As America becomes a lower trust society, we'll need more carceral responses | Hour 2

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to dpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. A couple quick notes. We were scheduled to chat with Mark Lynch, who is running for US Senate in the Republican primary, so if he calls in, we'll get him on, but haven't so far received his call. So there's that also a reference there. When I say our numero dose, sometimes I also mention that there's that that's just a little bit of Spanish lingo thrown in. That is what we call easter eggs. These are like little hidden things, maybe inside jokes or whatever. That's a reference to Limbaugh's line, little bit of Spanish lingo thrown in, you know. And so yesterday I got accused of being a thief because I say program, but that is also an easter egg. For longtime listeners of WBT, you may recall a little show called Spires and Krantz in the afternoons three to six, and that was one of their that was one of their pronunciations. So that's also an Easter egg, and so I sprinkle them around throughout the program so you you feel at home, you know, if you've been a longtime listener, they're like throwbacks. They're honorariums, if you will, honorary tributes. Let's just call them tributes. They're just tributes, all right. So at the end of the last hour, I was talking about a Peter Bogosian piece. Peter Bogosian, by the way, he was one of the the guys who did the Grievance Studies affair, along with Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. These were the three people that created all of these fake woke you know papers quote unquote like scientific research, and they would submit them to all of these ridiculous publications that would print them. And they are by exposing that there is no real scientific scrutiny as long as the outcome is one that aligns with the political ideology of the publication, like they did ridiculous things like dog's are racist because of how like they observed, like through an observation of dog park behavior like they did. It was all completely fabricated, but they they and they produced a series of these different papers, all more ridiculous than the last, and they got a bunch of them published, exposing the fraud that exists in these soft sciences, the social sciences. And so Bagosian writes a substack newsletter, and the other day he had a write up called Goodbye Shame, Hello Diversity, and he points out that, you know, removing shame from certain things in a society is not always necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes societies adopt shame as a weapon as a cudgel against behavior that should not be shamed in his opinion, And you may differ, you may disagree with that on a particular activity or whatever. However, the larger issue of the use of shame is what he's driving at here, which is in order for shame to actually work as a guard rail for the society, for a high trust society, which America has traditionally been, where you know, people walk around and don't feel like they're going to be attacked all the time. And you know this is you hear people say I remember when I could you know, leave my front door unlocked in all of that high trust society. A great example of a really high trust society is Japan. I see stories in fact, ever since this is this is a story that has gone like almost completely unreported, unacknowledged over on Twitter. Formerly known as X they created like a like a translation tool for Japan and for America, and so a couple of months ago when this thing first hit, this tool first was implemented, there was this massive exchange of you know, thoughts and commentary. People in America talking to people in Japan, everybody being able to understand each other because these things were being auto translated, and they were sharing like barbecue recipes and stuff, and they were you know, talking about cow and whatnot. And it was like a really cool moment. Japan is a very high trust society. There are stories all over the place, people you know, losing their wallet, leaving a credit card you know, someplace and coming back hours later and it's still there. Somebody finding the credit card or finding the wallet, turning it into the police. Right, you can leave your bicycle unlocked, Nobody steals it that kind of thing. It's a very high trust society. So what happens as you move to a low trust society where you are constantly, you know, under the assumption and belief that your stuff is going to get stolen, somebody is going to attack you, right that that is an economic activity limiter, Okay, because now people don't feel comfortable enough to go about doing these daily things, these rituals in their lives. Economic activity suffers, personal interactions suffer. You're less likely to help somebody. I mean, this goes all the way back biblically, the good you know, good Samaritan, that kind of thing. So he talks about the use of shame acting as a guardrail in society. And the more diverse the society becomes, diversities and strength. The more diverse a society becomes, the less agreement the different groups have about what things or activities are bad. And for shame to work, as you