A Society Will Get the Worst Behavior It Tolerates
Although the shine is definitely off the halo these days, for a brief period of time, Rudi Giuliani had enough respect put on his name that he was considered a FRONT RUNNER for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. At first glance, this seems ludicrous. After all, Giuliani is a moderate Republican who is best known for being the Mayor of New York City. Why were conservatives so in love with this guy?
Some of it had to do with him doing a good job during 9/11, but the thing he was most famous for was cleaning up NYC. The city was a crime-ridden hellscape before Giuliani took over, but “America’s mayor” had a plan to deal with it.
He embraced something called “Broken Windows” policing. The general idea behind it is that when small crimes are unaddressed, large crimes soon follow. You let people smash windows, put up graffiti, and jump the turnstiles at the subway, and people assume no one cares, and they can get away with more.
Under Giuliani, the NYC Police Department got very aggressive, very visible, and cracked down on these “small” crimes. As a result, not only did it improve the look and image of NYC, but the crime rate also plunged. How much? Quite a bit, actually:
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir today announced that overall crime for the first six months of 1998 has decreased by 49.3 percent and homicides by 69.3 percent citywide when compared to the same period in 1993. Preliminary figures for the first half of 1998 also show that crime fell by 9.7 percent compared to last year and that the murder rate for the first half of 1998 is at a 32-year low and has declined 24.7 percent since 1997.
Why did that work?
Because humans, being humans, are always experimenting. Somebody is going to do just about every behavior under the sun, both good and bad. Other people are going to pay attention to how that plays out for them and will change their behavior accordingly.
For example, did you know North Korea has elections that over 99% of the population participates in, and that tyrannical despot Kim Jong-un gets ALMOST 100% of the vote? Why? Because if you don’t show up and vote for Kim Jong-un, you may not be allowed to work, eat, walk free, or even continue to breathe.
Of course, that’s an extreme example, but almost everything in our society works that way. Very few people want to give our money to the IRS, so why do we do it? Because they will put us in prison if we don’t. Why don’t you see a lot of people who want to be investment bankers getting face tattoos? Because people who get face tattoos are unlikely to get hired as investment bankers. Why do so many women put so much effort into their hair, make-up, outfits, and pictures? Because men like pretty women.
In other words, it’s easy peasy lemon squeezy. The behavior we reward, we get more of, and the behavior we punish, we get less of. If you spank the child for doing something, they’re less likely to do it. If you tell them you’re proud of them for doing something else, then they’re more likely to do it. If your dog gets a treat after they roll over, they’re more likely to roll over next time you give them the command. If you yell at your dog for peeing in the house, they’re less likely to do it next time – well, at least when you’re around.
You may be thinking, “Okay, bro, we get it! We get it! Everybody understands this concept.”
Do they?
Okay, well, then explain this:
The man who will probably be the NEXT MAYOR OF NYC doesn’t understand the purpose of prisons? Well, they deter crimes by serving as punishment, and even better, if a career criminal is locked up in prison, they can’t simultaneously be robbing a store or stabbing someone on the subway.
Speaking of NYC, maybe I am biased, but I would call the Wall Street Bull the third most important piece of artwork in America behind the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.
So, why did this happen?
The first reason is that she believes this can get her attention, and she also undoubtedly believes, probably correctly, that she won’t face any sort of serious punishment for doing this in NYC. She won’t even be shunned by other liberals.
There are narcissistic jackasses everywhere, but there’s a reason this incident happened in NYC…
…and not in Florida, where the governor publicly endorsed running over protesters in the road if you feel like there’s a legitimate threat to your safety.
It’s also no coincidence that NYC (I didn’t mean for this article to have so many examples of NYC; they just do so many things wrong) is famous for having the most horrible homeless people in the country. It’s because New Yorkers put up with their sh*t. If a homeless guy is standing on the corner, screaming and punching in the air, nobody is going to tell them to stop. Not even the police. Nobody is even going to turn their head to look at them. If a menacing homeless guy says something vaguely threatening, the general attitude there is that YOU ARE THE PROBLEM if you don’t just ignore it.
There is a reason why things are the way they are. What was that line from “Watchmen?”
Since I’ve been picking on NYC here, it would be great to just point the finger at them and other liberals, but it is a “we” problem. Look around in our society, and what you will see is that so many of the bad things that happen are a result of us collectively rewarding people for doing them.
Why is the food in our country so unhealthy? Because “we” are willing to spend lots of money for the tastiest things we can find, not the healthiest things we can find.
Why are almost all of our politicians not just liars, but incessantly lying to us? Because we reward them for telling us what we want to hear, and we don’t punish them for telling us pleasing lies.
Why don’t we have honest, unbiased news sources? Because we don’t reward them. We reward partisan news sources that make us FEEL, even if those feelings are anger and outrage.
Why do people say so many obnoxious, offensive, and conspiratorial things? Because we reward them with attention and social media followers for doing that, and we ignore many of the people who refuse to go that route.
Why is the deficit so high? Because we all claim to want financial responsibility, but anyone who makes a serious effort to do it gets ignored at best and slandered or slimed at worst.
All around us, we can see our society deteriorating. That’s not an accident; it’s a consequence of the bad behavior that we tolerate as a society. It’s nice to talk about “tolerance” and being “non-judgmental,” but we’ve gone so incredibly far overboard on both that it’s tearing the country down. Nothing would make our society better at this point that to stop excusing so much terrible behavior.
