The problem with modern society is everyone's a master of plausible deniability. Our obsession with legalism over plain ol ethics in America has created a cultu

The problem with modern society is everyone's a master of plausible deniability. Our obsession with legalism over plain ol ethics in America has created a culture where everyone's assessing what they can and cannot get away with and going from there, in so many ways and domains. This is why enough comments in this thread are just circular arguments thinly veiling an opinion that does not want to fully shed itself into the light. America has thus become such contradictory place that trust between random strangers is null and void, already a Hobbesian game of stalemate. Progressives aren't any better; they rely on implicit, unwritten rules just as much as any strictly heteronormative conservative and so struggle with ethical nuance just as much. Until Americans stop trying to game each other for what they can get instead of exposing themselves to one another utterly whenever they have to confront real, indissoluble ethical problems that can't be brute forced by partisanship. And it's precisely because America really has no culture that it falls on America to face up to this task more than any other country. Edit: No really, go back and re-read Leviathan, Hobbes doesn't say a state of nature is all-out violence, he specifically says nothing happens ("no industry or culture"); it's a stalemate. Nobody makes a move, so everybody loses