know, a non legally enforceable mechanism to control people and to control uh society, you know, the order of the society. And I don't mean you know, control people like we're going to tell you what to do all the time. But shame does play a role in that there. It may not be any legal consequences, but there will be shame associated with that behavior. Right. And when you have a whole bunch of people with different understandings and a disagreement of what is shameful activity and what is not, what are you then left with? You have some people that are participating in the shameful activities as seen as shameful by some other group. That causes friction. Right, he says in this piece it's an important tool of social control. Without shame, we will become forced to default to carceral solutions, which leaves everyone from tax paying shamers to those whose behavior is immune to their shaming worse off. Right, if the government has to use the law in order to enforce things that otherwise previously would have been enforced via shame, no one's going to be good with that. No, this is this is not a benefit for us, He says. Shame is an integral part of a well functioning society. We should shame smoking in front of children, we should shame littering. But shame stops functioning as a mechanism to control behavior in morally diverse societies. For instance, he points out urban black youth culture does not consider public disorder to be shameful, right, and we see viral videos of this pretty regularly. Wasps, white Anglo Saxon Protestants do find public disorder shameful, and that sets up an incommensurable cultural conflict that no amount of shame, no amount of shaming will solve, because the former group doesn't give a crap about what the latter thinks is proper. The post woke era is also the post shame era some groups, and he identifies them Christian Larper's. LARPer is a live action role playing so people who are just like playing the role but aren't really you know, Christian LARPers Marxists those who aspire to institute Sharia law. Right, some groups believe that they will be the ones to enforce the next dominant moral orthodoxy. They're all wrong, he says, it's too late for that. Diversity, which is our strength, has triumph over a shared sense of right and wrong, and that creates a low trust society. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life and art. Stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and outs albums. 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You need to go now love you mean it all right, Thank you, Steve. I appreciate the kind words there, David says. Regarding the topic of the end of shame as a social control, David says, modesty is dead too. For example, skin tight yoga pants that leave nothing to the imagination. Yeah, I don't get that one either, but yes, that's part of it. Like, I could name several examples, like things that some people don't believe are shameful activities that other people do. For example, street takeovers. Right, if my parents found out when I was a teenager that I was out with a bunch of my friends and we were shutting down traffic and doing donuts in the middle of the street and fire and off fireworks and causing general mayhem, that would be shameful activity. I would be in trouble because that brings disrepute to the family. What about the the bicycle takeovers? Right, these people that ride bikes, Now there's a big problem with it down in South End for a while and uptown right, it's happening all over the country. You get like two three hundred of these bicyclists that just like take over and they weave in between cars and stuff. Right, shameful behavior because what is at the core of that is like an inconsideration to other people in consideration is shameful. That is something you should not be proud of. However, there are a lot of people that don't see anything wrong with this. They don't see anything wrong with you know, playing loud music off of their cell phone in an elevator, or engaging in a conversation, or watching a TikTok video on a bus and making everybody have to listen to your crap right driving down the road with the windows down and the music blaring. In consideration, littering is another one. Steve or Peter Bogosian points out, littering is a big one. Welfare fraud. I would put all crime really into that. Like, there's a not small portion of the American public now that doesn't find it to be shameful to be arrested multiple times for all sorts of things, whether it's white collar or a white collar crime, is it but it's not blue collar crime, no collar crime? What would be the other what's the alternative there, right, fraud, right, committing fraud, bouncing checks like that used to be like I still worry about that, and like I haven't bounced a check in thirty years. It's like, that's shameful behavior. You shouldn't do it. He's also got fair jumping. I would also point up what was the thing that happened up in Birkdale Village a couple of months ago, Remember that where all these youths, all these teens, they just like swarmed the streets and shut everything down, or dancing on cars and just acting like idiots. And whether it comes from social media or