Yearning For a Healthy Society

Move to a wealthy neighborhood. I don’t have time right now to look up stats but the type of low level crime you’re talking about happens much less in wealthy area because wealthy people have very little reason to commit petty crimes.

Create the trust with your neighbors. Start something new. Don’t runaway from it.

Both people are onto something here. You can move to a gated community and do not have any of the worries or issues. That is just a short term fix. You can try and change the world. That would be a long term fix.

Here is the truth as I see it. People are not really getting worse. Just the ability to commit crimes is getting easier. People did not walk into a bar and spray the place with a sub machine gun 100 years ago because people could not get a sub machine gun.

Also once a shooting did happen you did not have national 24 hour news agencies covering the issue because no one had TV. News papers did not have a rating system so they had no reason to only cover bad news.

I agree that things are bad. I only think they are bad as in proportion to society. So lets say that 1 out of a 100 people are sociopaths(btw I just made that number up). When you only have a million people then the number of sociopaths are low. Once you have 100 million they become more a part of society. Plus you now have media that makes it glamorous to be a sociopath.

Good points, Ken. I agree with pretty much all you guys have said; it’s still depressing.

Possibly attributed to the constant shifting of people moving in and out of areas. Everyone is always on the move therefore not able to develop a strong relationship with their neighbors and others in the community. Committing an act of deception on a person that one is not familiar with may void any guilt that may arise if there were to be an attachment bond such as friendship. Privacy concerns by the American public keeps us distance from our neighbors and locking the doors to our homes. Having a transparency factor may allow the local bar to allow IOUs, since the bar owner can possibly trust you more over some stranger when the owner actually knows where you live and who you are. Instead of another face that can disappear from radar by just leaving the bar, you have accountability obligations when you are known by others.

So how to develop a more close knit community? I dont know… corporate America wants you to devote most of your time working for them and have no time to develop friendships when you are too tired when you get home from work.

@NateDog I agree with you there. I am so busy trying to advance my career that I barely know my neighbors. It is not that I do not trust them, but I just do not know them. I assume that to live around me they must be.

At my place in the mountains, my neighbors and I depend on each other. Right now they are looking after my place, as I’ve done when they’re away. It’s just a simpler way of living. No one really locks the doors either. It’s a step back to a less complicated time.

-=T=-

Move to a place where there are fewer “degrees of separation” between everyone. Where even if someone doesn’t know you, you can be pretty sure that they know several people who know you. Where if you drive off without paying for gas, it invariably comes back around to affect you (your parents find out, your boss finds out, your friends find out).

What places are like that? Very rural, small town areas.

Then, after you’ve lived there for 6 months, ponder moving back to a city because there are so many more opportunities there. And, perhaps, because it can be nice to have some level of anonymity in your life, at the cost of decreased levels of trust.

Certainly the average level of trust in this country has declined as technology has allowed people to become more mobile, and as people have taken advantage of that mobility, for good and ill. But if you find a place that is sufficiently isolated, I think that places with such levels of trust exist.