While Everything Still Worked

A train is arriving. Everyone has arranged themselves into the rough shape of a queue—not because anyone told them to, not because there's a sign, but because that's what people do. The line has its own logic: first arrived, first boards. It isn't written down anywhere. It doesn't need to be.

Then a man appears at the edge of the crowd. He's filming on his phone, panning across the queue with the studied contempt of someone who has decided, in advance, that what he's looking at is stupid. "Look at these idiots," he says, to whoever will eventually watch the video. "Lining up and waiting patiently." He pushes through to the front. The doors open. People start to get off. He doesn't wait for that either—he shoulders his way in before they can exit, winning a few extra seconds in the eternal competition he's the only one who knows he's running.

The implied proposition, stated plainly: everyone else is stupid except him. He's here first.

He got on the train. He probably got a seat. By his own accounting, he won.

What He's Actually Looking At

What he was looking at, on that platform, was infrastructure. Not a metaphor for one—actual infrastructure, as real and as functional as the train itself. A queue is a piece of social infrastructure, maintained in real time by the collective decision of everyone participating in it to behave as though it exists. It has no physical form. It isn't enforced by anyone in particular. It runs entirely on distributed participation, which means it runs on the premise that the people in it share a model of what's happening and are choosing to act accordingly.

Queues are extraordinarily efficient. They solve, without any central coordination, the problem of how to move a large number of people through a constrained space in a way that's fair, predictable, and low-conflict. Societies that can produce them reliably are doing something sophisticated. The line at the train station represents a minor civilizational achievement happening in real time.

What the man with the phone saw was sheep. People standing around for no reason, waiting for something they could just go and take. He saw the queue as the absence of thinking—a herd behavior that a smarter person could simply opt out of.

He was looking at a feat of distributed human cooperation and reading it as passivity.

How You Get That Blind

This is not, or not primarily, a moral failure. Understanding how he got there matters more than judging him for arriving.

The queue had never failed him. Or rather—it had always been there, always worked, always delivered him onto trains and into buildings and through amusement parks with enough reliability that it had become, for him, something like weather. A feature of the environment. Not infrastructure that people produce, but a condition that simply exists.

Like plumbing.

You don't think about plumbing. You turn on the tap, water comes out, and your attention goes elsewhere—to the coffee, to the morning, to whatever the day holds. The infrastructure behind that tap is elaborate and expensive and requires constant maintenance, and you know this in the abstract, but you don't feel it. It doesn't register as something actively produced because it has never, or rarely, failed to be there.

This is what functioning systems do. They disappear. The better they work, the less visible they become, which means the more reliably they function, the harder it gets to see them as things that function—as opposed to things that simply are. The man on the platform had inherited a world where queues held. Where people waited. Where the infrastructure of public order had been maintained, generation after generation, by people who understood—consciously or not—that it needed maintaining. And because it had always worked, he could not see it working.

He wasn't running the calculation wrong. He wasn't running it at all. There was nothing to calculate, from where he stood. Just a crowd of people doing something unnecessary, and a train, and him.

The defect isn't selfishness, exactly. It's a perceptual failure produced by success. He is, in a specific and uncomfortable sense, a byproduct of the system he's consuming.

The Fence and the People Who Remember It

There is a principle—Chesterton's Fence, if it needs a name—that says you should never tear down a fence until you understand why it was built. The fence that seems pointless, that stands in a field blocking nothing you can see, might be load-bearing in ways that aren't visible from where you're standing. Before you remove it, find out why it's there. The inability to see its purpose is information about your knowledge, not about the fence.

The queue is a fence. So is the norm that says you wait for people to exit before you board. These are pieces of social infrastructure that look, from the outside, like arbitrary rules followed by people who haven't thought about whether they need to. They look, in other words, exactly like the man on the platform thought they looked.

Some people can see the fence. They don't necessarily know its full history, or the precise way it works, but they have a model of the world in which the queue is real—a thing being actively maintained, a thing that can be destroyed by defection, a thing worth protecting. They know what the platform looks like if everyone reasons like him. So when they see someone push to the front, they say something. They stop the line-cutter. They ask the person to wait their turn.

They are, in the language that has developed around them, Karens.

The word does a lot of work. A Karen, in the strict sense, isn't someone who enforces shared norms. She's someone who weaponizes the appearance of norm enforcement for personal status—demanding managers, policing neighbors, deploying social authority against people who pose no real threat. That behavior exists and it's worth naming.

But there are two kinds of enforcement, and the label collapsed them into one. The first is enforcement in service of shared coordination: stopping the line-cutter, asking someone to lower their voice in a quiet carriage, pointing out that the queue exists and that everyone in it agreed to honor it. The second is enforcement in service of personal status—the bad-faith performance of authority that the original label described. The first is load-bearing. The second is what the word was coined for. When the label migrated from the second to the first, something structural happened—and that migration is what changed.

