CD

Nothing shows the decline of a high-trust society like modern Halloween. Halloween used to be a civic duty that we've lost in barely 30 years. It was a simple deal that you bought candy for other people's kids. A high-trust holiday where every neighbor opened the door to strangers and had to welcome each one personally. The Greeks called it Xenia, the sacred laws of hospitality and guest-friendship with a duty to welcome strangers. No other holiday asks us to be this vulnerable to our community. Now trick-or-treating gets consolidated to a parking lot or onto a few commercial downtown blocks where local businesses have been passed the social obligation of welcoming that the neighbors used to do. High-trust means making oneself deliberately vulnerable, but there's nothing vulnerable for a business who opens their doors to random strangers. It's quite literally how they operate. They risk nothing. Total cowardice of the modern neighbor. Parents used to trust the people on their street, and a bowl marked "take one" worked because most people took one. If you grew up with it, you remember the houses that didn't give out candy were the neighborhood pariahs. This is what a fraying shared identity looks like in real life. Fewer obligations to our neighbors, social expectations to participate in shared customs, less faith that strangers will act decently, and more retreating into private circles. Very sad that a children's holiday needs a managed venue to do what an ordinary streets and communities used to do for free.