Are "Karens" A Benefit Or A Nuisance To Society?

The key to an orderly society is a culture where there are consequences for everything.

The stereotypical “Karen”.

An incident in Fort Collins, Colorado, reignited the “Karen” debate on social media:

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Not so long ago, all Americans were seemingly in agreement over our mutual disdain for the “Karen,” a slang term referring to a middle-class White woman who makes overbearing, unreasonable demands of others, specifically in a customer service context (hence, the “speak to the manager” part). It’s an archetype we’re all familiar with, a big reason why the term resonated.

It’s also a term that’s slowly falling out of disuse. I think a big part of the reason is because it’s a highly racialized term. We all know White women aren’t the only people who make overbearing, unreasonable demands of others. It’s hard to see, because popular culture remains so contemptuous of Whites, but I’m sensing that anti-White rhetoric isn’t in the same level of demand it was just a few years ago. I also think the term has been misused, as it’s come to describe anyone who notices very obvious imperfections in our society or demands even the bare minimum level of quality in a product or service.

I think we can all agree: there’s a big difference between being a difficult customer versus expecting to get what you paid for. There’s a big difference between obsessing over every little imperfection and noticing there’s a glaring problem. Maybe the reason why our culture has broadened the scope of “Karen” is that we need a pejorative for those who refuse to be silent sheep, who refuse go along to get along. I think every society deals with the issue of those who aren’t afraid to speak up when they see that something is wrong.

I also believe the strength of a society can be measured in part by our willingness to speak up when something isn’t right. If the majority of society is afraid to speak out because it might make them look bad, hurt their status, or turn their peers against them, that’s not a healthy society. At least, it’s not a free and open society. For all the lip-service our culture pays democracy, we seem to have a serious problem with our fellow citizens merely speaking up when something is wrong. It turns out Americans value conformity as much as anyone else. Unless they fit into the correct racial and sexual categories, of course. Then they can complain all day long and we all have to sit there and listen to it, even when their rhetoric becomes threatening and violent.

Scott Greer

came to the defense of the Fort Collins Karen:

Yhere’s [sic] a LOT going on in this situation. The most important takeaway is that the Karen is in the right. The trail does not allow service dogs, and for good reason. They cause problems for the wildlife. The older woman stood up for standards against rude morons who feel everyone else should accommodate their individual whims. Sadly, the morons are winning and standards are in retreat.

According to the City of Fort Collins:

• Are there natural areas where dogs are not allowed?
  Yes, because of resource sensitivity, dogs are not allowed, including in vehicles, at Coyote Ridge, Running Deer, Bobcat Ridge, Cottonwood Hollow, Fossil Creek Reservoir or Soapstone Prairie natural areas. Use the natural areas finder to check which sites allow dogs.

Emotional support animals, however, are a different story:

In alignment with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), service animals that have been trained to assist a person with a disability are always allowed. Animals designated as emotional support, therapy, comfort, or companion animals are not service animals under the ADA.

It hasn’t been established if the dog in question is an actual service animal or an emotional support animal. If it’s the latter, it doesn’t fall under the ADA and the Karen is correct. It’s just a question of whether it’s socially permissible for her to point that out.

Leading to the next point by Greer:

There’s the overwhelming abundance of service dogs in American life, often used by people who don’t need one but exploit an idiotic “medical” excuse to force their fellow citizens to deal with their dogs no matter where they go. I love dogs (except for pit bulls). However, they shouldn’t be everywhere. Blind people need service dogs. A few others with particular medical conditions may need them. But many people get them to cope with “anxiety” or some other phony reason. While seeing-eye dogs are well-trained, a lot of these other “service” dogs are not. But that’s not a problem for the owner. It’s something everyone else around them has to deal with. If the dog takes a poop in the store or jumps up on someone who’s afraid of dogs, we’re all supposed to accept these things without complaint. If you complain about a dog peeing on your shoe or chasing protected wildlife, you are a KAREN outrageously bothering a person with a “serious” (fake) medical condition.

Earlier this year, I came across a story about an apartment complex where pets aren’t allowed. Residents find a work-around, however, by having their pets certified as emotional support animals, so the pet prohibition is essentially meaningless. It’s an absurd policy, but we won’t get into that. In the story, a dog had repeatedly urinated in front of a neighbor’s door, with the urine seeping into the residence. I don’t know what the ultimate outcome was, but it’s a tremendous violation of someone else’s personal space, to say nothing of the lease agreement, for that to occur. It should never happen, but it does so in an environment where owning a pet has effectively become a civil right.

Greer continues:

The odd thing is that all these people with fake conditions force Americans to be more accommodating to dogs while we as a society become less kid-friendly. The entitled weaklings with an emotional support animal matter more than children in our country.

