Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Three

This essay follows from Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One and Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two.

We humans intensely comprehend our own limitations, fears, and psychological twinges, because we’re all passengers inside our own heads. We can never truly understand other people’s mental states from outside. In my last two essays, I made sweeping generalizations about working-class and upper-class mindsets, but I’m no scientist. I simply constructed a tentative hypothesis from personal experience, conversations, and observing public figures.

To recap, I suggested that most people have conditioned inner narratives driving their workplace habits, and “work ethic” is the benign manifestation of malignant inner trauma. I attribute this trauma to fathers, perhaps because my sources, both personal and public, are men. Maybe women learn more workplace habits from mothers; leave an informed comment. Either way, our “work ethic” is an external tool to paper over inner damage.

But this carries deeper implications: if I’m right, then work ethic, and workplace habits generally, orient toward the past. We appease the voices which exposed our inadequacies as children, constantly trying to silence condemnations that, as adults, only exist in our own heads. Addiction treatment specialist Gabor Maté says something similar about substance users, that they mostly want to assuage pain which their brains keep inflicting on themselves.

(As an aside, many friends have warm, supportive relationships with their fathers. I largely did, too, before his memory started failing. I don’t disparage fathers, but observe how they sustain patterns which they themselves don’t realize have caused harm.)

Contra this past orientation, most spiritual traditions favor a mindful orientation toward the present. Buddhist meditation, Christian centering prayer, and Taoist wandering all encourage supplicants to exist in the present, attuned to each moment, listening for the universe’s subtle call. The workplace of capitalist accrual reminds us of past voices and future rewards. But spiritual practice calls us to exist here, now, as we are.

Bringing spirituality into a workplace ethics discussion is, I realize, risky. Many True Believers insist their spiritual tradition is uniquely true, which could split my audience. Yet bear with me. For all their manifold differences, the religions I’ve studied share a core proposition that the person before us, the community around us, or the conflict buffeting us, holds primacy in our spirituality. Here. Now.

Overcoming the inherent “work ethic” trauma means attuning ourselves to the present. It means listening to instructions, not in fear of punishment or longing for reward, but as they are. It means recognizing our bosses as humans, with the foibles and needs that entails, and not as manifestations of engrained father images. It requires being attuned enough to our own bodies and limitations to say, without malice or fear, “No.”

Humans find ourselves torn between our carnal condition, driven substantially by past traumas and future needs, and our spiritual nature, which faces the present. What’s worse, our spiritual leaders, themselves facing the same tension, encourage this divide. When a millennia-old textbook becomes more important than the immediate person, conflict, or community, then spiritual leaders sink to the level of employers and politicians.

Moreover, the worldly forces which profit from our “work ethic” trauma, already know this. That’s why they barge into our spiritual domains. Billionaires and politicians have transformed Christianity into a nationalist front, reduced “self-care” to retail therapy, and taught us to see mindfulness as a professional strategy. Developing a spiritual discipline will entail purging the anti-spiritual influences from your tradition.

The spiritual equanimity I describe has no single path. Despite me mentioning prayer and meditation, I’ve found these disciplines of limited personal value. But I’ve achieved something comparable by writing poetry: listening to each moment, and selecting the most appropriate word which exists, has helped me attune myself to the present. Whatever removes you from past traumas and future mirages may be your path toward spiritual balance.

This conclusion probably feels abstruse, distant from my starting premise. Yet I believe it holds together. Whether it’s my father chastising me for slowing down, or Errol Musk chastising Elon for not collecting enough accomplishment tokens, that condemning voice comes from the past. The past thus can’t save us, nor the future, which doesn’t yet exist. Only in the present, the spiritual center, can we escape that conditioning.

Elon Musk and I learned incompatible messages from our fathers, which produce wholly divergent outcomes. Yet the harm those messages continue to produce have made us smaller, spiritually less developed beings. And we could both escape by reorienting ourselves away from those messages. But that means stopping seeing ourselves as economic actors, and redefining ourselves as human.

Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two

This essay follows from Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, currently likely to become America’s first trillionaire, has a conflicted history with his father, South African entrepreneur Errol Musk. Elon tries to deny Errol’s part-ownership of an emerald mine, for instance, but Errol calls that pure mythology. Even if Errol didn’t bankroll Elon’s earliest ventures, his wealth allowed Elon freedom to pursue an education, experiment with technology, and start several businesses in his early twenties.

If, as I said previously, people arrogant enough to become billionaires and presidents aren’t conditioned in childhood to be self-effacing, that doesn’t mean they’re unconditioned. And like me, their conditioning comes heavily from fathers. My father conditioned me, mainly by yelling, to maintain a self-destructive work ethic, pushing myself to the brink of collapse, then returning home too depleted to do housework. Elon’s father conditioned him to… well.

Like Elon, Errol was a serial entrepreneur, who also used his wealth to buy out enterprises that piqued his interest. Like Elon, Errol married a glamorous, accomplished wife, but seemingly paid her little attention, letting Maye Musk pursue her interests without support or awareness. Like Elon, Errol is sexually voracious: Elon has fourteen children by four women that we know about, while Errol had a child with his own stepdaughter.

Where my father taught me to deny myself and disappear entirely into my role as an employee, student, battalion member, or whatever, Errol Musk taught Elon to elevate himself, and his desires, over other people. Errol conditioned his son to be constantly self-seeking, always aware of ways he falls short or looks small. My father conditioned be to be self-abnegating, while Errol conditioned Elon to be self-centered.

I don’t know Elon’s full story, partly because Elon often contradicts himself regarding his biography. So I’ll draw an analogy. Joe Plumeri, former CEO of the Willis Group, opens his memoir by describing his father showing him the luxurious houses around his New Jersey hometown. Describing himself later as a “workaholic” who loves showing his father around his accomplishments, it becomes clear: Plumeri has spent his life appeasing his father.

Sigmund Freud

One could extend the comparison. Consider the American Presidents and presidential candidates who considered the Presidency their birthright: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush. George H.W. Bush and Al Gore were both sons of senators. The Kennedy family exists. John McCain, whose father and grandfather were both four-star admirals, had his military career stall because of his POW status; he ran for President partly to outrank his ancestors.

Developmental psychologists describe human behavior as “highly conditioned.” In plain English, this means our past circumstances shape our present options. We cannot make a completely original decision, but rather see our opportunities defined by our life experiences. Many of the conditioning agents that shape our ability to see fall into two broad categories: standards we want to live up to, and mistakes we want to live down.

Again, for many of us, fathers (or father figures) shape our perceptions. My father taught me to see myself as part of a unit: whether a workplace, a classroom, or a military battalion, I needed to diminish. If I took an unscheduled break, yawned loudly, or even slowed down notably, my father volubly reminded me that I wasn’t just shirking my individual duties. I was letting the entire group down.

Meanwhile, billionaire fathers teach their sons to seek themselves. Sometimes this self-seeking is a doom spiral, as Cornelius Vanderbilt failed to teach his sons business acumen, and the Vanderbilt fortune eventually disappeared. Other times, this self-seeking accrues wealth and power. We can see this in how billionaires treat others: Elon’s multiple divorces and President Taco’s Epstein Island adventures show they see women as consumable resources, not people.

My military analogy recurs. Rank-and-file soldiers internalize an ethos of self-sacrifice, and learn to see heroic death as the ultimate virtue. And I do mean “learn”: cult expert Daniella Mestyanek Young writes that basic training doesn’t teach military skills, it teaches self-abnegation and the primacy of the unit. As a collective, the military survives by teaching its members that their individual lives aren’t worth saving.

Elon Musk claims to work 100 hours per week. This feels specious, since he also claims to be a world-class competitive videogame player, while recently tweeting nearly 100 times per day. But even if it’s true, Musk doesn’t work those soul-breaking hours because he’s disappeared into his job. Instead, he’s made his companies an instrument of his ego, something to inflate himself, though it will never leave him full.

Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One

I sometimes literally hear my father’s voice when he isn’t there. Not in a jolly metaphorical way, either, but in a terrifying, often humiliating way. I first noticed this when I worked at a medical components factory during my hiatus between college and graduate school. If I slowed down, slacked off, or simply paused to chat with my co-workers, I heard my father shouting angrily, demanding to know why I wasn’t working until I bled.

Because of this terrifying voice which chased me throughout the workday, I moved faster, took shorter breaks, and got more done than people who had worked there far longer than me. Supervisors took notice, too. They often praised my work ethic, telling me that they wished they had an entire shift full of laborers as “dedicated” as me. Because they weren’t passengers in my head, as I was, they took my terror as committed professionalism.

Management often mistakes being “busy” with productivity. I noticed this often while working in construction: management would schedule marathon hours, especially in the final crunch. But management only deluded themselves. Fatigue, boredom, and resentment created new problems, while workers spent most of every morning ripping out the mistakes they made the previous evening, when they were tired. Team supervisors micromanaged workers’ every decision, because site superintendents micromanaged the supervisors. Everyone was tired all the time.

Literally every blue-collar job I’ve worked has faced some version of this. If food service workers find themselves caught up with tables, they’re given cleaning tasks to do, or refilling table caddies. I’ve worked in two car parts factories, where we were ordered to sweep and clean if the machines even briefly went down. Every moment is policed, every action judged, and companies demand constant maximum productivity; unscheduled pauses are justifications for reprimands, often stern.

Meanwhile, I’ve worked only two white-collar jobs, as a freshman composition teacher and a marketing copywriter. In both positions, I’ve been astounded by how much scheduled work time gets consumed by non-work activities. Chatting, dithering, side projects, day drinking, and even napping are anecdotally common. While hourly wage earners have their hours aggressively monitored for unsanctioned yawns, resulting in paranoid, often manic work, managers have so much discretion that they want for things to do.

My father spent most of his military career as a rank-and-file enlisted man. If you’ve ever spent time on a military installation, you know how aggressively the enlisted men’s time is regulated. Every barracks, parade ground, warship, and hangar is the epitome of cleanliness, with every plank sanded, hinge oiled, bolt painted, and floor scrubbed. Especially for unmarried recruits living on-post, twelve-hour workdays of constant, regulated motion are common, and labor outputs are closely quantified.

Simultaneously, a peer whose father was a career officer told me that officers cultivate the attitude of men of leisure. (We met in school off-post, because even officers’ and enlisted men’s children are discouraged from mingling.) Not that officers don’t work, because they too have pervasive regulations and readiness standards. Rather, they achieve their dictated goals at measured, deliberate speeds. Humans with autonomy, not checklists and rubrics, measure officers’ outputs. Rules are discretionary, not absolute.

This pattern applies broadly. Matt Taibbi wrote (before becoming a culture war spokesmodel) that every SNAP benefit applicant gets treated like incipient fraud, while almost nobody was held responsible for the 2008 financial collapse. Since then, we’ve seen how the only people indicted for the January 6^th, 2021, Capitol insurrection, were the foot soldiers at the door, and they got pardoned. Those who incited the crime not only got ignored, but they also got reelected.

America cultivates a socioeconomic narrative in which the poor, the laborer, the voter—the enlisted men of civilian society—hear their inadequacies repeated endlessly. Nor is this accidental. The wealthy and powerful—our officers—want us to suffer the constant loop of condemnation for even momentary weakness, like I heard, and sometimes still hear, my father. The psychological harm which this repetition causes individuals doesn’t matter, because to our “officers,” the outcome is “work ethic.”

But it also enables unbridgeable gaps in American social structure. This is why laborers seldom become management, classroom teachers rarely become administrators, and most citizens have little chance of getting elected to higher office. We numpties cannot lead because we’ve been conditioned to rehearse our inadequacies, real or imagined, constantly. Only those without that conditioning have the arrogance necessary to become presidents, billionaires, and other captains of society. “Work ethic” is the opposite of advancement.

