Do Not Educate Strangers

Everyday morality demands that you answer rudeness so that the offender does not “get used to it.” That turns a chance encounter into an educational project for which nobody issued either authority or insurance.

Someone shoves us — we want to shove back. Someone cuts us off on the road — we want to catch up and report our assessment of his driving. Someone is rude — we want to prove that rudeness is available to both sides.

In a tight-knit group, a response sometimes does regulate future behaviour. If a colleague constantly interrupts, a conversation about the boundary is worthwhile. If the stranger will be gone in a minute, the educational project rarely pays off.

Before reacting it is worth asking:

Do I want to prevent a repeat, protect myself, or return the unpleasant feeling to the sender?

The last one is understandable, but it usually creates a second conflict instead of fixing the first.

Not every offence should be ignored. Dangerous driving, violence and breaches of the rules may call for a report to the people responsible. But personal retribution almost always lowers the quality of the outcome.

Personal jokes and needling escalate especially fast. We think the other person ought to appreciate the wit. He appreciates the public reduction of his own status.

Humour works where people laugh together, not where one participant is left explaining that he is not offended.

The cost of an educational project is badly estimated because it leaves out the other side. Answering a rude driver feels free: five seconds and a little satisfaction. But the outcome depends not on us but on whoever is in the other car: how sober he is, how bored he is and how his day went. We choose the beginning of the episode. The continuation is chosen by a stranger about whom exactly one thing is known — that he is already behaving badly.

That is why a conversation about a boundary pays off inside a closed group and almost never on the street. In the first case the episode has a tomorrow. In the second there is only today and a random participant.