Drive-By: The Social Policing of Difference

I went out for some exercise today and somebody shouted abuse at me from a passing car. We had never met. They knew nothing about me. They were moving at speed, in company, and would be gone before any response was possible, although I may have reflexively suggested that they “go forth and multiply.” Somebody else’s few seconds of entertainment. My afternoon. Behind that afternoon, decades of much the same thing.

The particular insult hardly matters. Nor, ultimately, does the car. The interesting thing is how persistent the relation is while its expressions keep changing. Every period has different language for deciding who is strange, contemptible, embarrassing, weak, excessive, inferior or simply not “one of us.” The categories move. The acceptable vocabulary changes. Institutions change their policies and societies congratulate themselves on becoming more inclusive. Yet the underlying operation can remain remarkably stable: identify difference, organise a boundary around it, and make somebody pay for being on the wrong side.

Tall poppy syndrome is only one familiar expression of this. The problem is not simply that Australians sometimes cut down people who rise conspicuously above the field. We are remarkably well practised at cutting sideways too. Difference itself can become sufficient provocation. Ridicule, ostracism, harassment, humiliation and casual public abuse all perform variations on the same operation. They establish a centre by marking its outside. Belonging is produced partly through demonstrating who does not belong.

That is why periods of social transformation do not necessarily eliminate exclusion. They can transform its vocabulary while preserving its structure. Yesterday’s unacceptable difference can become protected or celebrated while another distinction acquires the work of carrying the boundary. The people involved do not need a strategy, conspiracy or even much awareness of what they are doing. The pattern can persist because thousands of ordinary interactions continually reproduce it. Nobody designs the whole thing. Everybody inherits a repertoire.

Australia is hardly alone in this, but my experience of Australian society across decades has been that these corrective pressures are unusually easy to encounter and unusually easy to dismiss. Each incident can be made to look insignificant precisely because the structure is distributed. Someone shouts from a car and drives away. Someone makes a joke. Someone excludes somebody. Someone decides another person needs taking down a peg. Considered separately, almost nothing has happened. Considered as recurrence, something quite substantial is happening all the time.

That is the invariance worth noticing. The victims change. The insults change. The declared values change. Even the people enforcing the boundary change. Yet a society can continue reproducing belonging through exclusion while sincerely believing that it has become more inclusive. The surface transforms while the relation survives.

Today it happened to be somebody shouting at me from a car. Tomorrow the mechanism will find another person and another reason. The details are contingent. The relation is remarkably persistent.

I have written elsewhere about this in A Theory of Dickheads. Perhaps, having shouted back, I briefly qualified myself. But there is an important asymmetry here too: the dickhead is the person who initiates the conflict. Without that first gratuitous act, there is nothing to reciprocate. The person shouting abuse at a stranger from a passing car is not identifying the dickhead. They are occupying the vacancy.