In probability theory, the law of large numbers states that the average of the results obtained from a large number of independent random samples converges to the true value, if it exists.
In etiquette, however, the law of large numbers seems to be that the optimal decorous behaviour converges to indecorum. That what is proper, rational, even ethical in an ordinary interaction, becomes sub-optimal in the unending assembly line of interactions, and what is indecorous now becomes optimal.
Take courtesy, politeness. Ordinarily, it’s a best strategy to be polite. The other party, assuming they’re not an asshole, tends to reciprocate, or at least not unnecessarily aggravate. Dealing with a client, a customer, a colleague typically means that one person wants something from another, and the other might or might not be able to fulfil that expectation. Politeness usually guarantees that both parties go their way with no more rancour than that inevitable from unfulfilled expectations, if any. Often, courtesy softens even that, if the one party is able to appreciate it and understand the other’s limitations.
On the assembly line, however, the optimization functions become different. By the assembly line I mean a situation where one person deals with many individuals, one at a time, independent of each other. It’s a one to many function, one against many now.
The most common example of this is the customer service agent or call centre representative, setting up hundreds of independent individual interactions every day, typically with irate customers. However, because of the dynamics of the situation – the customer is usually annoyed with some problem or he’d not be calling, and the agent is usually considered ‘subordinate’ to the customer – it’s not a true interaction of equals, since the agent is constrained to be, or at least to try to be, nice. ‘Constrained’ also because you wouldn’t expect a human to really be so upbeat after going through one damn problem after another – problems which aren’t even their fault, even if they are blamed for them – day after day.
The other example is a reversal of this dynamic, the example of a celebrity or a public official or a professional, like a doctor, essentially a relatively powerful figure, besieged by many who seek to interact with them. It’s easy to see in the case of a celebrity, the adulation one receives for an ordinary act of patience or kindness, and the vitriol for perceived rudeness. The adulation is, even if sycophantic, servile or cringy, perhaps not entirely unmerited, given that, deluged with so many requests, a person is able to retain, at least momentarily, some patience for one of them. The venom, on the other hand, is less charitable when you look at things from the perspective of the person involved. An unending stream of interactions, all typically revolving around the same banalities. That a person does not snap at the tiresomeness of it all is in itself a wonder.
So far, so obvious, that a person faced with an unending queue of people wanting to meet him, will, in all probability, lose patience, and if not outrightly rude, will at least attempt to dispatch them quickly, entailing a measure of curtness. The incentives are clearly that way. Either be reasonable with all, that is to say, accommodate everyone – which almost invariably means being unreasonable with yourself, to make this series of accommodations your be-all and end-all. Or to be selective, which is to say to accommodate a few and reject others, which brings with it the usual pitfalls of favouritism, although this seems a smaller price to pay. Or to be unreasonable with all, and reasonable with yourself, and not accommodate anyone beyond the bare necessity. And this, I think, explains why it’s natural to expect such a person to be rude, or at least curt, even if it is unreasonable in that the person who faces this rudeness has done nothing to deserve it.
That each one has done nothing to deserve it is the crux here – you can hardly blame one particular person for the cumulative cumbersomeness of the entire crowd. And so you have a situation where, despite the fact that each individual is blameless – there is, after all, nothing wrong in what they do – the cumulative group, with its unreasonable aggregate demands upon a person, is certainly not blameless. A series of zeroes summing up to an infinity, individually reasonable requests being collectively unreasonable, and hence being treated unreasonably individually (although reasonably in the collective), despite their individual reasonableness. Not surprising therefore, is the stereotype of the rude or unfriendly celebrity or bank official. Nor illegitimate is the grievance of the individual innocent visitor, treated to a rudeness he has done nothing to deserve, the unfortunate collateral damage of the law of large numbers.
And yet, dispassionately viewed, it seems hard to buy such an argument, that different standards of ethics – or, to use a milder word, etiquette – hold for some people and not others. That I would expect an ordinary person to be patient, polite, courteous, and a supposedly not so ordinary one to be the opposite, to be rude and curt, and to be grateful if he wasn’t, seems to me unfair, to hold each to apparently different standards. It might be understandable, though, if I consider that the expectation from both is the same; it is simply that meeting the expectation, achieving the same feat of courtesy, is harder for the latter than the former.
It’s harder in the same way it’s harder to score a goal on each of a hundred free kicks than it is to score on one. The fact that a person scores on ninety-nine of a hundred is no consolation to the hundredth one on which he failed to score, just as the fact that a person is nice to ninety-nine is no consolation to the hundredth upon whom his patience gives out. This hardness then, the hardness of replicating one’s performance umpteen times, perhaps, explains the discrepancy in standards.
It is harder for another reason too. What the assembly line also brings, I think, is the extinguishing of the characteristic each individual case most demands. There is no faster way to deplete a trait than to overuse it to the point of meaninglessness, just as repeating a word endlessly causes it to lose meaning to the listener through semantic satiation. The most inured and hardened, perhaps jaded, are often those exposed to an assembly line of suffering, their reservoir of feeling long depleted by the unending demands upon it. When this compounds on the previous kind of hardness, what you get is a striker, being asked to score on a hundred free kicks, with each kick taking its toll and consequently making the subsequent kick more difficult than the previous one. To compare him to the one who faces a single free kick is as ludicrous as comparing a graduate student’s test scores with those of a kid in kindergarten.
“I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,” he said, “I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,” he said. “On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.”
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
That is also why, perhaps, it is far more beautiful and interesting, and also uncommon, to see an ordinary soldier or doctor or official who still retains some sense of caring, than an armchair thinker or consultant with noble and lofty aspirations, whose textbook empathy is, in large part, oozing because of their cushiness and disconnect from what it is their heart professes to bleed for. Loving in the abstract is easy; in fact, it’s almost abnormal if it’s absent – even the worst tyrants, after all, typically claim to care about others. And yet, fine sentiments in the abstract (‘loving mankind in general’) rarely if ever, translate well into reality (‘loving people in particular’) – and even less rarely into the reality of the assembly line.