What it did was invert the penalty. Normally, the cost falls on the person who violated the norm. The line-cutter gets embarrassed. The person who pushed in gets asked to go back. In the post-Karen cultural environment, the cost moves. Picture it: someone cuts the queue at an amusement park. Someone else says something. The cutter films the enforcer, posts it, and within hours the enforcer is the content—clipped, captioned, mocked, given a name. The cutter has the views. The enforcer has the label. That's not a hypothetical. That's a Tuesday. The violator continues largely unbothered. It's the person who saw the fence and said something about it who becomes the story.

Enforcement runs on incentives like everything else. If the cost of enforcing consistently exceeds the cost of defecting, enforcement stops—not everywhere at once, but at the margins, and then beyond the margins. The people who would have said something start calculating whether it's worth it. Increasingly, it isn't. The queue holds, but more thinly. The fence stands, but fewer people remember why.

The man who can't see the fence looks at the person defending it and asks: who do you think you are?

The answer is: someone who can see what you're doing to something the rest of us are holding up. Not a hall monitor, not an official with a remit—just someone with a model of the world that includes the queue as a real thing, treating that visibility as the only authority available in a space without designated enforcers.

We built a norm that punishes exactly that.

That's a strange thing to have done. Stranger still: it isn't new.

They Noticed Before We Did

The observation that prosperity produces a specific blindness—that abundance degrades the perceptual equipment needed to see what abundance costs—is very old. Old enough that people had noticed it, named it, and built warnings around it long before the conditions that produced it had fully resolved.

The warnings usually get read as moral instruction. Don't get soft. Don't get greedy. Remember where you came from. This reading isn't wrong—it's just the surface. Underneath the moral instruction is a diagnostic observation about a mechanism, and the mechanism is what keeps getting lost.

Deuteronomy is precise about it. When you have eaten and are full, when you have built fine houses and live in them, when your flocks and herds have multiplied—then your heart will grow proud and you will forget.

Not might forget. Will forget.

The forgetting isn't a failure of character that careful people can avoid. It's what prosperity does to perception. It's a predictable output of the conditions. What gets forgotten isn't abstract. It's the cost of what you now have. The infrastructure that produced it. The maintained systems that stand between you and what came before. You forget because it works. The forgetting is a symptom of the success.

Rome is the same observation in different circumstances. The standard telling emphasizes decadence, corruption, military overextension. These were real. But underneath them, over a longer timescale, the Roman civic tradition—the culture of participation and obligation that had built and maintained the system—was thinning. Not collapsing. Thinning. The forums still functioned. The roads still ran. The legions were still there on paper. But the population of people for whom those things were real, who felt personally implicated in their maintenance, who understood that the fence needed to stay up and why—that population had been quietly shrinking for generations before anyone noticed the fence was down.

The ancient writers named this precisely. Softness. Decadence. Forgetting. These aren't fumbling approximations toward concepts they couldn't quite reach. They're accurate descriptions of what abundance does to people when the infrastructure becomes invisible.

The symptom just looks different now. Roman decadence was a turning inward—away from the forum, away from the legion, away from the civic obligations that had made Rome possible. It was legible as decline even while it was happening, because withdrawal looks like absence. The man on the platform isn't withdrawing. He's very much in public life, aggressively, with his phone out. What changed is individualism—and what it did to the self's relationship to shared space. When the self becomes the primary unit, the queue stops being infrastructure and starts being an imposition: a constraint on your timeline imposed by other people's prior arrival. And when a media system arrived that could film the exploit working and distribute it instantly, the feedback loop didn't just break. It reversed. The defector gets the views. The enforcer becomes the content. The available evidence, constantly refreshed, is that the man who didn't wait was right. Where abundance once made people soft and disengaged, it now produces something more aggressive: the belief that the system exists to be exploited rather than maintained, and that the people holding it together are the problem.

This makes it harder to recognize, not easier. Decadence looks like decline. A man pushing onto a train looks like a minor social irritant. We don't have a word for what he's doing that carries the same cultural weight as the Roman warnings, partly because the behavior doesn't look like the behavior they were describing. Same disease. Different presentation.

Which is why the Karen label is so significant—not as a cultural moment, but as a signal. The ancient writers could read the tell because they had watched enough civilizations rise and thin to recognize the pattern. We've had a longer run of stability. The pattern is less legible. But the label—the specific decision to make enforcement the problem rather than defection—is the same tell in updated form. Not softness this time. Something harder and louder and more confident. But pointing at the same invisible pipes, the same thinning population of people who remember why the fence is there, the same slow degradation that won't announce itself until it does.