Honor Beats Dignity
How the South's honor culture beat out America's dignity
Have testosterone levels in men really been tanking for decades? Whether or not the lab numbers are falling, the social symptoms are unmistakable. We’re watching what look like the ripple effects of low testosterone play out across society: more fear of contention and friction, more exhaustion. The whole country feels hormonally downregulated.
I remember the ‘90s. My dad could walk into the bank, greet the manager by name, and get a fair resolution to any issue. He ran a small business servicing many in town. Reputation was a circulating currency. The goodwill you earned in your community was paid back to you. It was a closed, zero-sum environment.
This is no longer our world. Everything you need or have to do is mediated by phone call or email. These are deliberately designed to thwart any goodwill you’ve earned. Support is now an army of disconnected workers who gain nothing if you stay and lose nothing if you leave. Rational ignorance is a strategically strong position.
The “Karen” framing finished the job. How dare you rage at someone who has no control over the outcome? Customer service and their employer both benefit from claiming it’s morally wrong to hold workers responsible. They are front-line infantry you cannot fight, and whose lines you cannot get past. Thanks to Karen branding, the business gets no pushback and the workers, who are effectively human shields, experience no unpleasant conversations. Everyone wins but you.
We forget Karens built the modern retail experience. They’re why the grocer in the nice part of town is so pristine. Groceries aren’t high fashion with disparate profits that swing by ZIP code. Kroger sells the same items everywhere at roughly the same margin. The difference is shoppers in wealthy areas feel entitled to quality goods and services and won’t settle for less. “What’s this mealy apple? Clean this up; I nearly slipped. Where’s your manager?” Without Karen, things quietly rot.
Think about the phone calls you’re putting off. There’s hardly a comparable dread. It isn’t the hold music or the accent. It’s that you’ve invested time, money, and goodwill into something, and you’ll soon discover it all vanished into a void. You will plead with a stranger who cannot care, and the call will end with the same corporate apology script. Your brain interprets that not as inconvenience but as humiliation—a lost skirmish.
Consider the opposite. When you actually get a fair shake on an outgroup phone call, you’re thrilled. You feel powerful, invigorated, so much so you want to spend that rare bit of energy making another call you’ve put off. Hot hand; let’s go two for two! This is not normal thinking for a simple negotiation. Your mind is treating these interactions as if they are local and status-loaded—that they influence or reveal your community standing. This is a testosterone-mediated response.
Testosterone is like a stamina bar for conflict. It rises and falls with your wins and losses so you don’t waste effort fighting battles you can’t win. Modern life provides the same feedback loop our ancestors got from tribal raids, just mapped onto bureaucracy. Repeated defeats lower the bar, telling you it’s safer not to try. You can see the population-level result everywhere. We have no appetite for confrontation.
Honor and dignity culture are names for two ways of treating conflict as a test of whose stamina bar is bigger. Dignity culture displays status by shrugging off glancing blows. The tacit reply is, “I’m so established that your little barb didn’t even move my meter, so it doesn’t deserve a response.” Honor culture reads that same jab as the attacker claiming his bar is bigger than yours—why else would he risk it? If you don’t answer, you confirm his estimate of your remaining strength, so you’re compelled to swing back.
When stamina bars stay low long enough, fear starts masquerading as strength. Make every effort to puff yourself up to avoid conflict. You have no hit points left for battle, so feign eternal battle-readiness. Buy the biggest, loudest truck you can find and black out the windows. Need to run into Starbucks to pick up your order? Not a chance. Half an hour waiting in the drive-thru in your fortress of safety is preferable to risking an unnecessary skirmish.
You’ll also see more attempts to take up space everywhere. You thought those people blocking the grocery aisle had tunnel vision? They know exactly what they’re doing. It’s a preemptive challenge to make you yield first. This is everywhere now, from massive wagon strollers—the SUVs of the sidewalk—to walking trails. These are the nonverbal equivalents of two clashing ways of enforcing respect, pushed toward always-defect.
An incredible experiment from 1996 showed the difference between honor and dignity cultures. Block a narrow walkway and curse those who eventually must push past. Northerners (dignity culture) laughed it off. Southerners (honor, a dilute face culture) were ready to fight. This is fine if Southerners stay in the South, where excess politeness exists to avoid harming others’ reputation. Similarly, Northerners can be crass and edgy without starting a fight in their neck of the woods. Think Boston.
