The death of a soft society

There used to be a move you could make. Maybe something had gone wrong, maybe you were late, maybe you missed something, and you could explain. Not lie, necessarily. Explain. You’d tell someone what actually happened, and sometimes, often enough that it was worth doing, the outcome would change.

I should say up front that I’m not remembering this. I never had this experience, really. By the time I was old enough to plead my own case, there was no case to plead, the deciding had already moved somewhere I couldn’t reach. So this is secondhand, which is a strange thing to grieve. But I’m fairly sure it was real, because I keep finding the evidence in a couple of places.

The evidence is in the movies

In Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale talks his way into a cockpit, a hospital, a bank, a courtroom. Watch what he’s actually doing in each of those scenes: he’s not defeating a system, he’s persuading a person who has the authority to wave him through, one at a time, over and over. The whole con runs on the fact that at every checkpoint in 1963 there was somebody standing there who could decide.

You can’t run that con now, and the reason isn’t that we got smarter about fraud. It’s that almost nobody at a checkpoint decides anything. His credentials would be checked against a database in four seconds by something with no opinion about how convincing he seemed. The movie has quietly turned into a period piece, and what dates it isn’t the suits or the cars. It’s that everyone he meets has the power to say yes.

The evidence is in encounters

You’re speeding, and a cop pulls you over and leans down and asks what the hurry is. He can see the car. He can see your wife in the passenger seat with her hands on her belly. You don’t need to be eloquent, because the situation is visible to him and he has the authority to act on what he sees.

Now replace him with a camera on a pole.

The camera catches you just as correctly. What it doesn’t do is ask. It photographs a plate and computes a speed, and those two facts are the entire universe of things it will ever know about that moment. Your wife is in the frame, the light coming off her hit the sensor, and the system has no representation for her anywhere.

He might have written the ticket anyway; plenty would. But standing there at your window he hadn’t decided yet, and your circumstances were allowed to bear on how it went. You were never owed the break. It was never a guarantee, only ever a possibility, and the possibility was enough to make the explaining worth doing.

A cop can choose not to care. The camera doesn’t choose.

Softness was a person

“Soft” never meant the rules didn’t matter. They mattered. What mattered more is that the rule and the enforcement of the rule lived in the same place, inside the same person, and that person could look at you.

Discretion was distributed all the way down. The clerk, the teller, the guy at the counter, the person who answered the phone, each of them held a small amount of power to make an exception, and they used it constantly and without ceremony. It was the normal operation of the thing.

Which meant explaining yourself was a real skill, socially. You learned how to make a case. You learned that the truth, delivered plainly to a tired person who has heard forty versions of it that day, works better than a clever story. You learned to read whether the person across from you had room to move. There was an entire genre of human competence built around the fact that outcomes were negotiable, and it worked because somewhere in the loop there was always someone with the authority to say fine, just this once.

The evidence is in the complaining

The second place I find it is in a complaint people my age have about people my parents’ age.

The complaint is that boomers think they can talk their way into or out of anything. That they ask for the manager. That they explain, at length, to a person working a register, why the policy shouldn’t apply in their particular case. It’s a real thing and the complaint is accurate as far as it goes.

We say it’s rude, and often it is. But the rudeness isn’t the whole of it, and it isn’t the part that interests me. Sitting underneath it, never argued for because nobody thinks it needs arguing, is the universal understanding that complaining doesn’t work, and it’s embarrassing to watch you try.

Everybody my age knows, without ever having been taught it, that there’s no arrangement of words that moves the needle. And you don’t cringe at someone for doing something futile unless you’re certain of the futility.

So the disagreement only looks like it’s about manners. They were trained in a world that answered when you spoke to it, we never were, and we’re irritated at them for not noticing the change. Which is a way of admitting the change happened.

”I understand, but the system won’t let me”

That sentence is the epitaph.

I’ve heard some version of it from an airline agent, a support chat, a bank, a person standing three feet in front of me who genuinely wanted to help. They aren’t brushing me off. They’re telling me the truth about where they sit in the machine, which is: nowhere with a lever.

The chatbot version is at least honest. Nobody expects mercy from a chatbot. The stranger case is the human placed in the exact seat where mercy used to live and then stripped of the ability to grant it. They still have the chair. They still have the desk. The job title hasn’t changed. They’ve been converted into an interface, a nicer and more apologetic front-end for the same rejection the form would have handed you.

The form has no field for it

Your reason is still true. It has just become irrelevant.

You have a document that says one thing and a situation that is another thing, and both facts are real, and the portal has a dropdown with eleven options and none of them is yours. There’s no text box. There was never going to be a text box, because a text box implies someone reads it, and nobody reads it. The form collects the inputs to a decision that was written down somewhere long before you arrived and now just executes.

This is the part that takes a while to accept. You keep trying to escalate toward a human, because your whole life has taught you that the human is where the flexibility is. And you do sometimes reach one. And they’re kind. And they can’t do anything.

The evidence is in my dad’s voice

The third place I find it is on the phone.

My dad calls the bank and I can hear the whole shape of it from the next room. He gives them too much. The reason, and then the reason behind the reason, and the timing, and what the other guy told him last month, and a detail about the family that has nothing to do with anything. Some of it is exactly true and some of it has been rounded in his favor, and he moves between the two without any visible seam, because he isn’t filing a statement. He’s building a case for a person. He’s trying to get someone to see it his way.

And I sit there and sigh and roll my eyes, because I know something he’s decided not to know, which is that the person on the other end cannot help him. Not won’t. Can’t. There is no field on her screen for any of it. He could be the most sympathetic man alive and the outcome would be identical, and he is spending forty minutes finding that out again. Except he won’t find out, because the person he is talking to will not stop him, will not let him know his song and dance are futile, and also because he doesn’t want to find out, he wants to believe that there’s still a chance. He wants to live in a soft world.

Here’s what took me too long to hear properly: he isn’t confused. He’s competent. That performance is a skill, and it’s a good one, and he built it in a world that returned something when you used it. What I’m rolling my eyes at is a man doing a thing that used to work, at full strength, into a phone line that no longer carries it.

I never learned to do that. I fill in the form correctly and I hope the numbers come out my way, and when they don’t I close the tab. I’ve never once tried to make someone see it my way, because I’ve never been in a room where that was on offer.

Eventually there won’t be anyone left who talks to institutions like they’re people. That’s the part I’d mourn if I could work out how to mourn something I never had. Not the leniency, he doesn’t get the leniency either, most of the time. Just the sound of a man who still believes there’s someone on the other end who could be moved.

What we actually lost

I miss the soft version, even though I never lived in it. I miss the possibility of mercy, even though I never had it. I miss the chance to explain myself, even though I never got to take it.

Saying it costs something, though: every power to make an exception is a power to withhold one. The same man who waves you on because he saw your wife is the man who decides, on no particular basis, that someone else’s story doesn’t hold up. The camera is blind by design. It is relentless, but it is that way towards everyone. It can’t like you, which means it also can’t dislike you.

So I’m asking for something with a known failure mode, knowing it’s there. I’d still take it. A world where mercy gets handed out unevenly is a world that has mercy in it.

Mercy is discretion. There’s nothing else it could be. A system that cannot make exceptions cannot forgive you, however good your reason is, because forgiveness is an exception by definition. Removing the discretion to prevent favoritism removed the mercy in the same motion. They were the same wire.

What’s left is rigid correctness. The system is right about you. It has your dates and your numbers, it applied them consistently, and the outcome is correct, and the outcome is also wrong, and there is nobody to say so to.