This human behavior tendency is covered by the Hedonic Treadmill theory... where people will reset to a new normal that is positive and reset to an old normal after experiencing a negative. Or to pursue a positive or resist the negative to stay firmly on the treadmill.
But with left oriented people, I have discovered they have a fatal flaw.
Explaining that flaw requires some reading of Daniel Goleman and others on the topic of emotional intelligence.
The definition has been somewhat corrupted over time to help leftists deflect from their obvious deficiencies, but the basis is the capability to understand and regulate your own emotions while also being adept at reading and understanding the emotions of others. At the high emotional intelligence function, people are very good at relationships. Sometimes they are so good that it powers their dark triad personality traits and is exploited to take advantage of others to get what they want. Having high emotional intelligence and low morality is a recipe for very bad behavior.
However, on the more extreme side of Alzheimer's and Achberger's syndrome spectrum there is a complete void of emotional intelligence. There is also scientific evidence proving that people with higher academic cognitive function tend to rate lower on emotional intelligence. I certainly have experienced this firsthand in my corporate career hiring computer science engineers that could not understand why it was bad behavior telling a senior executive he or she was stupid for making an uninformed decisions about some business technology.
In my self-awarded PHD in "liberal studies" after living in a liberal state and a liberal college town for 45 years, I have identified the flaw... that liberals in general either don't understand their own emotional impulses... how they impact their behavior, choices and decisions... or they don't read others very well and thus step on it by inflaming their emotional reactions... or they know, but cannot accept any negative impact that would require them to adopt an objective stance.
Left liberals claim to be the empaths, but they are actually driven by a level of guilt because they know in their hearts that they really do not differentiate individual people well... they don't read the nuance of emotional impulses in themselves and others... and thus they assign superficial labels and grouping to categorize people to help them, the left liberal, feel in control.
This flaw is basically described as liberal choices being constrained by their lack of emotional regulation capability. They cannot accept a reasonable, factual and feasible decision that results in them feeling negative. This causes them to seek short-term, feel-good policies over long-term health.
In my community they over-pay city workers, thus the road and park maintenance budget does not keep up. Then they push a sales tax increase and we have less business in town. They block peripheral development "because of the environment" and that too results in too low tax revenue from too few homes and commercial business. They will not allow the police to remove homeless from the sidewalks downtown, and thus fewer people shop downtown and since there is no peripheral retail (they blocked it), residents go to surrounding communities to shop... thus depleting tax revenue even more. Sales per capita is half the state average and 1/3 of that of surrounding cities. The budget is a mess. They cannot fix it because fixing it will cause them immediate negative feelings.
These people are not well.
If you think about the history of our economy and social system, the academic set did not have so much wealth and power. It has been technology changes that has rewarded them while we have gutted the productive economy that used to dominate the structures of wealth and power.
We have frankly put the inmates in charge of the asylum.
God never intended left liberals to lead and govern. They are supposed to be there to help regulate the tyranny of complete objectivity which can lack enough heart.
Everywhere we look where liberal Democrats run the place, the place is in decline and decay. This is from the incremental added layering of poorly optimized choices and decisions that feed their need to maintain their more volatile emotional equilibrium.
Trump derangement has added gasoline to this burning flaw as left liberals feel so terrible with everything that seems to be a Trump win or benefit. They cannot admit anything positive about Trump and his actions. They are so emotionally disordered that they demonstrate acceptance of utter destruction rather than face another day where they feel negative about their politics. Ironically and tragically, it is leading to them having to double down on the same destructive behavior that results in them having to eat so much humble pie that they reject.
We have a left mass psychosis problem that I expected to be resolved by now as objective brain cells kick in at some point, but now I think that it will never resolve. Now I believe that we can only stay vigilant in politics to try and get these people out of positions of power and influence, and to keep them out.
Giuliani was the frontrunner for the same reason Trump ultimately became the face of the party. He "got it." He spent more time with the dispossessed than with the elites. He wasn't lashed up with the party regulars who ran things.
There were stories during his candidacy about how he was well-liked in Texas and similarly conservative venues despite being pretty soft on abortion and other social-agenda issues.
There were plenty of candidates who were allegedly more conservative than Giuliani, but an awful lot of them came across as phonies, including the ultimate nominee, Senator McCain.
I couldn't remember why he wound up on the rocks but here's what Wikipedia (yeah, I know) has to say: "Giuliani's campaign hit a difficult stretch during the last two months of 2007, when Bernard Kerik, whom Giuliani had recommended for the position of Secretary of Homeland Security, was indicted on 16 counts of tax fraud and other federal charges. The media reported that when Giuliani was the mayor of New York, he billed several tens of thousands of dollars of mayoral security expenses to obscure city agencies. Those expenses were incurred while he visited Judith Nathan, with whom he was having an extramarital affair (later analysis showed the billing to likely be unrelated to hiding Nathan)."
Now it is certainly possible that he was all those terrible things and more, but you'll note that even Wikipedia accepts that at least one set of accusations were dubious. So to me this has all the hallmarks of a hit-job by those who felt threatened by his candidacy. No way of knowing, but...in retrospect it seems very...convenient.