whatever, right, these are shameful behaviors and there are a lot of people in the society that are not shamed by that. He says, though some of the stuff can be addressed, and he takes the example we mentioned it before. In San Francisco. To combat the fair jumping, they installed six foot tall plexiglass fair gates in the public transit system called BART the Bay Area Rapid Transit, although I don't know how rapid it is, or maybe it's regional that made it impossible to enter with out paying In tandem, they also increase the number of police and as a result, there was a forty one percent decrease in crime relative to the year before, nine hundred and sixty one fewer hours spent cleaning up graffiti and vandalism in just the first six months after installing the gates, and ten million dollars in annual revenue recovered. This is an excellent example of how even minimal selection against low trust behavior, such as fair evasion in public spaces, pays dividends. As the United States becomes more culturally and morally diverse and low trust behavior becomes more common, the returns from enforcing socially productive behavior increase. Right. So as as low trust behavior becomes more common sho, so it increases, this kind of behavior increases, you get an increase in the return on enforcing socially productive behavior. He also throws out you know, maybe you put more trash cans all over the place for people to throw away their litterally. Look, that's that's not going to do it. I've seen I have seen people throw trash like I remember one time I was pulling out of a fast food joint over an East Charlotte. I'd gone to the drive through window, got my sandwich or whatever. And I was on my way out and the person who was in front of me in the drive through line, they're waiting at the at the curb to turn into traffic right, and all of a sudden, I see the passenger door open and a hand reach out with two bags of fast food trash and they just set it on the ground and then they drive away. See I would consider that to be shameful anti social behavior, Like who teaches you that that is the appropriate way to dispose of your trash? Who tells you that that's acceptable? Same thing with illegal dumping. Right in our neighborhood, we have an area that is kind of remote and behind some woods and there's I don't know, probably a four hundred square foot area where people have just dumped tires. Like why would you do that? Well for the money, because you don't want to pay the dispose of them. Shameful behavior, Right, So we're actually now going to have to start policing these things and paying money to police these things and actually then committing to doing so, which won't happen in blue jurisdictions of course. But like you're going to have to spend we are going to have to spend money to police these things because diversity is our strength, because we have different concepts of what is shameful and what is not. Let me wrap up this piece by Peter Bogosian over it as substack. I believe it's mainly free. He also does a regular like YouTube or yeah, I guess a YouTube show where he goes out and he does street interviews with people, and it's fascinating to hear people go through the questions with him, and he like draws circles, you know, strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, and then he asks them a question and then he tests their their assumptions, their opinion, even if he agrees with them. But he's very good at playing devil's advocate. And I remember one time I saw him having a debate with an atheist and was asking, you know, all these questions and seeing if he would and then he would ask like, is there anything that I have said that would move you to a different circle, and that kind of thing, And after he was done with the with the interview, he said, just for the record, He's like, I agree with you. I'm an atheist too. But anyway, he says, it's easy to blame low trust behavior on people in low trust societies, and we see this all the time. I think, actually I have I have a text here from Lynn who says, Pete, whatever you do, don't blame the parents for anything going on. And this is normally where these conversations go. And so I'm bringing this to you because a lot of the conversations that conversations that we have about these you know, current events, news events that are that happen and we're trying to look for, you know, who's to blame or whose responsibility was this and what can be done? And this is outrageous and all of that, and I'm I'm submitting to you that these are examples of different understandings of what is good and bad. And shame used to be a guardrail that society used because we generally agreed as a society what was good and what was bad, and that is informed by a whole any number of things. In fact, Jennifer says, this is why conservatives always talk about America being a Christian nation. It's not that we want other people to worship the same as we do. We want other people to have the same moral values that we do. To preserve our culture, and civility in society. Right, And so that's when you had one predominant religion and that you know, despite all the different denominations, right, but all under the banner of