When I was a kid, you behaved in public. You just did. If you didn’t, every old lady, every mother, and every adult who knew your parents was watching and ready to correct you. Worse, they would tell your mom. And your mom would back them.
The best parents, of which there were many, modeled polite behavior, expected you to emulate it, and most importantly, trusted you to do so. That combination mattered. Modeling showed you what adulthood looked like. Expectation made it clear that courtesy was not optional. Trust told you that you were capable of self-control and worthy of it. Public behavior mattered because public life mattered.
Those conditions produced predictable results. Because etiquette was expected, there was less everyday unpleasantness between people. Manners acted as social lubricant, smoothing small frictions before they became conflicts. Because children learned early to restrain themselves, they matured faster. Teenagers grew into responsible adults because they saw adulthood had a clear shape and real expectations. And because people internalized norms early, they developed dignity instead of performative “authenticity,” self-governance instead of defiance, social restraint instead of legal entanglement.
I am not claiming everything was better. It wasn’t. Every era has its failures and blind spots. But it is impossible to look honestly at public life today and deny that something has been lost.
Politeness Is a Behavior of Trusted Adults
The dynamic that produces polite children is the same one that produces polite adults. Politeness does not emerge from constant correction or elaborate rule systems. It emerges when people are treated as capable of governing themselves and are expected to do so. When that expectation is real, not hedged or performative, most people rise to it.
Politeness is not compliance. Compliance is enforced and brittle. It disappears the moment supervision does. Politeness is voluntary. It is chosen restraint, practiced without an audience, rooted in the belief that one’s behavior matters to others. That belief does not survive in environments built on distrust.
Where trust exists, self-restraint develops naturally. People modulate their tone, check their impulses, and absorb small personal inconveniences for the sake of social ease. Courtesy becomes habitual rather than theatrical. Where trust is withdrawn, self-restraint collapses and must be replaced with management. Rules proliferate, discretion disappears, and interactions harden. The social fabric becomes tense and brittle, not because people are worse, but because they are no longer treated as moral agents.
Modern culture tends to fail on two fronts at once: It over-manages behavior while under-expecting character. People are surrounded by rules and supervision while being excused from responsibility. They are treated as liabilities to be controlled and as children to be indulged. This does not produce maturity. It produces regression. When adulthood carries no honor and no expectation, people stop aspiring to it. You wind up with a nation of self-indulgent toddlers.
When Politeness Declines, Rules Multiply
When politeness weakens, institutions compensate. They add rules and procedures and signage, training, scripts, escalation protocols, and enforcement mechanisms. This expansion is not driven by malice, but by necessity. When informal, community- and self-enforced norms fail, formal control rushes in to fill the gap.
In high-trust environments, rules are sparse because people regulate themselves. Courtesy absorbs friction before it escalates, apologies work, discretion works, and flexibility is possible because bad faith is the exception, not the expectation.
As trust erodes, however, discretion becomes dangerous. Zero-tolerance policies replace judgment, and escalation replaces conversation. Enforcement by bureaucracies and government structures replaces negotiation. The result is a paradox familiar to anyone living in a bureaucratized society: the more formal rules are added, the worse public behavior becomes. Not because rules are evil, but because rules cannot substitute for internal restraint.
This is where “Karen” behavior emerges, not as a personality flaw, but as a learned strategy. When social negotiation fails, people appeal to authority. When courtesy no longer resolves friction, escalation becomes the default. What was once handled informally now requires management, documentation, and force.
The deeper problem is infantilization. Systems built on the assumption that people cannot be trusted to behave train people not to try. Responsibility is externalized and moral agency atrophies. People do not rise to the level of the rules. They sink to the level of enforcement.
Authenticity Versus Truth
One of the cultural shifts that accelerated this collapse was the elevation of “authenticity” over truth and self-command. Authenticity, as now defined, treats the expression of internal states as a moral good in itself. Feelings are presumed valid because they are felt. Restraint is concealment, and self-control is reframed as repression.
This is a category error. Truth is alignment with reality, while authenticity is alignment with inner experience. They are not the same thing. A person can be authentically angry, authentically selfish, authentically cruel, or authentically wrong. Authenticity does not require goodness or kindness. Civilization exists precisely because we do not treat raw interiority as authoritative.
The rise of authenticity culture is a predictable feature of low-trust societies. When shared norms weaken and politeness no longer reliably signals goodwill, people compensate by externalizing their interior states. Expression becomes a substitute for trust. Constant signaling replaces quiet restraint. What begins as a defensive adaptation becomes a moral demand, and self-control is reinterpreted as deception rather than maturity.