This essay continues in Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two

Elegy for the American Imagination

Sophie Turner as Lara Croft

Amazon Prime Video has released first-look promo art for their announced Lara Croft: Tomb Raider TV series. Irish actress Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) has the lead, and appears remarkably like the video game character, though her measurements look more realistic. Turmer becomes the third live-action performer to depict Lara Croft, after Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander. Amazon also becomes the third studio to control the adaptation rights.

I’m sure Amazon’s production will be fine. The mere fact that previous adaptations have received lukewarm reviews and middling revenues, before descending into development hell for the sequels, proves nothing. And audiences’ overwhelming indifference to video game adaptations like Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter tells us nothing worth knowing about yet another adaptation’s likelihood of commercial success. I’ll keep an open mind.

But seriously, who wants another Lara Croft adaptation? What market niche demanded we try this again? Streaming TV services require truly massive audiences to ensure manageable amortized budgets, so Amazon certainly expects enough viewers to show interest. Their willingness to invest in a thirty-year-old franchise, which hasn’t released a new game in eight years, says they want something audiences can snuggle into, like a favorite blanky.

My friends know where I’m going with this, because I’ve said it so frequently. This is another reiteration of Hollywood’s persistent fear of innovation. Tomb Raider joins Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man as franchises which have been adapted three times, not counting sequels. Second adaptations are looming for the Twilight and Harry Potter novels. TV networks keep resurrecting shows like Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii Five-O.

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft

This partly reflects changes in the media landscape. Sarah Kendzior writes that, as networked computer technology makes it possible for writers and designers to work from anywhere, the Big Five studios have become unreceptive to portfolios from applicants who don’t have a Los Angeles-area return address. Giblin and Doctorow describe how consolidation between studios, agencies, and distributors turn creativity into a package deal, not an artistic exploration.

But recent events have convinced me something deeper is afoot. Those who control the levers of power have so much riding on their decisions that they dare not attempt anything imaginative or risky, because they have too much to lose. The creatives controlling Hollywood, Broadway, and Nashville are highly visible, because we expect their inventive stories to charm our intellect. But the same moribund imagination plagues our politics and economics.

Democratic politicians run on promises to resurrect past economic promise. From President Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In,” to President Biden’s promise of a post-Taco Republican “Epiphany,” to the very existence of  Hilary Clinton, Democrats keep yearning for a storied past, probably in the 1990s. Meanwhile, President Taco’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, locates greatness in a lost era, like King Arthur or Pecos Bill.

Violence is always a failure of imagination. The violence we’ve witnessed this month in Venezuela and Minneapolis reflects a power structure terminally allergic to compromise and innovation. Just as Hollywood can’t imagine new blockbusters, forcing them to revisit Star Wars and Batman, our leaders can’t imagine governance without burning cities like General Sherman. Faced with disagreement, the administration’s deputies can only imagine gunfire on unarmed minivan moms.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft

Eidos Interactive released the first Tomb Raider game in 1996, the same year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal protection to same-sex marriage, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which placed work requirements on federal poverty protection. There is no causal relationship between these, of course. But Lara Croft’s return definitely calls back to another time when America’s government attacked the defenseless.

Put another way, Lara Croft, Lucasfilm, and the Department of Homeland Security all promise their audiences that they don’t have to think. They allow Americans to subsume themselves into a property they’ve always enjoyed, whether it’s a game, a movie, or a lily-white national complexion. But to maintain that promise, the execution must become increasingly extravagant: more explosions, bigger confrontations, louder guns.

Business, media, and government leaders can’t imagine new approaches—at least without jeopardizing their chokehold on power. They offer the same loud, but ultimately disappointing, options we’ve purchased before. Challenging the monopoly is too costly for working creatives, no matter how imaginative, to even try. So we repeat the same dull, unimaginative techniques, hoping the outcome will somehow be different.

Somebody must be first to break the cycle. But without guaranteed returns, the establishment will remain too scared to try.

