David Brooks:

“Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of ‘openness.’ We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic ‘localist’ tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.”

I think often about two subspecies, or effects, of the phenomenon Brooks describes in this last sentence. The first is how the abandonment of clear status-signaling and deferential modes of address in hierarchical settings — academia and ecclesia being two such realms — actually makes it more challenging for entrants from lower economic and culturally powerful strata to a) accurately navigate those realms upon entering, when they possess the lowest level of power in the hierarchy, and b) be recognized as having truly arrived once they ascend to the higher levels of power. The second is how the contemporary world, despite the radically increased cultural visibility of neurodivergence, is in certain experiential ways a more hostile environment for persons on the autism spectrum, who need clear rules and overt signals for social settings rather than the muddy and inconsistent rules and covert signals with which our neurotypical ruling class is comfortable. Deference and clear social rules are contingent, socially constructed fictions; but they were and are useful fictions, in ways wholly unappreciated by their meritocratic destroyers. No society can function without socially constructed useful fictions. The question is whether or not the new set represents genuine improvement over the old.

UPDATE: My (very clever) wife pointed out that the therapeutic language and culture predominant among the teenage to early-30s set is another manifestation of this phenomenon. The need to “normalize” being “not okay,” seeing a therapist (and talking with friends about what “my therapist says”), having some form of neurodivergence or (at least) severe social anxiety, etc., can be read as both a response to the low-deference, muddy-social-rules culture we now live in and a replacement for older forms of deference and clear social rules. It serves as a way to cope with the unpredictability (uncontrollability?) of the world and as an imposition on it of new, somewhat clearer rules. It makes some social facts certain again. One cannot, in 2023, dismiss a diagnosis (even a self-diagnosis) of a mental health disorder, or do other than honor the boundaries that one’s friend declares he or she is setting, or veto anything that one’s friend’s therapist says — although thanks to a certain ubiquitous podcast advertiser, the idea that you can “get a new therapist” anytime your old one makes you uncomfortable has now been, er, normalized, which severely blunts the scalpel edge that true talk therapy ought to have, slicing through our self-protective layers of irony and self-deception to get at and treat the genuine underlying problems!