6 ms·

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bea

by rayiner 2mo ago

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time period. According to multiple independent opinion polls, his approval rating was high during this period because people were grateful to have stability. In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." Logic compels this conclusion. People who disagree on fundamental aspects of how the world and society should work cannot cooperate in a civil society if we trust that everyone will follow their vision of "the right thing." The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right. The thing I admire most about Anglo-American culture is that people will jump off a bridge if you give them a court order that complies with all required procedural formalities. That's how you create a civil society.

edot 2mo ago
But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.
- rayiner 2mo ago
  > But who decides which rules are neutral You’re correct that rules are themselves to an high degree arbitrary. They can only be imposed by a source of authority that’s beyond question: God(s), elders, founding fathers, kings, etc. In the case of the U.S. it’s historical inertia going back to 1215.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Those aren't neutral, they're just Schelling points.
    - rayiner 2mo ago
      They don’t actually have to be neutral, people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong.
      - bluGill 2mo ago
        > people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong. I would say people need to accept them as neutral and make them their own sense of right and wrong. You can have a stricter personal set of right and wrong, but it needs to be something that society recognizes as a stricter in all ways.
- virtualbluesky 2mo ago
  In that example the number on the scale is less important than chemical properties of the solution. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away and all that.
- femto 2mo ago
  The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule": "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself. The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attacking them you can reasonably ask "Would you like it if I did this to you?". Limitation of power is built in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
  - no-name-here 2mo ago
    I'd say expecting non-hypocrisy is also a top item. Someone says x behavior from a leader is disqualifying? OK, maybe that's their earnestly held belief and so worthy of consideration even if I disagree with their view. But if their behavior is the opposite/shows hypocrisy and suddenly isn't disqualifying? That should be a red line. Because even the "golden rule" leaves a lot of wiggle room - for example, should marital infidelity (or x) be a dealbreaker for electing someone? Maybe, but looking at hypocrisy (and thereby actions) might provide better insight as to what those groups actually believe is the "correct" standard? > The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule" Mostly agreed, but a surprisingly large percentage of the population seems truly unable to feel empathy for others (and can even show glee at others being negatively impacted by something) unless it personally affects them (a prerequisite for "Would you like it if I did this to you?" to work?). They can be gung-ho about laws that negatively affect others but upset if it affects them. For example, the countless examples of "Community members vote for politician promising illegal immigrant deportation, then upset/disagree that long-time beloved community member deported", or "Voter voted for politician promising criminal-record-immigrant deportation, then upset/disagrees that partner with past criminal record deported".
  - BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
    And lex talionis as a byproduct.
    - no-name-here 2mo ago
- Sha1rholder 2mo ago
  Your pH example actually proves the opposite. pH 7 is not neutral because it happens to sit halfway between 0 and 14. pH is not inherently limited to that range at all. Sufficiently concentrated solutions can have pH values below 0 or above 14. A solution is called neutral when the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions are equal, which happens to correspond to about pH 7 at 25°C. Change the temperature and neutral pH changes too. So if you arbitrarily changed the scale to 10–30, that wouldn’t magically make 20 “neutral.” Neutrality comes from the definition and the underlying conditions, not from being the midpoint between two numbers.
  - HappMacDonald 2mo ago
    I know it's off topic: but I am curious and this sounds both challenging to search for and likely to not get a straight answer from an LLM. Do you happen to know if this means that water may tip from neutral to slightly alkaline or acidic at different temperatures or pressures? I have always found it .. peculiar that water just so happens to (as you aptly put it) "have all the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions equal" :)
    - Sha1rholder 2mo ago
      This isn't a difficult question. I'm sure LLM knows these things better than I do. Water is H-O-H; H+ and OH- both come from water. If there are no impurities, then for every extra H+ there is an extra OH-, so it's not that they are "happen to be equal". They're born equal. Changing the temperature does change the concentrations of these ions so pH does change by definition. But the water remains neutral, since the ratio of H⁺ to OH⁻ is still 1:1
- dahart 2mo ago
  Hehe, unfortunately that example undermines your otherwise good point, physical laws do not support your claim. Changing the units of a physical scale range does not change the relative position of a point inside that range, it only changes the name. 20 in a [10,30] range is still the absolute midpoint, and represents the amount of base or acid on an absolute scale. Not sure I agree with the claim that we only allow “neutral” rules. That’s not necessarily true. And of course who decides which rules are neutral depends on which rule we’re talking about, and where you live, and (important) doesn’t depend much on whether the rule is subjective or not - the same processes are used even when the rule is objective. Some rules are fairly objective because they’re tied to health & safety. All humans require clear air & water, for example. Most tolerate a little pollution due to business interests, but whether pollution is poisonous isn’t particularly subjective, aside from the debates over the economic damage from small non-lethal amounts.
didibus 2mo ago
