A cloud of related ideas here:
First, what is considered normal comes from subcultures. People get their ideas of what is normal from the people they interact with regularly. Different subcultures can exist in close physical proximity – for example, different social classes traditionally had very different views of what was normal behaviour.
Speculation: are people today more ignorant or dismissive of other subcultures? I observed previously, for example, that the rich used to have more personal contact with the poor – they had servants, tenants, etc. that they knew as actual people, though not the same sort of person. Today technology makes it easier for the rich to avoid dealing with people from other classes, and an ideology of equality makes it embarassing to do so, since you are supposed to believe that they are of the same culture as you, even though they blatantly aren’t.
Social class is just one example, as another, there are obvious differences in the way of life between urban, suburban and rural environments. Young people in cities can meet each other in the evenings easily – young people in suburbia are more isolated from each other.
Really important point: people’s behaviour is much more constrained by what they consider normal, from their subculture, than by what they believe to be true intellectually.
Next consequence of this: crime and order. If, by effective enforcement, you make law-abiding behaviour normal among most subcultures, you will not have much crime. This is really the only way to not have much crime.
A society where it is not normal to commit crimes can do all sorts of things that are otherwise impossible. This goes back to a post I made way back in 2005. The biggest cost of crime is the forgone opportunity – all the things we could do, but don’t because we would run too much risk of crime. As I mentioned on twitter this week, the concept of a supermarket — goods displayed in the open for customers to pick for themselves and bring to a checkout — depends on an assumption that people just walking out with the stuff will be rare enough that you can handle it. (That assumption is apparently starting to fail in some areas now, such as parts of San Francisco). In Britain in the 19th and 20th Century, rarity of crime was one of the basic presumptions that people didn’t have to think about.
Aside: Not only that, but, in accordance with my original point, what crime there was was largely in certain subcultures — the immigrant “rookeries” of London’s East End, for example. Away from those subcultures, it was rarer than average statistics suggest. Even today, much of the civilised world still lives in an environment of very low crime. (That’s a point Steve Sailer makes from time to time).
This basic presumption obviously gets taken for granted. That’s the root of my divergence from libertarianism — given the presumption of an ordered society, it is fine. However, that ordered society needs to be actively preserved.
When I made the point about supermarkets on Twitter, obviously there was a lot of feedback to the effect that, as in the Dickensian rookeries, it is in minority subcultures that the law-abiding norms are not present. Even accepting that, though, it is possible for effective law enforcement to change what is normal in those subcultures. Obviously the story in San Fransisco is that the abdication of law enforcement is the immediate trigger. (I say “story” deliberately — I’m always cautious about pretending to understand what is going on so far away, and the reality may be a lot more complex than what I can see. However, I will stand by the logic of what I am saying here while being open to more information on the detail).