Etiquette once managed the boundary between private emotion and public action. It taught that not every thought must be spoken and not every feeling aired. This was not dishonesty. It was adulthood. When authenticity becomes the highest virtue, courtesy begins to look artificial, restraint suspicious, and dignity unnecessary.
The irony is that this produces less truth and less true authenticity, not more. Expression becomes performative. Outrage becomes currency. Politeness disappears not because people forget how to behave, but because behaving well is reframed as weakness.
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Courtesy Punished, Politeness Reframed as Power
Politeness did not merely fade. In many contexts, it was actively discouraged; feminism, for instance, taught women to reject ordinary male courtesy as patriarchy. Men opening doors or giving up seats to women was reinterpreted as domination, manipulation, or assertion of status. Gestures meant to reduce friction were treated as power plays. The lesson was absorbed quickly: courtesy was risky.
When politeness is punished, people adapt. They withdraw. They minimize interaction. They replace generosity with neutrality or aggression. Public life grows colder not because people are cruel, but because kindness becomes unpredictable in its cost. Worse, it damages relations, both actual and potential; men rejected because they were trying to be nice are embittered toward not just those women, but all women.
The truth is, traditional etiquette actually restrained power by formalizing mutual respect. When courtesy loses moral legitimacy, power does not disappear. It becomes rawer. Interactions lose their buffers. Suspicion replaces goodwill. Authority fills the vacuum left by withdrawn trust.
What once would have been resolved socially now escalates into complaint, policy, or force. Manners are replaced by accusation. The public square becomes both fragile and aggressive.
Dress, Presentation, and the Loss of Public Seriousness
The collapse of etiquette did not occur only in speech and behavior. It occurred on the body. Dress is embodied restraint, a signal that one understands the difference between private comfort and public space. We generally don't recognize it as such today, but how you dress is a form of communication; Melania Trump is a master of this.
Clothing once communicated readiness for responsibility. It reinforced posture, tone, and presence and reminded people that being in public meant something: that one was participating in shared civic life and we owed one another courtesy and respect.
As authenticity culture took hold starting in the 60s, dress was reframed as pure self-expression. Comfort replaced form, private became public, and presentation lost its social meaning. This shift in fashion tracked the decline of etiquette closely. When people stop governing their behavior, they stop governing their presentation, or they change it so it looks casual and self-expressive rather than respectful of social norms.
This also removed a key developmental signal. Adulthood once looked different, with its own visual grammar. As that distinction collapsed, so did the aspirational pull of maturity. Growing up stopped looking like an achievement and began to feel optional.
Dress did not cause courtesy, but it supported it by what clothing "said." When people stop signaling that public space deserves care, everyone begin treating it accordingly.
What It Would Actually Take to Bring Etiquette Back
Etiquette will not be restored through campaigns or mandates. It cannot be enforced into existence, and it cannot be revived by nostalgia. It returns only under specific conditions.
First, expectations must rise. People must again be treated as capable of self-restraint. Hardship may explain behavior, but it does not erase agency. A culture that permanently lowers expectations in the name of compassion produces neither kindness nor dignity.
Second, etiquette must be modeled openly. Courtesy is learned through imitation, not instruction. When respected adults abandon restraint, no amount of messaging compensates.
Third, people must be trusted to internalize norms. Systems built on surveillance cannot produce self-governance. Trust is risky, but it is formative. Treated as adults, many people will act like adults.
Fourth, informal correction must be rehabilitated. Public life once depended on distributed responsibility: neighbors correcting neighbors, adults correcting children, parents backing shared standards. When that system disappeared, escalation and punishment by a formal government system rushed in to replace it. If progressives really want to fix the "carceral state," this would be a good place to start, not with less policing but with more societal correction at younger ages.
Finally, adulthood must regain its status as something desirable. Etiquette works only when maturity is aspirational. Courtesy, restraint, and dignity must once again be seen as achievements, not affectations.
Etiquette never eliminated injustice or conflict. But it reduced friction throughout society. It prevented minor failures from becoming legal matters and ordinary disagreements from becoming moral crises. It made freedom livable and breathable; ironically, the constraints of etiquette made everyone freer.
A society serious about reducing punishment, surveillance, and coercion should stop dismantling the norms that prevent them. Etiquette is not the enemy of liberty. It is one of its quiet preconditions. When people are expected and trusted to govern themselves, courtesy follows. When they are not, force fills the gap.
What we are living with now is not an improvement.
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