Death of an American Propaganda Point

Renee Nicole Good

The internet reacted emphatically to Minneapolis mother and poet Renee Nicole Good’s gratuitous, on-camera murder. As it should, because it exposes the moral and legal rot underlying American law enforcement during the Taco Administration. But more-informed critics than me wondered why the internet didn’t respond with equal passion to ICE’s assassination of Keith Porter in Los Angeles. Do netizens care less because Porter is male and Black?

Porter’s death was, if anything, more egregious than Good’s murder. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, acted under color of authority, and therefore probably has qualified immunity. Porter’s murderer, who remains unidentified, was off-duty, and therefore has no such administrative protections. But of course, Americans aren’t shocked and horrified by Black men’s deaths as we are with White women. I suggest this reveals a deeper division.

Northwestern University historian Kathleen Belew, in her 2018 book Bring the War Home, describes how Vietnam-era propaganda became instrumental to the White Power movement when defeated veterans returned to America. That war emphasized the importance of fending off Soviet Communism to protect, as Belew writes, “wives and daughters back home.” This language wasn’t necessarily racial, as America’s military in the 1970s was substantially integrated.

However, that doesn’t mean the racial implication didn’t exist. Yale historian Greg Grandin writes that race has often loomed large in America’s overseas engagement propaganda. America’s first overseas engagement, the Spanish-American War, involved driving the Spanish out of Cuba and the Philippines (in the 19^th Century, Americans didn’t perceive Spaniards as White). This racist rhetoric persisted through generations of American overseas wars.

In short, over 130 years of American propaganda has conflated American moral virtues with White femininity. This has sometimes been depicted literally, with the goddess Lady Columbia, an Anglo-Saxon beauty in sexy body armor, sallying forth before the male army. More recently, the older, more stoic Lady Liberty has displaced Columbia, but the pattern remains the same: propagandists depict American goodness and White womanhood as synonymous.

(This pattern is common, but not universal. France has the similar goddess Marianne, but Britain has the more male, and more pugnacious, John Bull.)

Keith Porter

Nor is this unique to wartime. Legendary journalist Ida B. Wells wrote, clear back in 1892, that America justified lynchings by emphasizing the supposed threat sexually rapacious Black men posed to defenseless White women. Then as now, this was a lie, but that lie served many Americans’ pre-exiting beliefs. Ibram X. Kendi describes how American domestic propaganda conflated White female weakness with virtue, and Black female strength with vice.

To the informed, the pattern becomes overwhelming: White women need protected. This extends from early myths of lascivious enslaved Africans and rampaging Native Americans, to 19^th Century fables of White Slavery and the evils of opium dens, to the fears of Communists and terrorists who will kidnap American women into sexual servitude. Today’s willingness to suspend civil liberties to fend against “human trafficking” merely continues the pattern.

Early attempts to DARVO the blame onto Renee Good have proven laughable. President Taco claimed her killer, Agent Jonathan Ross, was critically injured; he not only walked away, but never dropped his phone. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a domestic terrorist; Good, a mom, had just dropped her kids at school. It all devolves the same way, that Ross targeted and murdered a White woman without cause.

Therefore, Ross didn’t merely kill one woman. He violated over 130 years of American propaganda, military and civilian. Overseas wars, draconian law enforcement crackdowns, and a criminal justice system that’s never completely expunged its racist past, have all been justified by the urgent need to protect White women. Defenders of the status quo love naming white women like Laken Riley or Iryna Zarutska to justify nakedly racist crackdowns.

Indeed, the first words from Ross’s mouth after the shooting reveal the underlying thought process. “Fucking bitch,” he snarled, still on camera. Throughout American propaganda history, the machine has expected White women to shut up, do nothing in their own defense, and accept male protection, whether they want it or not. Good showed self-determination enough to drive away, which pushed her outside the bounds of propagandistic protection.

Without the rhetorical condom of American propaganda, the Minneapolis invasion stands exposed as what it is, bigoted cruelty wrapped in the flag. If White women aren’t protected, the entire operation merely exists to hurt those the Administration deems unworthy of defense. And because the operation turned against the one group most needful of protection, the implication beomes: You’re Next.