There’s a much bigger, broader story here, which we won’t get into. For the purposes of this discussion, it suffices to say our society has gone off the rails with respect to accommodating pets and their owners. Like Greer, I love dogs, but he’s correct in saying they don’t need to be everywhere. We all seem to agree that kids shouldn’t be everywhere, and Greer is also right in saying we’ve become less tolerant of kids and more tolerant of pets. Our society’s inability to compartmentalize is both a cause and effect of our social ills. Expecting anyone to exercise some restraint out of consideration for others is now in contradiction with our values.

More:

A proper society keeps dogs in appropriate places. But our society is not one. It prioritizes individual wants over community standards. It’s why people can put up gory decorations for Halloween that terrify kids and no one can do anything about it. People feel free to smoke weed in parks and no one stops them. And assholes can take their “service” dogs everywhere, regardless of rules, and you will be shamed if you say something to them. 

The only people who will stand up for basic norms are Karens. Karen became a popular slur to attack middle-aged white women who won’t mind their business. Its meaning was specifically anti-white, as I wrote in an article four years ago.

Again, it’s a racialized term and we wouldn’t tolerate a similar term used to describe Black or Hispanic women, to say nothing of the fact it’s lost its original meaning. Our society has transformed to the point we’re more turned up over White women standing up for norms and their rights as consumers than the fact that everything has become so disorderly and unpredictable.

If you haven’t noticed, Greer doesn’t think Karens are the problem. Not by a long shot [bold mine]:

For all their faults, Karens at least give a shit. Many of them mean well. They would like to live in a safe place where people follow reasonable rules, miscreants don’t force everyone to accommodate their oddities, good service is expected, and people take care of where they live. But you’re no longer supposed to do that. Karens violate two basic principles in modern American life: “mind your own business” and “let people enjoy things.” So it’s easy to whip up popular ill-will towards them. Even conservatives will join in. 

You cannot build a culture, a society, around “mind your own business” and “let people enjoy things.” Societies are defined less by what they permit and more by what they don’t. They’re defined by the responsibilities people have for one another. For example, the reason why our country has such deep admiration for first responders and military servicemembers isn’t because of what they do, but for the obligations they willingly assume on our behalf. A mercenary doesn’t garner the same level of respect as a soldier, for example, because the mercenary has no duty to society. Being a tree-trimmer is statistically the most dangerous job in America, but we don’t memorialize them the way we do our soldiers. Call it unfair if you’d like, but it underscores how meaningful the concept of duty is.

One reason why so many Americans harbor deep dissatisfaction for American life, despite our high standard of living, is because that sense of social responsibility is absent. But as long as Americans value maximal individualism and liberty, we’ll never become a more socially responsible society. You can’t “have both.” Life is a series of trade-offs and we tend to walk down one road more than another. We need to privilege collective rights over individual ones if we want to enjoy the benefits of social responsibility. There can’t be a unique set of rules for every unique circumstance. Not everything can be considered a civil right, either. In fact, the entire civil rights regime may be a big part of the problem, since social responsibility implies that limits need to be placed on individual behavior, limits that are impermissible under civil rights law.

I’m expending an essay on this topic because I think there’s a much bigger issue the incident highlights, which concerns social order. Nobody, Americans especially, likes their fellow citizens telling them what they can and can’t do. After all, nobody’s better than us, right? Who’s anyone else to tell someone what they can’t or can’t do?

This is the wrong way of looking at it. The better way is to ask: Are we as citizens allowed to uphold the norms and rules that govern society? If we cannot do it, then who can?

We’ve become a society where even everyday social interactions carry tremendous potential for conflict and violence. Most social interactions take place without issue, obviously. But when it goes south, it does so very quickly. A big reason why is because America is culturally weak, lacking the strong ties serving as guardrails constraining our behavior. It often takes third-party intervention to resolve or at least squash a conflict. That third party is often the police.

Think about it: how often do you find people saying, “I’m calling the cops!” when two parties end up in an argument? This is something uncommon outside the U.S. In other countries, calling the police on your neighbors or even strangers is something that doesn’t happen. Even when you call the police, they often don’t do much of anything, because managing social relations isn’t in their swim lane. Only in America are the police expected to routinely intervene in interpersonal encounters gone wrong. In fact, throughout most of the world, the rules are enforced not by people in uniform, but by women we’d describe as Karens were they White American women.

As I’ll elaborate later, not following the rules isn’t an alternative. Neither is there not being any rules. Either we can enforce them as a society, or we can have the state do so on our behalf:

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I don’t get the sense Americans want a police state, either. Something has to give, however. Unfortunately, it’ll probably take a total breakdown of law and order before Americans understand why individual rights should never supercede collective rights.

But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s talk preparedness. What do you do if you’re confronted by a real-life Karen? She may be right, but nobody likes being called out like that in public. It wounds our pride and besides, who is she to enforce the rules, anyway? You’ve got to be ready to handle a Karen. How to go about it?

