cost of paranoia, which is basically incalculable, but conceivably, could have an opportunity cost in willingness to trust success, reducing likelihood of investment(either personal or financial, as in stock): imo cynical are less likely to succeed financially or socially.