Police, Paranoia, and the Streets of Minneapolis

Brian Klaas

American political scientist Brian Klaas, in his 2001 book Corruptible, describes two different recruitment ads for police departments. In the first, for the tiny Doraville, Georgia, PD, features a flashing image of the Punisher logo from Marvel Comics, six men in body armor and assault rifles, and the city’s M113 armored personnel carrier, owned by the SWAT team. The video unambiguously advertises the opportunity to bring the hammer down on Doraville’s terrible criminals and malefactors.

Klaas contrasts this to a New Zealand recruiting video. Several police officers race through the sunlit streets in conventional beat-cop uniforms, pausing to directly address the camera. Some of the featured officers are women or members of the Māori indigenous nation. The video culminates with the officers retrieving a runaway puppy and returning it to an overjoyed little girl. The quieter, lighter-toned New Zealand video emphasizes community, public-spiritedness, and a commitment to serving the citizenry.

From this, Klaas draws conclusions about which recruitment candidates each ad will attract. Doraville, with a land area of five square miles and a population barely over 10,000, will attract testosterone-fueled cosplay warriors, mostly men, who desire to manifest power. Its aggressive, violent ad will alienate the New Zealand video’s target audience of public-spirited and emotionally mature servants. Clearly the Kiwis want people unafraid to show their faces because they live and work among neighbors.

By now, we’ve all witnessed the dire footage of Wednesday’s broad-daylight murder of Minneapolis mother and poet Renee Nicole Good. Confronted by ICE officers bellowing conflicting orders, Good attempted to drive away. Agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots at Good’s moving SUV, killing her. Vice President JD Vance has claimed Ross acted in self-defense, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.” But phone videos from multiple angles categorically disprove these claims.

Alex Vitale

ICE agents aren’t police, let’s state that clearly. They have a specific law enforcement remit that doesn’t include traffic enforcement. But it’s impossible to separate the agency’s recruitment tactics from those Klaas describes. President Taco ran on pledges to deport “the worst of the worst” and declarations of a nation riddled with enemies. ICE recruitment relies upon the twin propositions of a powerful, destructive enemy, and a strong Anglo-Saxon defender who will subjugate that enemy.

However, law enforcement by identifying enemies creates a maelstrom of probable boogeymen. Alex Vitale writes how many urban PDs constructed gang units to crack down on groups that were organized as solidarity against prior police crackdowns. Indeed, Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton describes how police forces began stockpiling military-grade weapons in the 1970s because, in the prior decade, Black communities had pushed majority-White PDs out of their neighborhoods. The police see enemies everywhere, and prepare accordingly.

Nor am I the first to notice this. More informed critics describe warrior mentality in police training. Though instructors use guardianship language, the tactics taught resemble those of occupying armies. Many PDs have rules of engagement more draconian than those used in the Baghdad Green Zone. This warrior mentality, and this reliance on violent confrontation, happen because police expect a world full of enemies. And like most humans, they find what they’re paid to find.

The outcome is truly horrific. Almost simultaneously as Agent Ross executed Renee Good without warrant, ICE agents pelted a Minneapolis high school with chemical weapons because students resisted unwarranted seizures of their classmates. Teenagers, who by nature resist authority because they’re kids. We’re approaching late-1960s levels of state paranoia, when unarmed college students marching across campus in unison justified National Guard forces opening fire at Kent State. And it will happen sooner rather than later.

Elizabeth Hinton

Renee Good’s death, like the Kent State shootings or George Floyd’s murder, happened because America’s law enforcement agencies have paranoia baked into their structure. Police academies teach rookies to regard every traffic stop as potential prelude to a gunfight. Federal rhetoric makes undocumented roofing laborers equal to convicted murderers, justifying commando-style raids. Every encounter between law enforcement and ordinary citizens begins with them evaluating us—you—as potential enemies who may need stopped or killed.

