Wednesday Morning Rant

Much ink has been spilled over the past decade on the phenomenon of declining trust. I've even done so myself (don't comment on old threads). The theme of shattered trust has been popping up more regularly in more venues. Whether it's lamenting the loss of trust, or arguing that trust levels are just fine, to blaming loss of trust on Macedonian Content Farmers sowing disinformation, etc., the theme is increasingly apparent.

Yet outside the realm of politics - depending on where you are, anyway - vestiges of the high-trust society that made us great still remain. There are little indications of it here and there. These are gratifying to see but I find it very troubling that I now notice them and look at them as nice islands of the Old Ways and a throwback to the way things were.

One such occurrence happened this week. I had trouble sleeping and so gave up, got up and went out to breakfast early before work. I went to a diner. The counter was full, so I took a normal seat. I noticed that when the patron sitting next to the till finished up, the staff bused the counter and then stacked a bunch of paperwork on it. They were clearly taking that seat out of rotation for a bit. I did not wonder why for very long.

As I was finishing up, the shift manager came out of the back with a new cash drawer for the register. He set it on the otherwise busy counter and started running the end-of-shift tallies out of the machine. He packed up the outgoing drawer, installed the new one and then put the old one in the safe. The fresh cash drawer was sitting on the counter, in plain sight and largely unguarded for about five minutes. The old cash drawer got the same treatment for maybe half a minute during the swap.

Anyone who wanted to could have taken the drawer and fled. Lots of people undertake higher-risk crimes for much less. Yet, nobody did. The shift manager knew that he didn't need to worry about it. That money belongs to the diner, and everyone in there knew it. That valuable property could sit there in the open and not be stolen, because people there weren't going to violate the trust the restaurant had its patrons. This is how things used to work across the land, at least outside of the largest cities. It is now something I notice because it can no longer be taken for granted.

The lawlessness and degradation of the blue hives will not stop at the city limits. The normalization of criminal behavior at the highest levels of society will not fail to have downstream effects. Today, however - at least in real America - the old ways are still apparent. The Four Olds have not yet been eradicated across the land. Some places are actively defending them, others are merely maintaining them thanks to inertia because the corrosive effluent of the cities and the governments and the media have not yet entirely poisoned the wells.

Much like how the monks holed up in the distant reaches of Ireland were able to preserve the philosophical works that underpinned civilization after the fall of Rome, small reservoirs of the Old Ways peppered throughout the continent will - if maintained - show the way back after the fall.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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