An unposted draft from almost exactly one year ago. I think that it felt too ranty (it is), and there were some unknowns and discomforts with Crawford’s post that I didn’t want to jump into (which was part of the desire for a “bookclub” meeting). But I don’t mind posting now that the moment has well passed.
Every once in a while you come across an article, or an essay, or a Substack post, that you want to have a “book club” meeting on. (Is there such a thing as a Substack club?)
Seriously, it’s like Matthew Crawford is reading my mind:
Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”
“The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”
The rest of the post is fascinating, and adds plenty of goosebumps and exponents to the mind-reading factor.
Being from central Maine, I have little to say about the way immigration plays into this for Crawford. For the sake of this post, at least, I leave that to him and “the French,” both of whom rightfully have more to say on the subject.
But what I do see — all … the … time — is what Crawford calls an expanding field of petty harms. Between Meghan and my Dad, it’s becoming daily conversation.
I’m not claiming that all the muffler-mod and very-unnecessary-lift jockeys that needlessly (and insecurely) roam the streets trying to boost their testosterone levels are potential arsonist and psychopaths, but I do think they tend to be proverbial arsonists and real-life assholes. And though it’s a daily gripe, it is one among an increasing many.
The problem is that I haven’t figured out how seriously to take myself, because I know I sound more and more like a curmudgeon who’s losing (lost?) his mind. Here’s a small sampling of this week’s interminable thought-rant:
- A literal inability drive anywhere without being tailgated.
- An ever-increasing number of people who simply must drive 10, 15, 20 mph over the speed limit — at all times. And all of them purely indignant at the notion that any other car on the road would make them lift their toes to press the brake pedal.
- No eye-contact from the Staples/UPS guy the entire time you’re having a “conversation” with him.
- Restaurant hosts who might as well just say What do you want? when you walk in the door.
- City planners and board members who visibly roll their eyes when life-long community members (whose feet the board members should be washing!) dare to raise their hand and ask about the changes the board wants to make, changes that just happen to benefit a local real estate tycoon who (shock) used to be a board member.
- And of course there is the quaint coastal Maine home, built in 1984, that was sold by the original owner in 2021 for what was (all of 5 minutes ago) the shocking price of $290,000, then sold again in 2023 for the mind-numbing price of $440,000. And just in case you thought that that covers the sad part, this now fully-renovated
home…house…building… piece of capital will soon be on the market, less than one year later, for a price that should cause all of us, the most cynical and sane alike, to become muffler-modding proverbial arsonists ourselves. If you guessed $1,000,000, congratulations, you’re off by about the normal price of a house less than a decade ago. In less than three years this lovely house went from a $290,000 home to a $1,150,000 piece of real estate.
These are only a few of the petty (and not-so-petty) harms. There is also lack of what I’ll call “petty goods” that we have for so long taken for granted. For instance, I have been to every Home Depot and Lowes in central-southern Maine. Not one of them has a professional anything who works for them anymore, or if they do you can’t find them. Instead you will find a genuinely very-nice-someone who is fresh off of “training” and who either has the bad sense to point you in the wrong direction or the good sense to point you in no direction. The common practice now is to go there and, since they have neither the product I’m looking for nor the answer I need, to spend an hour “googling” information about alternative products. (We are all Ron Swanson now, but with phones and YouTube accounts.)
I used to be very fond of the saying: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” But I’ve lost a little of the nerve to laugh at that joke because, well, I run into assholes all day long. I admit that I have lately lost a lot of patience, but I also think that the field of petty harms is actually expanding while the ballast of my ship is starting to slip.
I’m not claiming world or national historic records. And there’s a disclaimer needed about hindsight and confirmation bias and whatnot, one that involves a restaurant table in Pokrovsk covered in 1930s Chicago newspaper clippings. But that’s a post for another day.