You can’t reform this. Protesters said this with “defund the police” in 2020, but heel-draggers scoffed. Because law enforcement is institutionally paranoid, every moving car is an assassination attempt. They constantly demand bigger guns because they believe us peons have artillery. But when confronted by actual shooters, as in Uvalde, they do nothing… because they’re terrified of us. You can’t train fear out of entire institutions. You can only dismantle the institutions and start over.

Venezuela, and the Death of Old-Fashioned Romance

Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro being extradited in handcuffs

You already know that, in the small hours of January 3^rd, 2026, American forces invaded Venezuela and arrested President Nicolas Maduro. The situation immediately got worse when Taco Administration spokespeople hinted darkly that this was a test run. Other states, including Cuba and Greenland, are potentially next. This action announces both a disdain for United Nations treaties, and America’s potential withdrawal from NATO.

Three days later, a young Threads user with the sign-on handle “josselocks” posted a query. It read, in part, “Do guys like even talk to girls in real life anymore? Like you see them in bookstore and decide to go up and start a conversation.” The poster’s bio indicates she’s 19, and therefore prime age to search for a spouse or long-term partner, perhaps yearning for the old-fashioned “meet cute” that populates romance novels and romantic comedy movies.

Poor “josselocks” got quickly ratioed. Multiple posters, mostly men, including me, reminded her that a decade of public messaging has asserted that women are sick of unsolicited male attention, and that men shouldn’t approach women unprompted in public places. The discussion was more nuanced, of course. But the consensus held that social mores have shifted, and approaching women in public has become insuperably risky for many men.

These two events seemingly exist in different spheres, a Venn diagram with no overlap. Yet upon consideration, I spotted more going on than my initial, flippant response admitted. These two events represent a breakdown in shared social values that makes trust between strangers possible. With it, this failure of trust threatens more than one country or one big-hearted teenager’s ability to audition a mate. Western civilization is threatened.

I’ve written recently that our understanding of social organization has evolved. Nation-states were once the private property of their monarchs, or whatever warlord could hold the throne against challengers, foreign or domestic. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers have attempted to assign moral purpose to states retrospectively. But these attempts are always provisional, changing, and inconsistent. We agree what role states serve for now.

Less obviously, but more pertinent for daily life, we’ve likewise reevaluated what families are for. No longer do people marry to ensure legitimate inheritance, as medieval aristocrats did, or to bind working families in mutual indebtedness, as peasants did. We choose voluntarily when and whether to marry or procreate. Men choose wives, not for the likelihood of hardy offspring, but because relationships serve moral values and bring emotional satisfaction.

Families and nations thus serve concrete purposes. These purposes may be economic, moral, social, or whatever, but in organizing societies or households, we start by understanding that all participants agree on that purpose. We needn’t agree on everything constantly, but we at least share core principles. For instance, a relationship might flourish over a love of books. A state might flourish over a commitment to hemispherical peace.

Somehow, too many Americans seem surprised that a President elected on his supposed merits as a billionaire, thinks America should exist to serve billionaires. While we’ve watched Republicans kick the poor for their poverty, and Democrats fold like wet rags, the Taco Administration has invaded an OPEC nation without Congressional authorization. They’ve shown paltry interest in Venezuelan democracy or civil rights, but are aggressively expropriating its oil reserves.

For this Administration, “trust” exists only between the wealthy and the strong. The greatest masses of people, American or international, don’t deserve respect, consideration, or trust. This administration regards poverty protection, labor rights, and public schools as theft from the wealthy, and strength as the only moral imperative. So they’ve deployed troops into their own cities while invading abroad.

This top-level dick-swinging machismo corresponds with the rise of “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, flexing their literal muscles performatively. The entire MeToo movement happened because some men proved themselves untrustworthy. Sure, not all men, but how many does it need to be? But the counter-push has been real: the ubiquity of TikTok “creep-shaming” videos altered the landscape so men can’t trust women who can’t trust men.

Taken together, on the personal and national levels, we’ve created a culture that no longer includes trust. From national borders to personal boundaries, from checks and balances to love and marriage, all our social arrangements have relied on the expectation that we can trust one another to behave honorably without constant supervision. Right now, all around us, in real time, we’re witnessing that trust wither on the vine.

