We need not puzzle at the lack of civility around us. Under constant influence of media and marketers, we are making ourselves unfit for polite society. In service of the bottom line, our natural pugnacity is overdeveloped and our better instincts are crowded out. Marketers are spending millions to boost our aggressiveness, acquisitiveness, and mutual distrust. It's not that they're evil, it's just that they wouldn't sell much by appealing to virtue and common courtesy.
Bad manners are modeled daily in the popular media. In the world of sports and entertainment, belligerent rudeness has become a fashion statement. Obsessed with crime, local news coverage exaggerates the danger of our common spaces, even though crime rates are the lowest they've been in decades. Talk shows, with their endless griping and sniping, spread chronic dissatisfaction and disrespect for public institutions.
Marketers are happy to fund this kind of influence because it sours us on common spaces. Convinced that it's a jungle out there, we retreat to our cocoons and consume ever more of their products and their brainwashing. We pull away from our real society, and long for our own, personal, suburban park, that we can enjoy in secure isolation from our neighbors who enjoy their own park in secure isolation from us.
There was a time when we enjoyed our parks in common; we shared them, and that required manners. Marketers don't want us to share; they want us to buy our own. On the roads, where we have to share the space, we are urged to show domination and disdain for others by driving the biggest and most powerful vehicles we can manage to finance. It is no wonder that our manners have deteriorated.
When we turn against the things we share, we lose the habits that make sharing possible; we get out of practice; our manners get rusty and we fail to teach them to our kids. The sweeter side of human nature hasn't disappeared, it's just been beaten down by relentless, profit-motivated marketing. Marketers are just doing their job, but that doesn't mean we must passively submit to their conditioning.
Let's turn off the media for a while, come out of our cocoons, and learn once again to love the common spaces where we can give our manners our good workout.
