At the gym, there’s a stand with small compartments at the entrance into the the weights and equipment room.
Everybody drops their stuff there before going on to exercise. Handbags, wallets, car keys. There are no locks because they aren’t necessary.
Respect for property doesn’t exist in isolation. Gym visitors are polite and respectful with each other. Nobody stares, nobody comments at other people’s performance. People take turns and wipe down equipment after each use. Nobody talks on the phone or listens to music without headphones. Women are completely safe from grabbing or lewd comments.
This is American culture. This is not the human default. It’s the opposite of human default. A very large number of cultural operations carried out across the span of many generations brought about this result.
Unfortunately, this culture comes with a built-in weak point where it’s likely to break down. This weak point is an effect of precisely the trust and the kindness that I described above. People leave their wallets out in the open because they assume everybody is equally honest and kind. They extend this assumptions to the entirety of humanity and backwards in history, assuming it’s the human default.
Clarissa's Blog 
Your photo is both iconic and symbolic, but it is the emblem of a society that most people have either never known, or it represents a long since forgotten or distant memory of a world that was and is no more.
I am reminded of this neck of the woods in Northern Italy where I live, which used to be a corner of Mitteleuropean society and had maintained its Germanic character for several centuries until the Second World War. Until then, it was common for people to buy food and groceries “on account” even in the large cities: shopkeepers kept books in which they marked the amount owed by each family after any purchase and, at the end of the month, when people were paid, the families would settle their account in each shop.
After WW2, immigrants moving from the impoverished South of Italy to the North could not believe their ears when they learnt that they could get stuff without paying for it simply on the understanding that they would settle the bill at the end of the month: they kept going from shop to shop without settling any debt ever. As a result the whole “on account” system was scrapped for everybody, since shopkeepers were not allowed to discriminate between the locals and the new arrivals. That’s what happens when you cannot have high-trust societies.
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We had those pay-on-account systems in the US as well, into the 20th century (probably more in farm towns than elsewhere, as farmers got paid at harvest). That seems to have existed very broadly in the US and large parts of Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. One reads accounts such as Belloc’s *The Path to Rome* (late 19th) where he walks, from France through Switzerland to Rome. The whole way, he knocks on doors, sleeps in random strangers’ houses, and this is… all fine and normal and safe. Here in the 21st century, those parts of the travelogue, rather than the pilgrimage itself, were the most interesting.
-ethyl
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” pay-on-account systems in the US as well, into the 20th century”
They existed into the 21st century in parts of Cental/Eastern Europe… but only for regulars whose address is known to the store owners. As far as I know it still might happen though the stores that can do that are growing fewer by the year.
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” existed into the 21st century in parts of Cental/Eastern Europe”
Forgot to include before…
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