Christianity, there was a general idea, generally agreed upon idea of you know, what civility was and was not, what was considerate and what was not, what was good and what was not. As you have more and more people with different you know, ethical codes that are all moving around together in these societies their ethical code, maybe it's totally fine for me to, you know, I don't know, drop my seat back in the airplane and not give anybody a heads up about it. Just push the button and slam my seat right back into the face of the person behind me. Or take my shoes off on the airplane and kick my feet up onto the the the arm rest of the seats in front of me. Right, People do this stuff, or just start screaming and yelling at the flight attendants. But like they don't. They don't have any shame in that behavior because they don't think there's anything wrong with it. They literally do not think there's anything wrong with it. Here's a message from Greg who says one time I saw a woman at a fast food place open her door and drop out a fast food bag. I waved at her through my truck rear window and honked. She opened her door like she knew me, and I said, pick up your trash pig. She flipped me off, but she did pick it up. Sean says, parking in handicapped spots without the sticker. I see it all the time on the East Side. Yeah, that's another one. Like I never park in a handicap parking space, Not really because I'm worried about getting a ticket or something. It's just I would feel terrible if somebody who actually needed the spot couldn't utilize the spot. I would feel terrible about that. Awesome Andy says, how about leaving your grocery cart in a parking space right, or not returning it right, just leaving it somewhere in the you know, putting it up in the in the grass or whatever. Now, look, sometimes the stores are partly to blame for this activity because they don't give you enough of the cart corrals. You know. Like there was a target down in a Steel Creek that we used to go to when we lived down there, and like there was a whole area where there was no shopping cart corral nearby, so you either had to bring it all the way back up to the storefront or walk it, you know, halfway across the parking line. And so of course you had all these shopping carts that people would put up onto the grass, you know, put it up over the curb, put the front wheels up onto the grass. I'm not excusing the behavior, but yeah, people who don't return shopping carts. There was this whole We talked about this a couple of years ago, this whole social experiment. You know, people who don't return the shopping carts to the corrals. It is indicative of a different understanding of their role in a society. They see themselves as better than others. Because this doesn't impact me, so I'm just going to do this no consideration, right, Scott says Pete. Shame and humility is something taught mostly by fathers. What's the illegitimacy rate? Again, that may have something to do with it as well. Absolutely, that could be a component here. Seven oh four number says My favorite one is turning up your radio at the gas pump and then leaving it on to go into the store while I'm out there pumping gas right, Like so much of this stuff when we're talking about quote shame, it's it's in consideration for others. I don't want to hear your song, let alone hear it at that decibel level. You know, I don't want to hear it, but you don't care. You don't care that I don't like your music. You're going to turn it up really loud because you think I should like it, and you want everybody to know that you think this song is fantastic. Like, unless you're a record producer or something trying to do guerrilla marketing. Just stop final segment on this topic. I know a lot of people are writing in with their I mean basically pet peeves, but things that are inconsiderate that would have prompted feelings of shame, that would have prevented people from behaving poorly, that we no longer we no longer have shame as a societal moral guardrail. And so what Peter Bargosian is asserting is that you're going to end up with more government enforcement, which is not ideal. Don't like it, but that's that that's what's going to happen, and he cited several examples, you know, fair jumping, street takeovers, riding, uh, you know, bicycles on sidewalks, like all of these things that you used to just not do. Now people do because they don't have any feeling of shame attacked or embarrassment attached to the action. Chip says, what a mayor who announces her resignation mere months into her new term qualify as a lack of shame? Maybe maybe? Williams says, Uh, I don't regarding leaving the radio on loud at the gas pumps, I don't do it with music, Pete, but I always do it with your show, even when I'm listening to the podcast, because I'm trying to convert everyone around me to listen to your show. All Right, I will allow that. I will allow that that's not shameful because it benefits me. David says, listening to this shame argument takes me back to Soviet defector Yuri Besmanov. He spoke of demoralization. Yes, we've quoted him regularly on the show here too, and I always questioned whether he was talking about making us give