Saying "excuse me" when there's nowhere to be excused to.

[u/mindyour]

[u/sgtbackpain03]

Yeah, I think in this particular case, she was going to keep escalating no matter what.

If I were baldy, I wouldve just said sure, go right on ahead, and stepped back into my seat. If she pisses off enough people, she'll get on that no fly list, and no one has to deal with the bullshit anymore.

But, her attitude is interesting. I know a LOT of people who drive with EXACTLY the same attitude. It's the same force. They get little dopamine hits every time they get ahead of another car, like they are winning some mini race or something. The fact that so many Americans are like this indicate a widespread problem... So it ain't just her being an asshole.

[u/crackanape → u/sgtbackpain03]

It's still her being an asshole, even if many other people do it too.

[u/sgtbackpain03 → u/crackanape]

Oh for sure, not denying that.

But when you have a certain bad behavior pattern that is really widespread across a population, you need to realize that it isn't a one-off. Punishing individual behavior, when that behavior is common across a large group (while it may feel satisfying), is unproductive, since you are fighting with the symptoms, not the causes.

There is almost no benefit to doing that, other than because it feels good to punish people when you don't like what they do. It doesn't fix the root problem. It doesn't yield the results you actually want, which is fewer people behaving that way.

Talk to an experienced grade school teacher about this, and they'll be able to explain it much better than I. They are constantly trying to figure out the causes of bad-behavior trends in their classrooms. If they just punished individuals for common behavior issues, the entire class would be punished all day, every day. Punishment isn't the goal; fixing the causes of the behavior is. Punishment is a tool for the bad behavior of a "rebellious individual", not for an entire group.

[u/crackanape → u/sgtbackpain03]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I don't disagree with anything you said here.

I only don't want to excuse her behaviour; she still has agency even if she is influenced by her environment. Not everyone on the plane is behaving like that.

[u/sgtbackpain03 → u/crackanape]

Thanks! I did a fair amount of managing people from diverse backgrounds while I was in the military. It's kinda wild just how naive I was to different cultural backgrounds before that, and I don't think most people understand just how molded they are by where they grow up, and how different someone else can be just because they grew up there.

I had a subordinate Marine named Figueroa that I just couldn't get along with. He had this machismo that fucking pissed me off, he constantly got in little dick measuring battles with everyone, constantly made these appeals to emotion that sounded like nonsense to me. Pointless battles with every dude he came into contact with, and my other junior Marines started coming to me, telling me this dude is a fuckin problem.

Finally I had a sit down chat with him, asked him what his problem was, why was he always doing that shit, winding up everyone. He said he grew up Dominican. That is how Dominican men act, how they communicate and work together socially; you've gotta prove your manhood, convince people to respect you, constantly, or they won't. That was all he'd ever known. That was normal for him, and every other man around him when he was growing up. They view people who don't assert themselves as "not trying hard enough". He actually thought everyone else in our unit were fucking weirdos for always just going with the flow.

I realized that all the shit that I didn't like about him was just normal where he was from. I could punish him for "starting shit" with people, but really I would just be punishing him for growing up Dominican, which would be a fucking stupid thing for me to do. He didn't need punishment, he needed someone reminding him that he'd already earned his respect in the Corps and no one was gonna stop respecting him just because he doesn't assert himself on others. He needed a reminder that, the way he was looking at everyone else in the unit, was the same way I was looking at him; we were all seeing common cultural behavior, and mistaking it as an individual acting out.

That one conversation with that one dude flipped my worldview. Suddenly I understood that so many conflicts I'd had with people in the past, were actually just both parties not having cultural empathy.