It's amazing how much peer pressure via culture accounts for us being "civil". There is a link between an individual mostly-harmless action (flick a cigarette

It's amazing how much peer pressure via culture accounts for us being "civil". There is a link between an individual mostly-harmless action (flick a cigarette butt on the sidewalk) and the very visible systemic effect of a million people doing that same thing. But even for individuals that want clean sidewalks it is actually not a very obvious correlation to articulate in the moment - it takes a collective consciousness to draw the conclusion that a specific harmless transgression might add up across the population. And so the cultural code-of-conduct could be looked at as a "caching" technique for worldly experience and logic. Very convenient, except when it gets in the way of evolution of the originating logic and experience.