Manners: Cheap, Easy to use, and Very Unfashionable

[major_clanger]

This mornings Independent features an opinion article on public rage attacks (warning: contains strong language). It's about life in London, but from my experience it applies to much of the rest of the UK too. This item struck a chord with me: I'm getting more and more aware of the tendency these days for people to act as if any minor inconvenience or obstruction to their unfettered actions is an insult requiring a tantrum and threats as the immediate response.

It ties up with another bugbear of mine, the seemingly wide assumption that rules meant to help or protect us (be it as individuals, groups or society as a whole) are somehow now optional and can be disregarded if remotely convenient. Disabled parking bays, for instance - it seems they don't apply when it's raining. Or the hard shoulder? A spare lane in traffic jams.

I don't want to turn into a reactionary old fart. (And some of the worst offenders re the above are ROFs who think they're above regulations or manners). But should I ever manage a military coup (ha!) there's a subset of the population that is going to get a sharpish introduction to the Pillory and the EU Rotten Tomato Mountain as a stern reminder that actually no they can't do what they like when they like and throw obnoxious fits at the rest of us when they don't get their way.

MC

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

No, indeed not. But the point is that people have the capacity to and yet choose not to. To quote Dawkins's closing comments to the original version of The Selfish Gene</>:

"...even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight - our capacity to simulate the future in imagination - could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. [...] We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

Yes, I expect individuals to act as obnoxious little gits some of the time. But I also expect society to collectively frown on and discourage such behaviour, and what depresses me is the feeling that more and more it is accepted as the norm, after which it is not far to it being seen as the only way to get what you want in life.

MC