On 03-Jul-11 3:35 AM, Indrajit Gupta wrote: > Was there a primaeval political act at the bottom of it all? It is tempting > to speculate that our behaviour represents the rejection of alien systems > imposed on us by an alien minority and perpetuated by deracinated individuals > who represent that alien minority. We have been taught in our political life, > and to an extent in our social life, that rejection of these alien systems > represents a positive impulse, a divinely sanctioned freedom to reject > systems and authority which impedes our personal understanding of what is > good for us. Our individual measure of social good is what counts, and our > collective responsibility is to follow that individual understanding.
I think this is quite easily explained by 1) Population pressure (and attendant perception, at a societal level, of scarcity of various resources - a perception that has a great deal of hysteresis built into it) 2) A collective understanding that "what I say" and "what I do" are essentially disjoint sets. 2a) A corollary to the above is the lack of incentive to enforce various _stated_ norms around appropriate behaviour such as crowding instead of queueing. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