I think "the right thing" implied by "civil" in "civil society" means equal say in legal matters, immediate calling out of corruption and full transparency requirements, rule by pre-established and mutually agreed-upon laws, absolute adherence to pre-agreed human rights that require total consensus to alter, etc. Therefore you can re-read the sentence as: > Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to uphold those shared rules and principles, even when doing so is inconvenient or runs against their immediate self-interest.
lurk2 2mo ago
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right. This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.
- roenxi 2mo ago
  > This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure... Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them. The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details. Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.
  - john01dav 2mo ago
    The law in North America and Europe (possibly elsewhere too, I don't know) is full of accommodations for special interests at the cost of everyone else, due to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs causing the former to lobby aggressively while the latter doesn't. To make a clear example: I don't think that it's fair that I'm not allowed to plumb my own (commercial¹) building just because I didn't learn how via a difficult to get, underpaid, full time, 4 year apprentiship in whatever state I'm living in at the moment, with usually ~0 practical escape hatch to demonstrate competence in any significantly different way, or to just have the result inspected. 1: some places, not all, have exemptions for owner occupied single family homes
rmunn 2mo ago
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politicians who truly wanted "the right thing" and actually gave up personal power when it was necessary, for the sake of having "the right thing" happen. Cincinnatus is the often-cited example, for very good reasons.) Which is another reason why legal structures such as the American Constitution, which constrains (or would constrain if actually followed, which is a whole other rant) the power of government to certain specific channels, are important to have. They limit what the power-seekers can actually do with that power once they obtain it, and provide ways for turfing said power-seekers out of office if enough people agree to remove them. (Then you probably end up electing another power-seeker, because those end up being the vast majority of the candidate pool... but sometimes you get really, really lucky and get someone like George Washington).
- WalterBright 2mo ago
  > selfish ambitions for power or money Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity. There's nothing wrong with making money that way.
  - vkou 2mo ago
    How well do free markets resolve basic problems of resource distribution? Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?
    - WalterBright 2mo ago
      Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.
modo_mario 2mo ago
I think the right thing in this context relates more to every day matters that affects people and how they interact with the world. Corruption, unsafety, tax avoidance, vandalism, not paying the bus/tram ticket, littering. As for el sisi. I remember an egyptian friend who fled the country after he did some protesting and journalism critical of the new regime. He said he was amazed by what good they had done for the country and was happy to see the change...despite his past opinion and current exile. Not that he would go back permanently. He married a german gal and later moved to the US.
inigyou 2mo ago
You don't have a society if half the population is fighting with the other half. Pretending that you do is not useful.
TacticalCoder 2mo ago
No, no, no and no. There's is right and wrong and there are evil people. No all cultures are equal: torturing kids for as long as possible before they die, to extract as many tears as possible to please the gods, used to be a thing. We do not all need to agree on "neutral" rules: we can agree it's an evil thing to do to torture kids for as long as possible, to extract as many tears as possible from them. Don't be one, two or three of the "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys: don't be neutral. Fight evil. At the moment for example there are 300 million women/teenagers/girls alive that have been genitally mutilated, including in the west: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance and fight against FGM. At the Bataclan in Paris islamists with AK-47s (which are forbidden in France btw) lined up 300 people and slaughtered them: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance against islamism. In January the islamist iranian regime killed 30 000 of its own unarmed civilians: same thing, you're allowed to not be neutral. I don't care if islamists are convinced they do the right thing by spreading terror: they are evil. And I'm not a religious person. And btw western societies are based on rule that are mostly not neutral: we don't believe in harm to others, for a start. Even if in several cultures (past and present), that was normal. At the moment for example there are lots of talks in french media about the status of women in Afghnistan since the talibans came to power. For, as a western society, we do not care if others believe it's the right thing to mutilate girls, kill your enemies and enslave their women and daughters, etc. The fallacy of gray is really a nasty thing and no good shall come to civilized societies for resorting to it.
pstuart 2mo ago
> To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." That implies that there is a collective general trust that when the rules are not the right thing that they can be addressed.
philipallstar 2mo ago
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." Only slightly. Multiculturalism explodes it, but it's not so very different amongst people with shared language, history, faith, and heroic stories.
NotPractical 2mo ago
> The thing I admire most about Anglo-American culture is that people will jump off a bridge if you give them a court order that complies with all required procedural formalities. The president of the United States routinely violates court orders and has little respect for the law or the Constitution. Also, nobody is going to willingly jump off a bridge because a judge told them to. You'll find that the death penalty isn't carried out by asking people politely to kill themselves.
- rayiner 2mo ago
  I’m talking about the rule-followingness of your average american, which is the bedrock of civil society. Every society has rot at the top. Few societies can survive rot throughout the base of the pyramid.
  - letmehelpyou 2mo ago
    [dead]

by rayiner 2mo ago

edot 2mo ago

But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.

