On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > On 03-Jul-11 3:35 AM, Indrajit Gupta wrote: > >> Was there a primaeval political act at the bottom of it all? It is tempting >> to speculate that our behaviour represents the rejection of alien systems >> imposed on us by an alien minority and perpetuated by deracinated >> individuals who represent that alien minority. We have been taught in our >> political life, and to an extent in our social life, that rejection of these >> alien systems represents a positive impulse, a divinely sanctioned freedom >> to reject systems and authority which impedes our personal understanding of >> what is good for us. Our individual measure of social good is what counts, >> and our collective responsibility is to follow that individual understanding. > > I think this is quite easily explained by
A hypothesis! Is it testable? Let's see... > 1) Population pressure (and attendant perception, at a societal level, > of scarcity of various resources - a perception that has a great deal of > hysteresis built into it) If this is true, we should see similar sorts of behaviour in other densely populated societies. Are there observable counter-examples? What are the obvious candidates? China? Singapore? Brazilian favelas? > 2) A collective understanding that "what I say" and "what I do" are > essentially disjoint sets. How does one test this? I think though that this is the heart of the issue, that it's actually cultural - a shared set of cultural norms, though that simply begs the question. Where do/did these norms come from? > 2a) A corollary to the above is the lack of incentive to enforce various > _stated_ norms around appropriate behaviour such as crowding instead of > queueing. If this is true we should be able to identify the incentives that are present in other societies that do enforce those norms. What do you propose as the incentives? I suggest instead that this is another question begging "cultural" norm. It would be interesting to gather observations as to which societies crowd, and which queue, see if there is a pattern and extract a hypothesis from that. -- Charles
