In addition to placing eight out of 20 cities in Forbes‘ “America’s Most Miserable Cities, 2011” list, California also has another geographic distinction to its credit — Los Angeles was dubbed “the rudest city in America” by Travel + Leisure readers. In the L.A. Times, Amy Alkon, the author of I See Rude People responds:
Sure, L.A. is big and spread out, and it’s easy to feel alienated here — if you let yourself be alienated. To a great extent, you inhabit the world you create wherever you are.
To understand why L.A. can be a tough city to feel at home in, it helps to understand why people are rude. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar figured out that the human neocortex seems to have a capacity to manage social interaction in societies of about 150 people. Beyond that number, social order seems to break down.
In other words, people are rude — in L.A. and many other places — because we live in societies too big for our brains. In a small society in which everyone knows each other, you can’t act out the way you can around strangers. If, however, you’re around people you’ll never see again, you can get away with all sorts of nasty behavior.
We can’t shrink Los Angeles to a more polite population size, but we can bring back some of the constraints and benefits of the small tribal societies our brains are adapted for. This actually doesn’t take much.
We need to refuse to be victimized by the rude. This means speaking out when people are behaving hoggishly, like all those cellphone shouters privatizing public space as their own. We also need to make an effort to treat strangers like neighbors — to smile at the guy passing us on the sidewalk, to say hello to the cashier, to do the small kindnesses that you would for someone you know.
It helps to be mindful that L.A. is not just the second-biggest strangeropolis in the country but a place of neighborhoods: geographical neighborhoods and neighborhoods people create in their lives; neighborhoods defined by shared interests.
Last month, Victor Davis Hanson postulated “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”
It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.
The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.
Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.
Is there a related and equally Orwellian correlation between how much a city’s municipal body is obsessed with such faddish leftwing buzzwords such as “social justice,” “diversity,” and “tolerance” and the lack of those conditions in the city in which they govern?
Related: “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within,” writes John Tierney, the New York Times’ token libertarian.
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