They say idle hands make the devil’s work. The saying is incomplete. Boredom starts the trouble, envy gives it a target, and a narrative supplies the alibi. A story is cheaper than competence and much easier to repeat. It takes a private failure and recasts it as a public crime committed by somebody else.
A narrative arrives looking official. It speaks as if it had been present at the founding of the world, though it was usually assembled last week from slogans, grievances, and a few selected facts. Its purpose is not understanding. Its purpose is permission. It lets a man break the ordinary rules of civilized life and still feel clean about it. The people who invent these stories often seem, without quite meaning to, to work against the long and expensive project of keeping a society from falling apart. They prefer the drama of demolition to the dull labor of maintenance, because wreckage makes a better tale than a bridge that merely stays standing. Destruction has a short learning curve. Building does not.
People grow bored. Then they grow captivated. The moment a man notices his own shortcomings, the narrative is already waiting with a villain. Not everyone can stand at the top. Human capacity is brutally unequal, and modernity contains whole districts where that fact shows itself as decay. Stare at those districts long enough and the future looks empty. That emptiness is often only the view from a small and unhappy corner. The people who leave those corners tend to do the old things that have worked for generations. They trust what has already paid its rent in results. They ignore the latest fashion in grievance. Often they remain unaware of it. While they quietly become more capable, the narratives pass over them like weather they never bothered to name. Ignorance of a bad story can be a form of sanity.
Late at night the depressed, the envious, and the simply incapable go looking for someone else to blame. A man who cannot bear to inventory his own habits will inventory the sins of strangers instead. Forums are full of such meetings. There he learns that the successful are keeping him down. In practice the successful are mostly trying to put distance between themselves and the unsuccessful. That distance gets called conspiracy by people who find sorting more offensive than failure. The bottom quartile produces nearly all the visible trouble: the crime, the ruined schools, the consumption of public effort, and the elaborate machinery required to keep disorder from spreading into the parts of life that still function. A society spends a shocking portion of its intelligence on containment. That is not a glorious vocation. It is the price of not pretending that character is evenly distributed.
The successful consume almost none of that machinery and supply nearly all the revenue that keeps it running. They do not introduce new problems so much as they work, often more than is good for them. Work is the unfashionable alternative to interpretation. A man who is busy has less time to audition for the role of victim. Remember Luigi. He killed a man walking out of a six o’clock meeting, a man who had already put in more hours that week than most people manage in two. Luigi had achieved nothing of note until the moment he destroyed a life and handed a family a lifetime of grief. For a brief interval he felt powerful. That feeling was the whole of the accomplishment. A bored man found a chorus of other bored men and mistook the noise for meaning. Fame of that kind is the fame of a stain on a clean shirt. The shirt was doing the work. The stain only made itself visible.
Politicians still import fresh members of the lower quartile, people with few skills, little attachment to the norms that hold a place together, and every likelihood of adding new weight to systems already straining under the old weight. A narrative can call this compassion. Maintenance has another name for compounding a problem you have not yet learned to manage. Compassion that refuses to count costs is only sentiment wearing a halo.
Everyone wants to climb off the bottom rung. Those who remain there stay restless. Restlessness seeks a theory the way thirst seeks a well, and the nearest theory is usually an accusation. The rest are left with the unglamorous duty of keeping a certain distance from the consequences of their character. A civilization is mostly the accumulated refusal to treat that restlessness as a philosophy. It is also the accumulated preference for proven value over a story that flatters the listener. The story will always be more exciting. The proven thing has the single advantage of being true enough to live on.