First, as always, de-escalate. I said a few essays ago that once your fight-or-flight response gets going, remaining calm is a challenge. When both parties have their fight-or-flight responses going, it’s very difficult for a cooler head to prevail, often requiring outside intervention in order to prevent a volcanic confrontation. It’s not easy, but matching the other party’s level of intensity outright is a bad idea. Remember: it’s not a competition. Safety is your objective, not winning the argument.

If someone confronts you the way the “Karen” in the Fort Collins incident did, ask them to clarify what their grievance is. If it turns out you were in error, acknowledge you made a mistake, correct it if you can, and if you cannot, remove yourself from the situation. Don’t apologize if you really don’t want to, but at least acknowledging your error does have a calming influence, serving as a sign you intend to de-escalate the situation. Social trust requires us all to take the hit every once in a while; admitting your mistakes is the easiest way of doing so.

If you’re not in error, gently correct them, but never get righteously indignant. This is an escalatory act. A fact of life is that you need to give your opponent a face-saving way out of a confrontation. If you don’t, they’re incentivized to remain engaged because the more they become emotionally invested in the argument, the more they feel they have to “win.” Look at it from their perspective: if you were the “Karen” and you turned out to be wrong, would you want the other side to rub it in your face? Sure, it might be what you deserve, but again, we’re not here to “win” anything. If you were right all along, simply correct them and allow them to walk away.

I can’t stress enough how important disengagement is. You can never get in trouble for walking away. Remember: the greatest alibi a person can have is to be able to say, truthfully, “I wasn’t there.” Don’t waste your breath trying to win an argument with a Karen. By the end of it, you’ll be exhausted and there won’t exactly be a prize awaiting you when it’s over.

If anything, just be grateful there are still people out there willing to speak up when something isn’t right. We’re not much of a society without such people.

The Left’s Buyer’s Remorse

I’m not a fan of Matthew Yglesias. He’s part of the intellectual wing of the Left and more often than not acts as a Regime mouthpiece. That said, a broken clock is correct once a year.

Yglesias, on his own Substack, discusses how the Left’s good intentions (*chuckle*) are leading to ruin:

The starting point of that process is totally sensible: Democrats are the party of people with humane instincts, and there was a lot of interest in trying to find ways to make the American criminal justice system less cruel. That’s a reasonable and important problem to work on, and it’s something I’ve written about over the years (most recently in May). But it turns out, like many policy problems, somewhat difficult. And in too many cases, the fallback option has become just not enforcing the rules.

This is not politically viable. But it’s also worth saying that while humane impulses are good, letting public spaces go off the rails is a kind of false humanitarianism. Most low-income people are not criminals, and it’s precisely the poorest and most vulnerable people who most need things like public spaces and public transit and affordable housing and libraries, and they need these things to be actually good.

He correctly identifies the problem: not crime rates, but rampant disorder. There may be fewer criminals today than there were 30 years ago, but the relatively few criminals today are running roughshod like never before. As I recently noted, it’s amazing how losing an election can snap some people back to reality. It’s unfortunate that daily, on-the-ground reality isn’t good enough for these people, but never let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Yglesias continues:

I also do not want to see large numbers of police officers arresting people for smoking on the subway. But, like [Chris] Hayes, I support the rule that prohibits smoking on the subway. And having a rule means that sometimes, someone needs to enforce it.

If we think about why nobody is lighting up in the restaurants these days, it’s clearly not the case that cops are posted up in every restaurant, making smoking arrests. If you lit a cigarette in a restaurant, the other patrons would say something. You’d be asked to leave by the staff. It’s possible that you would refuse, in which case the police would be called, and they’d probably be annoyed by needing to spend their time dragging a smoker out of a restaurant. But they would do it. It’s also, of course, possible that someone would react to being asked to leave by lashing out in a violent manner. One can only hope that if that happened, patrons and staffers would work together to restrain this person and minimize anyone’s odds of being hurt. And if someone responded to being asked to leave the restaurant by committing a violent assault, they would definitely be arrested.

Note that, in practice, the rules prohibiting smoking in restaurants do not generate large numbers of arrests. Anti-smoking laws are not a major driver of mass incarceration. What happens is that people mostly follow the rules!

What Yglesias is getting at is similar to what I said earlier: either the Karens can enforce the rules, or the police can. I’d expand that to say the Daniel Pennys of the world can step in between us and the bad guys, or we can wait for the police to get there in time. Either way, not enforcing the rules isn’t an option. Otherwise, what’s the point? We’d be instead masquerading as an orderly society, which is exactly what America is doing these days.

