At a meta-level, social institutions like marriage and family have always seemed like long arc cooling out devices for entire populations as collective marks. Nothing challenges the establishment like individuals without familial ties who have nothing to lose. It follows then that the state all over the world, without exception, loves the idea of individuals getting married (and getting married early), and having children. Once people sign up for that script, it activates a whole assembly line of elaborate, localized and slow release cooling out scripts that ensure business as usual carries on without any fuss.
The litigiousness framing is sharp, but I think it’s downstream of something older: the closing of the frontier. For most of American history, the mark’s default wasn’t to sue – it was to exit. Lose a political fight, find the local sheriff intolerable, get on the wrong side of the church elders. Move west. The geography itself was the cooling infrastructure, vast enough to absorb almost any quantum of social disorganization Goffman warns about.
Turner declared the frontier closed in 1893. The census had run out of unsettled land to count. The cooling-out system had to be rebuilt from scratch, and litigiousness filled the gap – imperfectly, expensively, but functionally. You can’t exit, so you litigate. The veto becomes the surrogate for the open door. Mohsin Hamid’s magical doors in Exit West carry weight precisely because the original version was real for so long, and then wasn’t.
But there’s a second loss alongside the frontier that your framing made me see more clearly: the Republic itself used to be part of the cooling infrastructure. Twenty-seven flag changes between 1818 and 1960. Constitutional amendments every generation – twelve in the first decade, then more as the country lurched through Civil War, Reconstruction, the Progressive Era. The system kept reconstituting itself. Losing a political fight didn’t feel permanent because the underlying architecture was demonstrably plastic. The marks could tell themselves, correctly, that the game wasn’t over.
Then after Hawaii in 1960, the flag froze. The last substantive structural amendment was the Twenty-Sixth, granting eighteen-year-olds the vote, in 1971. The informal norms that kept institutions workable turned out to be load-bearing walls, and nobody noticed until someone started removing them. Now you have a political system designed for four million people across thirteen states governing a continental empire of 340 million – and the bones won’t bend.
So the picture that emerges is a vetocracy layered on top of a constitutionally frozen system layered on top of a continent with no exit valve. That’s an enormous amount of pressure with nowhere to go. Which maybe explains why the “personal disorganization” you’re tracking feels qualitatively more volatile than previous rounds of American identity crisis. The cooling mechanisms worked before partly because people sensed – correctly – that the underlying system was still plastic. Marks can accept losing a hand when they believe the game continues. It’s when the table itself feels locked that disorganization turns into something harder to name.
It makes one wonder what might be the next cooling off mechanism… Artemis is apropos and timely… cyberspace has been a mixed bag but is blending url and irl in unique ways… I also wonder how the current collapse and possible reinvention of the current us constitutional regime might connect with the planetary scale institutions envisioned by nils in children of a modest star
There is a harmony with the US having a conman making marks of his voters domestically whilst revealing an international system his country underwrote for decades to be a lie.
But I think the individual level recognition that the entire narrative as con is the deepest cut. It is true and the reckoning will be rough.
At a meta-level, social institutions like marriage and family have always seemed like long arc cooling out devices for entire populations as collective marks. Nothing challenges the establishment like individuals without familial ties who have nothing to lose. It follows then that the state all over the world, without exception, loves the idea of individuals getting married (and getting married early), and having children. Once people sign up for that script, it activates a whole assembly line of elaborate, localized and slow release cooling out scripts that ensure business as usual carries on without any fuss.
The litigiousness framing is sharp, but I think it’s downstream of something older: the closing of the frontier. For most of American history, the mark’s default wasn’t to sue – it was to exit. Lose a political fight, find the local sheriff intolerable, get on the wrong side of the church elders. Move west. The geography itself was the cooling infrastructure, vast enough to absorb almost any quantum of social disorganization Goffman warns about.
Turner declared the frontier closed in 1893. The census had run out of unsettled land to count. The cooling-out system had to be rebuilt from scratch, and litigiousness filled the gap – imperfectly, expensively, but functionally. You can’t exit, so you litigate. The veto becomes the surrogate for the open door. Mohsin Hamid’s magical doors in Exit West carry weight precisely because the original version was real for so long, and then wasn’t.
But there’s a second loss alongside the frontier that your framing made me see more clearly: the Republic itself used to be part of the cooling infrastructure. Twenty-seven flag changes between 1818 and 1960. Constitutional amendments every generation – twelve in the first decade, then more as the country lurched through Civil War, Reconstruction, the Progressive Era. The system kept reconstituting itself. Losing a political fight didn’t feel permanent because the underlying architecture was demonstrably plastic. The marks could tell themselves, correctly, that the game wasn’t over.
Then after Hawaii in 1960, the flag froze. The last substantive structural amendment was the Twenty-Sixth, granting eighteen-year-olds the vote, in 1971. The informal norms that kept institutions workable turned out to be load-bearing walls, and nobody noticed until someone started removing them. Now you have a political system designed for four million people across thirteen states governing a continental empire of 340 million – and the bones won’t bend.
So the picture that emerges is a vetocracy layered on top of a constitutionally frozen system layered on top of a continent with no exit valve. That’s an enormous amount of pressure with nowhere to go. Which maybe explains why the “personal disorganization” you’re tracking feels qualitatively more volatile than previous rounds of American identity crisis. The cooling mechanisms worked before partly because people sensed – correctly – that the underlying system was still plastic. Marks can accept losing a hand when they believe the game continues. It’s when the table itself feels locked that disorganization turns into something harder to name.
That’s a great point and in hindsight doh obvious. Endless frontier is almost a literal cooling mechanism. Gases cool when they expand/
It makes one wonder what might be the next cooling off mechanism… Artemis is apropos and timely… cyberspace has been a mixed bag but is blending url and irl in unique ways… I also wonder how the current collapse and possible reinvention of the current us constitutional regime might connect with the planetary scale institutions envisioned by nils in children of a modest star
Had never read the Goffman paper. Cuts deep.
There is a harmony with the US having a conman making marks of his voters domestically whilst revealing an international system his country underwrote for decades to be a lie.
But I think the individual level recognition that the entire narrative as con is the deepest cut. It is true and the reckoning will be rough.
Good one Venkatesh. Cheers