A microcosm of this clash of cultures happens the moment you drive across the Mason-Dixon line. Above it, dignity players happily stay in the right lane except to pass. Below it, the honor-bound camp in the left lane until someone rides their bumper, forcing them to move right. Southerners are perpetually enraged and confused by this. “I’m already over the speed limit!” is the universal retort. Dignity culture does not register something as minor as being passed on a walkway or a road as a threat. Even blinker usage tanks in the South; revealing intentions only opens you up to encroachment.
What happens when cash-flush retirees leave their blue states for redder pastures? Californians are making a post-COVID exodus to places like Nashville and Knoxville, assuming they’ll find a better cultural match. Meanwhile, the entire country is experiencing a blending of cultures. The United States is Southern now. This creates an unwitting nationalization of the South’s insult sensitivity, since in a battle between an honor and a dignity player, honor is the attractor equilibrium. Retaliate or lose.
Let’s model the outcome of mixing honor and dignity players. In my Southern city, the wealthiest transplants—those you’d encounter downtown—mostly arrive from dignity states. They’re edgy like their home culture but still expect ingroup treatment. This sets off honor players, who retaliate against the accidental threat with coldness or even attack. “Where’s the Southern hospitality?” the dignity player wonders.
Dignity transplants experience this over and over, losing every encounter for reasons they can’t name. “I thought these were my people. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I’ll lead with barbs too.” You now have the worst of both, a dignity player leading with an attack an honor player only uses defensively. The local honor adherents are now on full alert—attacked in every encounter. What’s their move? Drop the civility with anyone they do not know. Create a strong local versus transplant divide. Lead with “Where are you from?”
This is my city now. I cannot walk into a bar or even the DMV without being sniped at immediately, even by someone who’s lived here the same four decades I have. If they aren’t absolutely sure I’m a fellow honor player—my neutral accent doesn’t help—they preemptively attack. I have to spend several minutes winning them over with a hybrid approach. Deploy the defense of a dignity player with the polite, face-respecting offense of an honor player. Then the same angry local will be more than kind, even surprisingly so.
The trail down the middle of my neighborhood boulevard has become a battleground. Groups now line up four abreast and effectively play Red Rover with oncoming walkers. Years ago, as a dignity player, I’d step aside into the grass. Now that I know it’s deliberate, I shoulder-check at every opportunity. Most locals have abandoned the trail and taken to walking in the street. When everything feels like a threat, you start choosing physical risk over social. Each swerving car you face down gives you the victory that greenway jousts did not. If you ask, they will even admit this.
Rising anxiety rates may be less about danger than about this omnipresent threat. Anxiety is the feeling that any move might cost reputation. That’s every move now. You can see the adaptation: writing that prioritizes endless disclaimers, feedback delivered only inside a “shit sandwich.” Some have self-diagnosed out of the game entirely. This is too much; I must have an ailment that makes social nuance impenetrable in a world so quick to punish misread tone.
This pattern is so prevalent post-COVID that we are witnessing the birth of an entirely new genre of daylight horror to depict it. You can trace the throughline, starting with social awkwardness as comedy like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. The 2010s saw intermediates that braided horror with social failure like The Lobster and Force Majeure.
After 2020, the genre comes into full focus. It’s completely normal everyday life with no supernatural elements, explicit violence, or hints of brooding danger. Dark comedies have forever used horror elements in service of comedy. Daylight social horror may include comedy, but jumps the chasm from horror in service of comedy to comedy as brief relief from unrelenting social horror. All My Friends Hate Me is a strong contender for the first of the genre.
Tim Robinson is a leader in the field. I Think You Should Leave was no simple sketch comedy. It captured the canonical boomer-versus-millennial customer service dynamic. In sketch after sketch, he flips out in denial over some minor loss, hilariously doubling down as the world proves him wrong. He plays the Karen, but with enough absurdity and variety to hide the parallels. Cathartic for his millennial audience working these jobs.
His film Friendship and newest show, The Chair Company, go further into the genre. The comedy comes from our third-person view of his unreliable perspective. He’s a dignity player tossed into an honor culture. A chair breaking in a key meeting brings enough shame to unravel his life. HR comes after him for nothing. Phone calls go nowhere. Online orders deliver junk. Fights look life-threatening from his viewpoint but are so absurdly low-stakes we can deduce they’re at most some yelling.
Our culture has changed so much that you couldn’t send this show back a decade without critics panning it as inscrutably plotless. With luck, his work will again be incomprehensible, because ours will again make sense.
Tomorrow, if everything is combat, when do we flip from preserving order to introducing harm?