Comment by Prinzinc on Kiki

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Prinzinc
Prinzinc·1 month ago
@Kiki

If you get rid of social pressure and you remove expectations and duties from people, it will only create chaos.  Off the top of my head, there are dozens of things that people are well known for doing or not doing due to social pressure that we would be forced to convert to a law if we suddenly decided that social pressure wasn't good.  For example:

1) Sexual harassment - A lot of sexual harassment is perfectly legal but most men don't engage in it because men have social pressure on them that stops it.  

2) Hand washing - In most cases it's perfectly legal to not wash your hands however social stigmas make people embarrassed to come out of the bathroom without washing their hands.

3) Working vs living off of the "system" - Although some don't, most people have a certain level of shame living off of the government system.  If you remove the social stigma of taking government handouts, significantly more people will happily quit their jobs and stop working so that they can live a life paid for by other people's hard work.

4) Theft/lying - A certain level of shame is experienced by people who steal once and then don't ever steal again because it feels shameful to get caught.  The same can be said for people who are caught lying.  Although lying is certainly not illegal in most cases, theft is absolutely illegal but it's only prosecuted if it's discovered.  If you get rid of the public stigma regarding shame for certain behaviors, both theft and lying will increase dramatically.

5) Structure of current laws - Not only will it be impossible to get people to agree on new laws that ought to be created, current laws will be easily overthrown as more and more people only look after their own interests and seek to erode systems of law that limit their selfishness and hedonism.  Therefore, life in cities will become exponentially more chaotic with ever weakening punishments for people who break the law.

6) The end of a high-trust society - There are a lot of advantages of a high-trust society.  You return something to a store and they believe you.  You need medication and you get it quickly without a background check.  You fall on hard times and people will help take care of you, etc...  Everyone only looking after their own needs and desires without any social pressure on them or duties that they are required to fulfill will create the lowest trust society possible where everything everyone does cannot be trusted.  Every single aspect of your life will be affected to the extent that eventually even our concept of "innocent until proven guilty" will be changed to "guilty until proven innocent".

I could go on, but honestly it gets progressively worse and dystopian from here.  You can rest assured that you live in a country with plenty of food, water, clothing, shelter and freedom today only because your ancestors believed in mutual duties and behavioral expectations between both sexes which created the incredibly valuable high-trust society that still affects us today (although it is eroding).