Simple Solution to Free Rider Problem
November 03, 2010
If someone broke one of this guy's windows, I suspect he'd find a more suitable place for his cars. When you read the comments, though, it's mostly blah-blah-blah and let's-involve-the-government. The biggest problem with modern society is that you can be a motherfucker because everyone is too much of a pussy to do anything about it.
Parking was tight in my old apartment, and so people would inevitably bump into a car while parallel parking. None of us had much of a problem with this. You always have some motherfucker, though, who is going to abuse the trust.
When a guy decided that he'd violently bump the car in front and in back of him, repeatedly, in order to squeeze into a space, he got a lecture on public ethics and the social contract. He never parked in front of my apartment again.
Most problems could be solved if people would stand up to the anti-social rather than passive-aggressively muttering insults under their breath. Yet society is so rotten that I am the bad guy.
At my favorite restaurant, seating was limited. You needed to line up about 20 minutes before the doors opened. Most would stand in line, and I'd usually arrive early enough to be first in line.
I was there with a girl, when, just as the doors were about to open, I saw something suspicious to my left. A couple was pretending to look inside the next-door shop's window. I knew what they were going to do: They were going to swoop in front just as the restaurant's doors opened.
I said, "I know what you're doing. You think you're going to cut in front of the line." They were deeply offended (and they indeed did cut in front of the line, they just didn't cut in front of me). Yet my date was outraged that I confronted them. I was the bad guy for telling someone not to cut in line. As John Stewart's TV-watching, mouth-breathing, drooling fans would say: How uncivil!
Sure enough, however, I heard people bitching about the line cutters. If instead of uttering under your breath, you'd confront someone, people would stop cutting in line. The problem with society isn't that we're uncivil: The problem is we have too much civility. It has turned us into a nation of passive-aggressive cunts.
And of course this goes well beyond line cutting. It's currently profitable for Wall Street to steal from the American public. No law or regulation will stop them.
Oddly - though not ironically, because it's by design - those of us who would willingly stop the Wall Street thieves would be the ones who would get arrested. Until we all agree to act, we will remain slaves. When we as a society agree to take to the streets rather than bitch at dinner parties or at blogs, we'll finally find the Change we've been looking for.
The words of America's greatest alpha male, Benjamin Franklin, seem more apropos than ever: "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."