up or making us sinful. This angle of shame makes me think he meant the latter. I think it's both David again, They like our adversaries, do not care what our positions are on a particular issue as long as it is divisive, and they will promote both sides because it keeps us fighting against each other. Regarding the yoga pants, John from Jersey says, three things that do not lie drunks, young children, and yoga pants. Beth's favorite. Russ says street takeovers. My parents thought hanging out or just loitering at the mall or movie theater was inappropriate. They would have ended us if we were involved in a street takeover. Yeah. Same. Darryl says leaving your car at the pump while you go in to the bathroom or shop. Yeah, Like, just park your car in one of the spaces, especially if the if the gas pumps are full. You know. Number one though, is inconsiderate. Butt wipes that pee all over the seats. Yeah again, shameful. People that park in the fire lane, says Greg, like they're too good to park in a spot. Dennis says it's interesting concerning shopping carts that ALDA stores have very little problems getting carts returned because people want their quarterback, and says also considered self centeredness selfishness, no one matters but me, and that I believe is a parenting deficit, not just the father or lack of a father. Linda says, I hate it when people just drop grocery items they decide they don't need randomly in the store. Then they complain grocery prices are too high. They don't think that those items spoil because they're not remotely near where they belong, or that wealthy grocery stores can afford the loss. Yeah, I never understand that. It's like, oh, I don't need you know it, second thought, I don't need this product. I'm just gonna leave it, you know, a quarter of a mile away from where I picked it up. Someone else should do it. Someone else can can restock it. Also, Peter Bogosian notes, harassing innocent people used to be shameful behavior. It was done in dark alleys and at night. Now it's done in subway cars in New York City by the criminally mentally ill. I would also add YouTubers, right, this is a thing people live stream themselves picking fights with people, random people, just harassing random people on the streets. He says, a dream scenario would be for our cultural and moral homogeneity simply to the extent of a respect of public spaces, right like that would just like, can we do that? Just have a respect for public spaces. But he says, I won't hold my breath, So he says, I'll take enforcing laws, whether through rebuilding physical infrastructure, increased police presence, or harsher legislation designed to compel behavior that was once largely self enforced. This will necessarily mean increased state presence in the lives of citizens, something which I am generally against. There may, however, be no other realistic options. If you have further ideas for preparing the United States for increasing low trust behavior, I'd love to hear it. I think this will be one of the defining questions of the next few decades of American life. Back to the text line the good, Jeff says, Pete, you were talking about people that do not return shopping carts. That's definitely one of the pet peeves I have. Have you ever watched the YouTube channel cart narcs? I have not. I also hate a twin people pull up to the gas station. Oh, I hate it when this is obviously a voice to text app being employed. I also because it says hate a twin people, but I think it's I hate it when people pull up to the gas stations with loud music, or in the neighborhood at two am with it blaring. Eddie, I know exactly what brought us to this point. It was Elvis. They said in the nineteen fifties, if we let Elvis shake his legs and swivel his hips on TV, it'll destroy the morality of our youth. Today is just a bloated continuation of that destruction. Elvis did it, Gabby says, driving around with no headlights on your car like you're trying to be stealthy. That's more of a safety thing. But I just wanted to say personally, at the gas pump ituned to one oh seven nine, turn the volume all the way up, in hopes that any perpetual CNN, MSNBC users around me may actually learn something that's from Andy parking in the fire lane, especially when there are spots thirty feet away. I'm going to disagree, he says. Rodney. Dad does not teach you morals. He teaches you mischief that gets you in trouble with your mom, who in turn teaches you the morals and the right way to do things. That's fair. I mean, I think it just depends on the dad, you know. Kathy says, I'll take twerking for one thousand dollars as the no shame that tops all of the no shame, which twirking is pretty bad. Accepting any type of charity. Now, having other support you is to be aspired to, says tim Otao. Killer Bees says there's no weight limit on yoga pants at the Louisiana State Fair. I don't know if that's true or not. Motorcycle riders that park their bikes in the handicap marked areas of parking lots, yeah there's okay, now, okay, this is just now an airing of grievances people. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecallanershow dot com again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.