The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.

I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).

Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).

This doesn't seem particularly related?

> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1]

Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.

This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.

> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.

Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?

People can still behave honorably despite all this. It's easy (and wrong) to justify someone's dishonorable behavior by pointing to the leaders.

  “But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”

  “Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”

  “I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”

Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad

> [...] it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.

Turning into what from where is the interesting part.

Idk about corruption, but the shoplifting trend has come from corporate america's wholesale looting of the country. The social contract was abandoned many decades ago.

You ever seen a man over 40 pull a building permit for work wholly within his own home? Yeah me either.

These days college kids are just as jaded. Of course they cheat the instant they think they can get away with it.

The college is there to serve the college, not them and these days the kids know it. Even if everyone cheating degrades the value of the degree there's no guarantee the college won't do that itself if everyone is honest so might as well get away with what you can while you can. Nobody likes this, it's just a rational adaptation to the perceived state of affairs.

> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting

It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.

We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.

We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.

I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.

Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.

Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.

To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.

Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.

As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.

The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...

WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.

> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.

Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.