Coming Unglued

Rather than leading off this post with the commentary that caught my eye this morning let’s begin with a local news story. From ABC 7 Chicago:

FOREST PARK, Ill. (WLS) — A 30-year-old Chicagoan has been charged after four people were shot and killed while asleep on a CTA Blue Line train early Monday, police said Tuesday.

Rhanni S. Davis faces four counts of first-degree murder, Forest Park police said.

Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins said the victims were sleeping when they were shot.

“Every loss of life is tragic, regardless of what their circumstances were. You know that they were special to somebody,” Hoskins said. “This was an incredibly unfortunate act, a criminal act, the loss of life that we all grieve for.”

The four adult victims are three men and one woman, police said. Three of the victims were found shot in one train car and one was found in another. Police said the victims were not robbed.

In another words a young man approached several people who were sleeping on an L train and murdered them. It has been suggested that one or more of the victims was homeless. The murders were not done for gain. The perpetrator apparently did it because he could.

I can think of several possible motives. Maybe the shooter was high on something. Maybe it was part of some gang initiation. Maybe he hates people sleeping on trains.

Now on to this post at the American Institute for Economic Research by David C. Rose on our fraying cultural framework:

The rise of civilization is the story of people living in ever-larger groups. In places like America, culture evolved even further, producing the moral belief that we should never do moral don’ts and use government, if necessary, to enforce them. Meanwhile, obeying the moral dos is to be treated as a purely private matter. In other words, we should mind our own business. This is so deeply ingrained in the American ethic that for us it’s like water to fish.

Being confident that, in most contexts, no harm would come to us led to a habit of extending trust to strangers unless there was a good reason not to. That is the essence of a high trust society. Since trust is a powerful catalyst to voluntary cooperation, this unleashed the power of freely directed cooperation as never before in human history.

Tocqueville’s own thesis for American success notes that many of our mediating institutions are highly trust dependent. These institutions were voluntary associations which is why they were epiphenomenal with a culture of freedom. It is difficult to imagine that such voluntary associations would last long if everyone in them was highly suspicious of everyone else.

Gallup has found declining levels of trust in most institutions and professions.

He continues:

Here from Statista is a snapshot of the decline in CTA ridership:

It’s clear what impelled the decline—COVID-19. That, too, is a form of decline in trust. People don’t trust that the person sitting next to them won’t give them a potentially fatal disease.

Will feral young men murdering people on trains increase trust in the trains, decrease trust in the trains, or have no effect?