Approaching crime and disorder from the Left has its limits, however [bold mine]:

But I really do think everything needs to follow from a basic statement of values. It’s not progressive to allow public spaces to become chaotic and unusable, and it’s profoundly not progressive to rely on exclusionary zoning as the main tool of public safety. Democrats shouldn’t accept racial profiling or “statistical discrimination” as a law enforcement tool or make apologies for clear cases of police misconduct. And they should also acknowledge that policing is a difficult, important job and that doing it properly requires officers to be proactive and to take risks with their personal safety. There are a lot of issues and difficulties downstream of urban police officers being so uniformly right-wing, but part of the solution to that is to urge more young liberals to consider law enforcement careers.

Racial profiling isn’t useful since criminals come in all shapes and sizes. That said, it’s an indisputable fact that crime rates are higher among some races. We also readily accept that criminals are disproportionately young men. Nobody wants to admit it, but a certain level of institutionalized discrimination occurs, as men are eyed suspiciously to a much greater degree than women as potential criminals.

That said, every case is specific to its particular circumstances. However, ignoring certain statistical realities of crime while institutionalizing others, if only informally so, doesn’t contribute to a safer society. Crime is the one area where reality-denial is entirely unaffordable. If we’re going to accept that men have a higher propensity for crime, there’s no argument against refusing to acknowledge that certain races have a higher propensity for crime, especially when the data says so. Debating the “why?” should never take precedence over keeping the citizenry safe.

As for more liberals becoming cops, forget it. There’s a reason why the law enforcement community skews right. There’s a reason why it attracts right-leaning people to begin with, and why liberal-minded police officers often end up becoming reactionaries on the job.

The reason? Exposure to violence. That and being tasked with the duty of restoring order. You can change everything about policing, but you cannot change the part about it being in the business of violence and maintaining order. Liberalism involves a tremendous amount of reality-denial, among the most harmful being that even criminals are otherwise good-faith individuals who made a few bad choices, and can be sweet-talked into laying down their arms. When exposed to the bluntness of violence, it’s impossible to continue holding onto the fantasies at the heart of liberalism, which includes the idea there’s a way to let everyone win.

I agree with Yglesias: policing is a difficult, important job and that doing it properly requires officers to be proactive and to take risks with their personal safety. However, not only are more liberals not going to become cops nor remain employed as cops, the reality of policing is such that a liberal mindset is incompatible with the job.

We also need to much more sharply distinguish between the idea of asking whether certain punishments are unnecessarily harsh, and trying to reduce mass incarceration by making it harder to solve crimes. Tools like surveillance cameras, DNA evidence, and facial recognition software that make it less likely people will get away with crimes reduce the amount of crime that happens, which ultimately is the sustainable route to less incarceration.

I reject using the term “mass incarceration,” because it’s premised on the idea we’re just throwing people into prison mindlessly. Unless we’re talking about locking the whole of society up, you lock up whomever you need to in the interest of keeping order. That said, some crimes are obviously worse than others and having lots of people in prison suggests serious social problems. However, I also believe there need not exist a binary choice between incarceration and not punishing them at all. Legal systems all have a range of punishments and America used to have many more.

Perhaps it’s time to re-consider corporal punishment as a practice? Or hard labor? Punishments need to inflict discomfort or pain, otherwise, it’s not much of a punishment at all. I’ve always believed there’s more of an argument for striking an adult versus striking a child, because an adult is supposed to know better. If as an adult, you’re still figuring out how to properly conduct yourself out in the world, I’m not sure a lecture is going to do the trick. Some people need a hard hand.

I’m all for coming up with a range of punishments, reserving jail time for those who can’t or won’t be corrected. But simply cutting people a pass isn’t an option. The key to an orderly society is a culture where there are consequences for everything.

Read the entire essay - it’s worth your time and I have no problem providing exposure to those on the other side when they get it right. If nothing else, Yglesias at least identified what the real problem is in our society and does a better job of it than his counter-parts on the Right who yell, “CRIME IS SKYROCKETING!” into the ether. Hyperbole isn’t as effective as many think it to be.

Rule By Karen? Or Rule By State?

Though China isn’t a country I’d want America to emulate, there’s no question that the only way to maintain social order in a country of 1 billion is through a self-policing culture.

Look at how Chinese crowds manage themselves in public transportation:

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It’s a lot deeper than that. China has a stronger culture, a stronger sense of collective identity. Whatever conflicts exist on an interpersonal level, at the societal level, everyone understands they’re part of a greater whole, and that greater whole needs to conduct itself in an orderly fashion. This isn’t about obedience, not specifically. It’s about understanding that not everything’s a competition, and the most fair and just way of managing social relations is to just keep things orderly. We should all look forward to the day Americans don’t feel like they need to fight one another over every little thing, especially in a land with plenty to go around.

What say you? Any thoughts on the Fort Collins Karen? Was she right or wrong? What do you think about Karens in general? Should individuals be empowered to enforce the rules? Or shall we surrender those duties entirely to the state?

Talk about it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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