It is a shame, but it’s not simply individual personal attitudes that’s causing this. People are afraid of strangers. The problem is, there are too many cases where that’s actually justified now.

The bad people have in fact ruined it for everybody. They have made it legitimately dangerous to have this sort of openness and trust in most slices of society, at least for people who look and behave a certain way, or were born certain ways. The problem is, under the influence of traditional media and social media and government and all the other dysfunctional and corrupt systems in our society, we’ve started tolerating the actually bad and dangerous people in society, instead of punishing them. Often we’re actually celebrating them, and in some cases even electing them President. It makes it almost impossible to sustain a functioning society when bad people are allowed to do bad things with impunity or worse, reward for their behavior. This is what’s causing the breakdown of society. Trust is hard to build and easily broken, and now it’s been broken and it seems like fewer and fewer people are interested in trying to rebuild it.

Why the fuck would women trust anyone in this society when allegedly half of the people in the world’s most economically powerful and culturally influential country voted for a party who is now occasionally saying women shouldn’t have the right to make decisions about their own bodies or even have the right to vote. These horrifyingly regressive attitudes are not just extremist throwaway comments because they are being paired with actions in the US and around the world, and they have serious consequences.

And yes, I am allowed to bring politics into this, because society is literally made out of politics. That’s what politics is, it’s the primary ingredient for making civilization function and it defines how it functions. Our aversion to discussing contentious “politics” is what has allowed society to decay to the point it has. This is not about being “woke” this is about being intelligent enough to want to live in a civilized society. Civilization requires not just moral boundaries but also the willingness to treat those who push at or exceed those moral boundaries as an existential threat, because they are. If you want your society to be good, you cannot tolerate evil. The boundaries and definitions are not always clear, but we must grapple with them as they stand, not avoid them. Grappling with these issues is the day-to-day work required to make civilization function. It is not a failing that we will always have these issues and always struggle with these issues, but it is a failing if we stop trying to struggle with them, because then we’re no longer keeping society functioning. Politics is life. Life is politics.