Who killed the social contract?

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In June 2020 I was in a New York grocery store. Everyone was masked, as was the custom at the time, and I proceeded about my business. In the produce section one man had his mask pulled below his chin. In my neighborhood that was abnormal then, at the grocers, so I politely asked him to pull it up. He flipped out, cursing at me and following me around the store. It went beyond being angry at me, it was as if the last little straw holding the man together had been undone. I thought, momentarily, that he was out of his mind. The second he saw a worker, however, he got it together and pretended everything was fine. Then after checking out he followed me down the street and yelled at me for two blocks.

It was right around that time I started hearing stories of more people smoking on public transportation, more people harassing service workers and neighbors, and more people casting aside niceties and human respect for one another. My guess is we’ve all heard about this stuff, if we haven’t experienced it ourselves. We’ve heard about the fights on airplanes, the viral videos, the most outrageous or atrocious stories. And in smaller ways we’ve probably seen some of this breakdown in the social fabric. But something always rubbed me the wrong way, not just in how this endless string of incidents are covered, but in how they’ve been discussed.

I don’t expect news stories to approach most of their coverage by going back to the roots of how a phenomenon developed. They should, but that’s a story for another day. I do, however, expect a lot of the people I respect to talk about a complex topic like rising incidents of the most rudimentary social contract being breached with some desire to get down to the roots, the real causes. Instead I kept seeing the tearing, the destruction of the social contract itself named as the core issue. I kept seeing a problem without causes.

So today I want to talk about why. I have no illusion that we’ll get to every reason the social contract has disintegrated in a short essay, but I’m going to try to get to some fundamental reasons, especially ones I rarely, if ever, see mentioned. I refuse to accept the idea that people just aren’t as nice as they used to be, or that there’s just an inexplicable rise in anti-social behavior. When we look at any issue in society and stop there, we’re missing a rot in the wood, a flaw in the structure that needs to be addressed, and which we can only confront if we’re aware of its existence.

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Not to strip it all the way down to the bone here, but the question I want to look at today is, who has broken what? The ‘what’ appears simple at first, it’s the social contract of course. But what is, or what was the social contract? 

The original definition used by enlightenment thinkers went something along the lines of “an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for their mutual benefit.” And although that background is useful, I also want to bring in what people have meant as they use the phrase in recent years. Most often, today, people basically mean treating each other with common decency, especially strangers in public places. Not cursing out people on planes and trains, not threatening service workers, maybe even holding the door or saying bless you when a stranger sneezes. This bar is low, but its the one that isn’t even being met for too many people on too many occasions.

The low bar here is very much related to the higher bar that philosophers and thinkers talked about all those years ago. These little interactions we have with one another are dictated largely by a broader social contract that binds us together, or doesn't. In this country that contract was always partially a fiction, and people are in part mourning the death of that fiction. There was a patriotic American idea that we're all in the same boat here, all pulling together, all bound together by the social contract of this country’s great promise. And that was never really the case.

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From the beginning there has been one contract for the rich and powerful and another for everyone else. In many ways the social contract, the implicit agreement around decorum, order, niceties, has served to placate the masses on behalf of the ruling class. The general feeling in the air these days is partially a response to that truth of the social contract being nakedly revealed for what it is. In an era of minimal class mobility, or living being overpriced, of massive, overwhelming wealth being flaunted in our faces while survival gets harder and harder, the contract is unraveling.

There is still a lingering belief in America that says “work hard and you can have it all” or “you can be anything you want in America” even as reality says otherwise. People work their asses off and get evicted. Wages haven’t kept pace with productivity since Reagan. Public housing and public health are increasingly a thing of the past. The cost of higher education multiplies every few years, it seems. We see more wealth, more and more lavish lifestyles on TV and social media, and a lot of people's eyes never stopped getting bigger even as our pockets were drained by the cost of simply living an ordinary life. Reality itself grew further and further from what people had come to think they were owed in this life.

The social contract has always been implicit, a degree of understanding and unity that comes together from an unspoken agreement among the people. It was never exactly rigorously studied, just theorized. So when people speak about it today, they’re speaking more to these vague feelings. A sense that people aren’t acting like they used to, and more than anything that the underlying sense of order is crumbling.

And I do believe it’s crumbling. I do believe that a lot of people walk around with main character syndrome, thinking they're the center of the universe and caring less and less for the people around them. I do believe that we’re less invested in one another's lives in many ways. Homeless is going up and mental health and drug use go unaddressed. Systemic neglect, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment” runs rampant. But somehow individual decisions are blamed for all this, the little people are called degenerates and uncaring and then criminalized. Customers are blamed for being rude, service workers are blamed for corporate failures, and the big wigs are let off the hook.

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The mainstream discourse neatly avoids capitalism and capitalists, as it most often does. The people and institutions and systems that have wrecked communities, stressed us out, and made life less livable seem to avoid the blame. The companies and billionaires who have built a work culture full of pressure with a society devoid of care and caused people to snap avoid responsibility. The reasons people aren’t as kind to one another isn’t just because we woke up and decided to be rude or inconsiderate, it’s because we’ve been locked into a world where we’re told that only looking out for number one is a virtue. We’ve been told being cutthroat and saving thirty seconds getting off an airplane and being ruthlessly competitive are the way we’re supposed to live. Then a pandemic hit. Oh and the fascist movement is lurking at the door.

It’s no wonder people lack faith in the collective, in the silent social graces, in kindness to strangers. We lack faith in one another because a society has been slowly and steadily created around us where we’re pitted against one another and told that we can’t trust one another. And that narrative has been paired with a material reality where people make money screwing us over every which way. Faith in each other, caring for each other, and trusting each other means swimming upstream in these times.

We see these countless little incidents of people violating the social contract, but capitalists are ripping the entire social fabric, from our neighborhoods to our careers to the future we felt was guaranteed. Our parents tried to preach a set of values to us, but when we go out into the world we see them broken and cast aside in a million different ways by the powerful and their systems, and by the culture they’ve created. Communities have been broken, principles rendered naive or outdated, old ways of life cast aside, destroyed, or passed by. And what have we established in their place?

In the absence of the bonds of community, in the absence of a strong social contract, we need stories and values to tie us together. And while for generations these principles and communal ways of living were simply passed down, carried on, we can’t count on that anymore. We need to build that which our ancestors took for granted. We need to do it differently, we need to innovate and create and deliberately pull old threads from the past into the present and the future. None of it’s easy, but all of it is the only antidote to a society where the social contract is, in many ways, being shredded and turned to dust. The solution is not to criminalize petty offenders endlessly, we’ve already seen that fail. Instead the answer is to build up something new, a new contract and new fabric tying us together across difference, and to render those who have torn society apart for profit powerless because their systems have been overthrown, supplanted, and replaced.