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The Necessary Corset

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Clarissa

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What keeps people from sliding into lumpenization and dysfunction is control. A sense of boundaries between self and the world. This goes from the basic acts of not expectorating on a sidewalk and not throwing around garbage to the more complex task of being emotionally contained in public.

When these boundaries aren’t put up around a person by means of religion, tradition, ritual and community, all that’s left to perform this function is a highly concentrated inner motivation that most people simply don’t have.

It’s easier to function and be happy when all these things keep you together.

5 responses to “The Necessary Corset”

  1. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    perform this function is a highly concentrated inner motivation that most people simply don’t have.

    Very true. Lee Kuan Yew realized this and enforced civilized behavior by means of public canings for stuff like littering. Most countries (and all of the “global south”) deserve the Singaporean model.

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  2. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Liked by 2 people

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    Definitely related and relevant:

    “A sense of boundaries between self and the world” is an impediment to the real goal:

    https://x.com/booktycoon/status/1863665791696245138

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Well, yeah. If “society” enforces the little things, you never have to think about them. It’s not a choice you have to make every minute of every day. Of course you don’t throw trash out the car window. Of course you don’t shoplift. Of course you don’t urinate on public sidewalks. Of course you don’t get up and have a beer with breakfast. There are expectations.

    That frees up headspace for other things.

    For some of us at least, just shopping for dental floss and being presented with 20 options results in fatigue. Big stores capitalize on this by deliberately inducing decision fatigue at every possible turn, so that by the time people reach the checkout, half of them will be tapped out and buy something that catches their eye in the impulse-buy rack, just because. They’re all out of decisions. $$

    What must that be like for people coming up now, in the Amazon-and-Tinder world of apparently infinite choice, where large chunks of the standard rules are deemed oppressive?

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    1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
      oldcowboy3

      methylethyl

      ” …people…where large chunks of the standard rules are deemed oppressive? ”  

      Where you are concerned about that in the future, us old pharts are already viewing it. And worse, our parents actually wondered that about us. The Britain that Lee Kuan Yew saw in th 50’s was created during the days of empire, and collapsed with it.

      I saw the end of it. In public school in Canada, everyday we started “Assembly” with “The Lord’s Prayer” followed by “God Save The Queen” and ending with “The Maple Leaf Forever.” None of that would be considered acceptable today, let alone the seemingly routine corporal punishment regularly administered to virtually all the boys, and more than a few girls, as the discipline problems of puberty arrived 😀

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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