Without that trust, all social philosophy is empty talk, and the experiment of freedom fails.

Trash Day and Suburban Secret Rules

Trash bins placed curbside the afternoon following Trash Day

Once per week, residents of American suburbia know a recurrent ritual: Trash Day. That’s the day when every family trucks their household waste to the curb for collection. A few years ago, this ritual involved metal trash cans with lids, loose plastic garbage bags, and even paper bags and cardboard boxes. More recently, as trash collection has become automated, this menagerie has been replaced with standard plastic wheelie bins.

Trash Day doesn't only exist in suburbia, of course. Urbanization requires waste removal, and before cities standardized the process, it resulted in either street dumps or anarchic, foul-smelling communal landfills. Centralized waste collection resulted in two markers of modern urban life, Trash Day and the professional garbage collector. Suburbia didn't invent waste collection, but it changed where it happens: in front of the house.

Post-World War II suburban design removed the alleyway from the land plat. Yesteryear, the back alley was the principal access point for waste removal, besides being where home builders put the carriage house or garage. Alleys exist purely for practical convenience, and are often not very aesthetic. But they provided a place for the uglier parts of urban life, like garbage collection, mucking out the stables, or home oil changes.

As James C. Scott writes, grid-style urban design reflects a top-down government hierarchy. Straight, wide streets with curbside parking; single-use zoning restrictions; and yards with wide setback lines make it easier for governments to police neighborhoods and keep their populations homogenous. In their origins—in places like Manhattan and Chicago—this included alleyways, because keeping carriage houses off the street made quick egress difficult.

But as horses and dairy cows gave way to cars, alleyways became a liability. When police or tax collectors knock on the front door, alleys make it possible for residents to escape neatly out the back. Though the state could prevent this by simply deploying more officers, that makes enforcement more cumbersome and expensive. So much simpler just to write alleys out of urban plans and have builders put garages on the front of the house.

Sadly, as Jeff Speck describes, America’s architects and urban planners simply accepted this change. Back alleys didn’t just disappear; as countless movies like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause show, back alleys became synonymous with crime, delinquency, and general seediness. Americans not only put garages in front of our houses, but we made our garages so large that they make our actual houses seem paltry by contrast.

Combined with the setback lines, the garage renders our front lawns useless. Nor is this coincidental. Many municipal codes or homeowners’ association covenants expressly forbid growing vegetable gardens, building swingsets, or otherwise doing anything public and useful in front of the house. The mandatory lawn renders the house prohibitively expensive for working-class residents, and in return, those who can afford the buy-in are forbidden from even using the land.

Yet somehow, this completely front-facing urban design makes us use the front lawn for one thing: waste removal. Every week, we dump our household refuse curbside in chunky, foul-smelling wheelie bins and plastic bags that easily burst. Codes and covenants generally dictate when households can put their trash out, and when they must bring it in, rules that greatly inconvenience shift workers, but which keep our streets politely controlled.

This demonstrates a conundrum amid suburban polish: to remain slick and orderly, we must periodically dump our entire weekly waste curbside. Like placing an outhouse on the lawn, it makes the grosser, unsanitary parts of our lives visible for everyone. State-sponsored orderliness is only possible by permitting public nastiness at preordained times, like a low-level Purge. It exposes the underside of urbanity.

The phenomenon we call “suburbia” doesn’t merely happen. It emerges from the residents’ relative wealth and privilege, but also the laws and zoning regulations that keep property expensive enough to price out the peons. It comes from residents’ willingness to mow their large lawns, but also the government’s willingness to subsidize ongoing road construction. Most of all, it derives from everyone’s willingness to accept the illusion and follow the rules.

Not to say these secret rules and tacit illusions are bad. They make a certain way of life possible, certainly. But because the rules and illusions exist, the inherent lawlessness and dark reality they conceal occasionally poke through. Trash Day occasionally reveals that humans are trash-producing species, and if we want to appear polite and organized six days a week, our ugly side must reveal itself on that seventh day.