First prolegomena to future texts: Also, the case against the now part one: What is society for?
I am not a very nice person and I have done very few nice things in my life. However, I have done two things that were, if not nice, then at least not completely bastardly, and I would like to trot them out for the admiration of the world, and also to make a point.

So I used to have the Microsoft IM handle of warmmilk; and someone messaged me begging for it. He said that he was already warmmilk in several other venues, and desperately wanted to be warmmilk here as well. I didn't really care, so I switched the password to something generic and gave it to him. When I told people why I had switched my IM name, they all informed me I was an idiot. This person, the new warmmilk, could now impersonate me and, in some unspecified way, make my life a living hell. Only a retard, I was assured, would hand over a handle like that.

On another, unrelated occasion, I was driving a friend's moving van, and, as I cannot drive well, drove it into a parked car. I left a note on the windshield. As I wrote the note, my friends gathered around and ridiculed me. I could just drive away! I told my girlfriend at the time about the incident later, and she agreed that I was an idiot for leaving a note, as now the person I hit could make up a whole lot of damages and sue me for them. Everyone agreed that in this situation the smart thing to do would be to just drive away.


A model of morality that is ludicrous in its banality but not necessarily invalid

Now, I think it's pretty clear that, whatever the "right" thing to do when you hit a car may be, it is not to drive away anonymously. It is (as we all know) often hard to do the right thing. It's hard because you have something at stake, so you are inevitably tempted to do not what you know is right but what you know is expedient. You might even talk yourself into believing that the expedient thing is the right thing ("I deserve to keep this wallet I found"). But the people around you, your proverbial friends and neighbors, have no such vested interest and are capable therefore of presenting a theoretically unbiased distinction between what is right and what is expedient. Everyone knows these things.

In a conventional model of morality, societal pressure is to do what is right. That is to say, if I found a wallet, and needed the money in it, I might turn to a friend for advice, and the friend, not tempted by the money, would say, "Give the wallet back, fool." It is, after all, very easy to give advice when you can't be affected by the outcome.


What is society for?

I would go so far as to say that the purpose of society (and here society stands in opposition to government but perhaps embraces the concept of culture; we need not worry overmuch about definitions at this stage)--the purpose of society is to help us do things that would otherwise be difficult. It is, for example, difficult to toil all summer to put food aside for the winter, but we have pressure--the parable of the ant and the grasshopper to which we are exposed as children; sewing or harvest festivals; people coming up to us and saying, "What's wrong with you, fool, you're going to starve this winter if you don't shape up"—that makes it easier.

If everyone tells you, "Return the wallet," it is easier to return the wallet. If everyone tells you, "Return the wallet or you'll go to hell," or, alternately, "Return the wallet of we will shunnnn you, for you are a thief," it becomes even easier. Societal pressure is to do what is right but difficult.

But this is not at all what societal pressure points towards any more. My friends, doubtless with my best interests at heart, advised me (in the above examples) not to do what is right but rather to do what is smart. Societal pressure becomes to do what is easy and wrong.

These anecdotes are hardly data, as they say, but I think we will all agree that if we turn to our friends for advice we do not expect a "hard answer." We expect to be made to feel better for our crimes. Sartre has pointed out that when we turn to another for advice we select whom we turn to in order to get the advice we want. So if you know someone who would say return the wallet, don't ask him. We've got to look out for ourselves.

Two things happened between the former model of society (which is of course, an ideal perhaps never widely attained) and our current one. We lost faith in society and we lost faith in morality.


On Becoming a Woman

I used to collect old teen advice manuals, so I know that something strange happens to them between the late 'fifties and late 'sixties. In the late 'fifties, they say (and I wish I had them in front of me to quote verbatim, but this will be fairly accurate) that when unsure of what to do simply seek out the most popular people in school and do what they do. Try to fit in. Avoid loners and outcasts. Juvenile delinquency had been perceived as a major problem since the mid 'forties, but these teen manuals saw peer pressure as a means to combat it. Peer pressure will prevent you from becoming a delinquent.

This advice changes sometime in the 'sixties, so, of course, by the time I (and presumably you) was forced to sit through a string of tedious and pointless "life ed." classes, peer pressure had become a force of evil. Do not, the textbook thundered, under any circumstances, do what everyone else is doing. Do, rather, your own thing, or (the textbooks become confused at this point) your own thing that happens to correspond to what we and not they say you should do. This is nonsense advice, which is impossible to follow, which is why we all turn to our peers and become drug-addicted prostitutes.

And Lord knows I don't trust society. When I read those 'fifties manuals my sympathy is all with the loners and the outcasts. Everyone's is; if yours is not you are so far removed from the mores of contemporary America as to be, paradoxically, an outcast yourself. Grease, Crybaby, Dead Poets Society, and Pleasantville are all texts that present the conformity of the 'fifties as something to be overcome. And all I can say to them is amen, since I hate society as much as, or probably a hundred times more than, anyone. And yet, now I find myself in a culture that has no confidence in itself as a culture, that cannot hold the majority of its citizenry up as exempla or even successes. If peer pressure is negative, then most people who pass through the culture are failures. Whatever you may think of the society of the past at least it was not usually a failure.


The deontological argument

The fact that most people are amoral I'm just going to assume as a given, or leave to another time.


Conclusion

Like most things, societal pressure is both a symptom and a cause or our woes. Etc.

This is not a very satisfying ending, but then this whole essay is merely a prolegomena to future texts.