Comment by bdangubic
1 day ago
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
just as a small recent-ish example, I live in a white-collar affluent area and this Halloween we took our daughter to her friend's neighborhood but left a dish full of candy outside with a sign to take a couple. we have a camera outside and the very first "group" of 3 kids (with two adults) that came took all of the candy that was there...
FWIW, I would expect this behavior more in white collar affluent areas more than the rural areas the GP comment is referring to.
Many people get into these positions of affluence by participating in competitions that repeatedly normalize that exact variety of deviance.
Honor-anything works when you create and maintain systems that normalize honorable behaviors and shame deviant behaviors (for any definition of honorable and deviant), and you can only measure peoples’ honor by the circumstances they’re given to prove themselves.
In bourgeois corners of the US, we’ve implicitly normalized deviance by removing the expectation for honor in competitive environments. “Win at any cost” (you don’t think the other team isn’t doing everything they can to get ahead, do you? How naïve!) has quietly replaced “be prepared” and “give it your best”.
An honor system is a culture, where most people feel shame if they cheat. While some external enforcement is necessary to maintain the system, it mostly relies on everyone policing their own behavior. The more you focus on policing others, the further away you get from an honor system.
There are places today in the USA where the roadside stands don’t even have a lockbox, just a bowl of money.
We specifically don’t tell you where because we’d like to keep it that way.
I think that is not an exception, but is pretty common almost anywhere in the US rural enough to have a roadside stand. Although bowls are not immune to wind, so generally the exact implementation takes that into account. Often a slotted box with no lock, etc.
There is no benefit to taking all the newspapers out of the stack. What do you do next? Try and hawk them to people walking by? Candy though, you can eat all that candy.
see I often wonder the same thing like why would you take 20 newspapers when you don’t need 19 of them but human mind works in misterious ways. my answer would be cause it is free and I’ll burn the 19 of them in my backyard for fun. or just like “it is ‘free’ I am taking it!”
I had a similar experience going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant for the first time. the universal reaction from anyone I talked to about this experience (same as mine) was “there is no way in hell place like this in my home country would be in business more than a month.” people be eating not until full but until their body would physically reject additional food :)
Maybe some did that certainly, but in those days, yesterdays newspapers were in abundant supply and available all over the place for various hobby craft efforts or budding arson hobbies. It would not be worth the initial quarter if you merely wanted a stack of newsprint.