Comment by gen220

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”.