United States culture celebrates and often elects grifters, whose core precept can be summarized as “either you’re running the con, or you’re the mark”. Cheating at academics is treated no differently, through a social lens, from attempting to scam a widow out of her insurance payout: simply attempting to run the con places you in a higher social caste than those marks who do not attempt any con, even if you fail. That the cheaters often get caught is much less relevant to them than the shame and shunning and demotion to the lesser caste that their peers would respond with if they did not try to grift their grades — even if they could graduate with a 4.3 without cheating at all! (I don’t personally subscribe to these beliefs, but it’s important to understand why ‘cheating is wrong’ is so contentious in U.S. culture, if only to be able to evaluate whether academic policies are designed effectively to decrease the rate of cheating per student capita.)
1) capitalism and the money is all you need has gradually worn down all other moral and ethical institutions over the decades. Without something like WWII to reset a popular ethos in a uniform manner, it's a gradual slide downward
2) maybe the universality of team sports in the United States, where again winning is all that matters and if you aren't bending the rules and burdening the referees, you aren't trying.
3) this all gets cranked up based on socioeconomic stress, which also is being steadily ratcheted up each decade.
I guess it depends on what you mean by contentious and by whom. The current US administration is a love letter to grifters, con artists, liars, and cheaters. And is staffed with many of the same kind of people.
It's a fairly long way from those people elected to the actions of individuals.
Given a few minutes of thought, it's not hard to imagine one side calling the other cheaters, while holding themselves to higher standards (even holding up those "others" as reasons why its important to be honest). That's just how politics seems to go.
I was thinking more of our cultural appreciation for con men, Robin Hood types, and so on. Many movies come to mind over the past several decades; Ocean’s Eleven, whatever that grass seed salesman movie was, etc. Also, I’d been considering the endless cheating in multiplayer games, whether video or IRL, for as long as humans have played games; and the tendency of United States drivers to cut in line in congested traffic, which is a less-considered form of cheating but still hits all the right points to count as such. Olympians and their endless doping scandals demonstrate that some authorities might think cheating is wrong, but athletes clearly aren’t so uniformly concerned about it. Still, you make a good point about politics demonstrating both the controversy and popularity with voters of cheating and grifting!
Those movies, stories, and games are popular _because_ we have an aversion to rule breaking, IMHO. The average person could never muster up the courage to steal a candy bar, let alone a treasure from a kingdom. It's a fun fantasy to live out precisely because we cannot bring ourselves to do it in the real world, and precisely because it wouldn't go well in the real world.
Being asocial myself, the aversion described comes across as an outcome of societal pressures, rather than any sort of innate characteristic. I still voluntarily adhere to the principles intended by it, but without ever feeling the aversion that typical vulnerability to social pressures confers. So, yes, I do agree that aversion holds true in some social environments — but not all. If one constructs a theoretical culture where lying to, conning, and stealing from outsiders is ethically neutral, then the opposite becomes true: courage is only required to steal a candy bar from an insider, else it’s ethically neutral and courage is not required. This isn’t a thought experiment; such cultures do exist within the United States and have numerous adherents both in U.S. politics and at home. One of the controversies around cheating on homework is whether it’s cheating or not; if a degree ultimately earned fraudulently is only used to exploit outsiders — e.g. including faceless corporate and government non-person entities — then it is not necessarily cheating under an “insiders-only” ethical framework at all. The threats of such frameworks are many and various, but right at the top of the list is “ethical concerns are only applicable to in-group members”, which neatly sidesteps the courage otherwise required to take advantage of a professor, college, etc. Thus the controversy: to say that “cheating is wrong” assumes not only that cheating is “wrong”, but that the ethical concerns implied by the label “cheating” are even applicable at all. Unfortunately, colleges tend not to engage at that level with students (other than those that self-select into philosophy!), and so punitive-only efforts are ineffective at shifting the underlying cultural issues.
If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club, not one’s community.
Community precipitates around shared characteristics; typically places or hobbies. You have no say whatsoever in who else shares that characteristic. Shunning is the only form of exclusion reliably available.
Social clubs are organized around voluntary membership, where one can choose to enter or exit the club at any time, and constraints may be placed to prevent that. Eviction is an available form of exclusion.
Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter are social clubs: one has control over interactions, membership is loosely or tightly controlled, and the threat of eviction is used by club leaders (which are sometimes an inhuman corporate entity!) to keep people in line.
Support meetings are communities: the shared property of “recovering from XYZ” cannot be revoked by others. A much higher bar of social violations — that are more or less stable per cultural context, but typical minimum bounds are sharing private conversations publicly and committing nonsexual violence — are required for a community leader to pursue exclusion.
It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of awful rainbow clubs; that sucks and I empathize from my own experiences as well. I’m still modeling the language to discern whether a given group is a club or a community; my best so far is to ask: “Is this a queer support group, that welcomes anyone queer and necessitates compromise?”. Obviously this phrasing is still mediocre, but that’s not reason not to use it. It doesn’t necessarily reveal clubs at first, but it’s useful for exposing the lie more rapidly if it turns out that it’s a club disguising itself as a community but malice and exclusion are prioritized over compromise and tolerance.
I really don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think you're trying to make community too specific. And support meetings are very much clubs by your definition.
Also I haven't had to deal with "awful rainbow clubs". In fact my experience has been the exact opposite. Twelve years ago, I went to a furry convention and ended up joining one of the most accepting communities I've ever seen. And let me tell you, once a community gets to a certain size, it will have Problems™. :)
One reason not stated by the author is that U.S. culture and tends to handle badly the ebb and flow of physical intimacy among co-residents and their guests, not only through the excuse of jealousy as a conduit for physical and emotional abuse, but also by applying the playground puritanical ‘cooties’ logic to (almost exclusively) women who have been ‘contaminated’ for future relations by a prior partner within the community. Not that communes uniformly handle this any better — jealousy and power plays can still tear up an open-partners community! — but as all constant human coexistence groupings such as work, school, and churches demonstrate: where people are around each other often, intimacy and its successor attractions will crop up without regard for monogamous fidelity. So, given the U.S. puritanical tendencies, it makes sense that they avoid coresidency: isolating humans inhibits (somewhat) intimacy outside of the married partner.
Consider become an auditor who audits the sort of work you no longer wish to perform. You’re uniquely equipped to audit it, whether that lies in forensic, privacy, security, financial, compliance auditing. And your cynicism with the field will help temper your natural bias as ex-SWE to give excess credence to SWE claims.
There was a Chrome experiment for it when I looked last year; it worked well in some cases and was just as bad at Google Sheets as every other generic darkmode solution.
reply