rayiner 2mo ago
> But who decides which rules are neutral You’re correct that rules are themselves to an high degree arbitrary. They can only be imposed by a source of authority that’s beyond question: God(s), elders, founding fathers, kings, etc. In the case of the U.S. it’s historical inertia going back to 1215.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Those aren't neutral, they're just Schelling points.
  - rayiner 2mo ago
    They don’t actually have to be neutral, people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong.
    - bluGill 2mo ago
      > people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong. I would say people need to accept them as neutral and make them their own sense of right and wrong. You can have a stricter personal set of right and wrong, but it needs to be something that society recognizes as a stricter in all ways.
virtualbluesky 2mo ago
In that example the number on the scale is less important than chemical properties of the solution. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away and all that.
femto 2mo ago
The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule": "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself. The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attacking them you can reasonably ask "Would you like it if I did this to you?". Limitation of power is built in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
- no-name-here 2mo ago
  I'd say expecting non-hypocrisy is also a top item. Someone says x behavior from a leader is disqualifying? OK, maybe that's their earnestly held belief and so worthy of consideration even if I disagree with their view. But if their behavior is the opposite/shows hypocrisy and suddenly isn't disqualifying? That should be a red line. Because even the "golden rule" leaves a lot of wiggle room - for example, should marital infidelity (or x) be a dealbreaker for electing someone? Maybe, but looking at hypocrisy (and thereby actions) might provide better insight as to what those groups actually believe is the "correct" standard? > The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule" Mostly agreed, but a surprisingly large percentage of the population seems truly unable to feel empathy for others (and can even show glee at others being negatively impacted by something) unless it personally affects them (a prerequisite for "Would you like it if I did this to you?" to work?). They can be gung-ho about laws that negatively affect others but upset if it affects them. For example, the countless examples of "Community members vote for politician promising illegal immigrant deportation, then upset/disagree that long-time beloved community member deported", or "Voter voted for politician promising criminal-record-immigrant deportation, then upset/disagrees that partner with past criminal record deported".
- BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
  And lex talionis as a byproduct.
  - no-name-here 2mo ago
Sha1rholder 2mo ago
Your pH example actually proves the opposite. pH 7 is not neutral because it happens to sit halfway between 0 and 14. pH is not inherently limited to that range at all. Sufficiently concentrated solutions can have pH values below 0 or above 14. A solution is called neutral when the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions are equal, which happens to correspond to about pH 7 at 25°C. Change the temperature and neutral pH changes too. So if you arbitrarily changed the scale to 10–30, that wouldn’t magically make 20 “neutral.” Neutrality comes from the definition and the underlying conditions, not from being the midpoint between two numbers.
- HappMacDonald 2mo ago
  I know it's off topic: but I am curious and this sounds both challenging to search for and likely to not get a straight answer from an LLM. Do you happen to know if this means that water may tip from neutral to slightly alkaline or acidic at different temperatures or pressures? I have always found it .. peculiar that water just so happens to (as you aptly put it) "have all the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions equal" :)
  - Sha1rholder 2mo ago
    This isn't a difficult question. I'm sure LLM knows these things better than I do. Water is H-O-H; H+ and OH- both come from water. If there are no impurities, then for every extra H+ there is an extra OH-, so it's not that they are "happen to be equal". They're born equal. Changing the temperature does change the concentrations of these ions so pH does change by definition. But the water remains neutral, since the ratio of H⁺ to OH⁻ is still 1:1
dahart 2mo ago
Hehe, unfortunately that example undermines your otherwise good point, physical laws do not support your claim. Changing the units of a physical scale range does not change the relative position of a point inside that range, it only changes the name. 20 in a [10,30] range is still the absolute midpoint, and represents the amount of base or acid on an absolute scale. Not sure I agree with the claim that we only allow “neutral” rules. That’s not necessarily true. And of course who decides which rules are neutral depends on which rule we’re talking about, and where you live, and (important) doesn’t depend much on whether the rule is subjective or not - the same processes are used even when the rule is objective. Some rules are fairly objective because they’re tied to health & safety. All humans require clear air & water, for example. Most tolerate a little pollution due to business interests, but whether pollution is poisonous isn’t particularly subjective, aside from the debates over the economic damage from small non-lethal amounts.

