Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

This dog-eat-dog "if you don't steal, you won't survive" endemic level of corruption and ubiquitous legal broken windows is IME not uncommon in shitty third-world countries (of one of which I'm an expat) where scarcity leads people to prioritize their own needs over common decency and consideration towards others. The "everybody else is cheating, this is the baseline" attitude always felt wrong, but, just like the article said, you were made to feel a fool if you didn't participate in it. The US felt like a place that, while not immune to cheating, had strong social and legal norms around it.

The most recent phenomenon of this kind I can recall was people lying to vaccination centers about having medical conditions that would help them skip the line ahead of everybody else. I was and still am vehemently opposed to lying about that, despite having been told numerous times that the government would have just thrown the doses away if nobody used them up by lying about their status. Again, you were made to feel a sucker.

High-trust vs low-trust societies. In a high trust society you can generally get more things done more quickly and easily because you can spend less time and effort on trust structures; you can hire strangers rather than family members, etc. The downside is that there's a bigger, less heavily guarded return to cheating. And every effort to cheat to win that pot pushes the society closer to low-trust.

You're also a sucker if you don't invest in crypto. This "sucker" trick is very primitive, it's common to see that teenagers use it to control each other. What's horrible is that significant power structures in our world use it to control the population. This is a huge marking of cultural degradation, in my opinion.

> This dog-eat-dog "if you don't steal, you won't survive" endemic level of corruption and ubiquitous legal broken windows is IME not uncommon in shitty third-world countries

No different in most first world countries

Yeah, I’m an immigrant like the other replier too, you kids need to dump your books and travel the world, outside Americanized liberal cities.

I hated the vaccination thing sooo much. I was already annoyed that the US is becoming a communist country where all the most valuable goods (e.g. vaccines) are given to powerful politicians (members of Congress) instead of letting people in the private sector buy them with their own money. The fact that people started lying to jump the line ahead of all the honest people in addition to the people who would’ve paid for them with their hard-earned money pissed me off royally. It made me feel like a sucker for working and paying taxes. I identify very strongly with the author of this article.

I didn't feel like a sucker at all. I just hated those people that thought to cheat the system.

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