didibus 2mo ago

I think "the right thing" implied by "civil" in "civil society" means equal say in legal matters, immediate calling out of corruption and full transparency requirements, rule by pre-established and mutually agreed-upon laws, absolute adherence to pre-agreed human rights that require total consensus to alter, etc. Therefore you can re-read the sentence as: > Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to uphold those shared rules and principles, even when doing so is inconvenient or runs against their immediate self-interest.

lurk2 2mo ago

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right. This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.

roenxi 2mo ago
> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure... Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them. The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details. Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.
- john01dav 2mo ago
  The law in North America and Europe (possibly elsewhere too, I don't know) is full of accommodations for special interests at the cost of everyone else, due to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs causing the former to lobby aggressively while the latter doesn't. To make a clear example: I don't think that it's fair that I'm not allowed to plumb my own (commercial¹) building just because I didn't learn how via a difficult to get, underpaid, full time, 4 year apprentiship in whatever state I'm living in at the moment, with usually ~0 practical escape hatch to demonstrate competence in any significantly different way, or to just have the result inspected. 1: some places, not all, have exemptions for owner occupied single family homes

rmunn 2mo ago

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politicians who truly wanted "the right thing" and actually gave up personal power when it was necessary, for the sake of having "the right thing" happen. Cincinnatus is the often-cited example, for very good reasons.) Which is another reason why legal structures such as the American Constitution, which constrains (or would constrain if actually followed, which is a whole other rant) the power of government to certain specific channels, are important to have. They limit what the power-seekers can actually do with that power once they obtain it, and provide ways for turfing said power-seekers out of office if enough people agree to remove them. (Then you probably end up electing another power-seeker, because those end up being the vast majority of the candidate pool... but sometimes you get really, really lucky and get someone like George Washington).

WalterBright 2mo ago
> selfish ambitions for power or money Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity. There's nothing wrong with making money that way.
- vkou 2mo ago
  How well do free markets resolve basic problems of resource distribution? Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?
  - WalterBright 2mo ago
    Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.

modo_mario 2mo ago

I think the right thing in this context relates more to every day matters that affects people and how they interact with the world. Corruption, unsafety, tax avoidance, vandalism, not paying the bus/tram ticket, littering. As for el sisi. I remember an egyptian friend who fled the country after he did some protesting and journalism critical of the new regime. He said he was amazed by what good they had done for the country and was happy to see the change...despite his past opinion and current exile. Not that he would go back permanently. He married a german gal and later moved to the US.

inigyou 2mo ago

You don't have a society if half the population is fighting with the other half. Pretending that you do is not useful.

TacticalCoder 2mo ago

No, no, no and no. There's is right and wrong and there are evil people. No all cultures are equal: torturing kids for as long as possible before they die, to extract as many tears as possible to please the gods, used to be a thing. We do not all need to agree on "neutral" rules: we can agree it's an evil thing to do to torture kids for as long as possible, to extract as many tears as possible from them. Don't be one, two or three of the "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys: don't be neutral. Fight evil. At the moment for example there are 300 million women/teenagers/girls alive that have been genitally mutilated, including in the west: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance and fight against FGM. At the Bataclan in Paris islamists with AK-47s (which are forbidden in France btw) lined up 300 people and slaughtered them: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance against islamism. In January the islamist iranian regime killed 30 000 of its own unarmed civilians: same thing, you're allowed to not be neutral. I don't care if islamists are convinced they do the right thing by spreading terror: they are evil. And I'm not a religious person. And btw western societies are based on rule that are mostly not neutral: we don't believe in harm to others, for a start. Even if in several cultures (past and present), that was normal. At the moment for example there are lots of talks in french media about the status of women in Afghnistan since the talibans came to power. For, as a western society, we do not care if others believe it's the right thing to mutilate girls, kill your enemies and enslave their women and daughters, etc. The fallacy of gray is really a nasty thing and no good shall come to civilized societies for resorting to it.

pstuart 2mo ago

> To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." That implies that there is a collective general trust that when the rules are not the right thing that they can be addressed.

philipallstar 2mo ago

NotPractical 2mo ago

> The thing I admire most about Anglo-American culture is that people will jump off a bridge if you give them a court order that complies with all required procedural formalities. The president of the United States routinely violates court orders and has little respect for the law or the Constitution. Also, nobody is going to willingly jump off a bridge because a judge told them to. You'll find that the death penalty isn't carried out by asking people politely to kill themselves.

rayiner 2mo ago
I’m talking about the rule-followingness of your average american, which is the bedrock of civil society. Every society has rot at the top. Few societies can survive rot throughout the base of the pyramid.
- letmehelpyou 2mo ago
  [dead]