Jordan Neely’s death on May 1, 2023 by a Marine veteran who placed him in a chokehold after the 30-year-old, homeless African-American appeared on a New York subway train allegedly hurling garbage and verbal abuse at passengers is one extreme end of a social malady plaguing our society today: individuals who treat the public sphere as an extension of their private sphere (or lack thereof), and who subject others to their obtrusive behaviors.

Neely had been arrested over 40 times previously for various crimes ranging from lewd behavior to assaulting senior citizens. As one commentator noted: This guy has been arrested dozens of times and he is back on the subway causing people to be scared for their safety; either get some law enforcement on the subway or give citizens authority to protect themselves without recourse.

Other recent incidents include two women blasting music from their phones on a plane in flight (pictured above). The women gave the middle finger to annoyed fellow passengers. As the article points out, one of the alarming trends in travel is the rise of people using personal speakers in public and carrying on loud phone conversations without using headphones.

Another recent article describes a woman voted off a Frontier Jet for lobbing a barrage of vulgar expletives in an argument she started with a couple seated rows in front of her.

People who use their phones as personal speakers are polluting every pocket of the public sphere; their boisterous behavior indicates they believe they are entitled to treat shared public space as their own private space—indeed, as an extension of their disheveled bedrooms.

Why is it that so many people have no understanding of their responsibility not to dominate the public sphere, monopolize it, or even make themselves highly conspicuous and obtrusive in it? For indeed, when we draw unnecessary attention to ourselves and transgress on the personal space of others in public, we undermine the ability of others to interject themselves into that space and use it for their own limited goals and aims. However limited it might be, the public sphere is one or two spaces in which our agency as human beings unfold. We have a duty to make ourselves as unobtrusive as possible in shared public spaces so that we can allow as many participants as possible in the public sphere to feel comfortably ensconced in that space in a manner that does not compromise the reasonable way they are entitled to exercise their agency.

Those individuals who contaminate the public sphere exhibit contempt and disrespect for the idea of a shared space and the norms and mores that secure its operation for all those who inhabit it. Others may read and talk and enjoy moments of quiet or tolerate a reasonable level of volubility which does not nullify their own equilibrium and sense of equanimity.

Those guilty of emitting noise pollution, the linguistic equivalent of grunting farm animals, proclaim their vulgarity as a right—and one that normalizes thuggery as the new standard of public (mis)behavior.

This trend is permissible today only because we have two phenomena at work.

The first is massive inclusivity of uncivilized and improperly socialized persons in the public domain. I am speaking of hordes of individuals flooding the present and the future with little thought from members of society about how to assimilate such individuals into the culture when, truth be told, many of them are unassimilable.

Also, there is a concomitant radical egalitarianism at issue. Everyone must have a place at the table. The attendant forms of self-expression are permissible because what cultivated folks think of as miscreants contaminating the public domain is interpreted differently in the minds of progressives. For the latter, public domain polluters are merely committing behavioral malapropisms, a form of self-expression and, a fortiori, self-fulfillment. The truth is, such reprobates have always existed. They were called vulgar, low-class, thuggish, pedestrian at best, and they and their behaviors were stigmatized. They were shamed if they showcased their beastly sensibilities in public spaces. They were forced to retreat. In their stead, bourgeois values and virtues prevailed.

Today, there is a revolt against those bourgeois mores, norms and values which are properly elitist, exclusionary and, above all, rationally discriminatory.

Just as every sophomoric high school opinion of any village idiot is too often raised to the level of human knowledge, so tolerance is invoked to excuse tawdry and vulgar behavior as constitutive of personal identity.

To criticize this behavior regardless of the ethnic makeup of whom it is directed toward is to incur being labeled a white cultural, civilizational imperialist. One is likely to be accused of commodifying public space into private realms. That is a form of race-capitalism, we are told.

Judging by the rage and the massive protests surrounding Neely’s death, one is left with the impression that to appraise and adjudicate obstreperous behavior that violates the public sphere is verboten. Since it is apparently imperialistic and racist now to hold behavior to a civilizational standard, all aberrant, nefarious, and anomalous behaviors that compromise the public domain are graded on a curve.

I am not referring here to mere oddities and eccentricities, or inconveniences caused by behaviors of other people which are the price we pay for living in a free society.

The truth is that we are increasingly witnessing persons de-ratifying the social contract we live by with gross, uncivilized behavior. This behavior is normalized and mainstreamed as the manifest vitality and the loud, bodacious expression of certain individuals. To disrupt and punish it is to be a discriminator. What the uncivilized violators of the public domain need is a civilizade blasted against them. These people suffer not just from faulty socialization, the obstruction of sensibilities, and a paucity of decent manners, but also from deep impulse control.

Their sense of radical entitlement to monopolize shared public space results from a refusal to limit their desires, wishes and whims. Theirs is a solipsistic universe where none but themselves exists.

The desire to live in concord with others is what drives civilization. Barbarism is a tendency towards disassociation. Today’s civilizational social disruptors are inverted barbarians.

This whole phenomenon, though, is the logical consequence of over-democratization. The latter leads to massive inclusiveness, the kind in which the lowest common denominator in each is enshrined. The exceptional, the refined, the decorous are annihilated via neglect, default, and willful stigmatization as exclusionary and discriminatory.

The short response to these behaviors is for anyone to step in to restore order, be it a law enforcement agent, a flight attendant, or dutiful citizens.

The longer response is applied rational discrimination, which will curb the degree of radical inclusivity. Yes: vote people off airplanes, maroon them from cruise ships, and toss them from trains. Hyper-democratization is tyrannical. Parents have morally outsourced their children to government schools which in turn not only entertain their thuggery but, unfortunately, long ago abandoned the seemingly jejune notion of creating moral character and developing and cultivating refined sensibilities.

Coarseness, crassness, and inelegance have been raised to a statistical average, codified, and then enshrined like a national treasure trove on which others can pin their aspirational identities. Civilized people must resoundingly reject this trend. Moral and behavioral vigilantes must police the public domain. Moral opprobrium must be visited upon violators of public decency, norms, and mores. And, in the limited context available to the civilized enforcers, the violators must simply be ejected from the larger public sphere they occupy. They will then think twice before acting out their thuggish instincts. If each civilized citizen took it upon him- or herself to be the fiduciary and custodian of the public sphere, then the aberrant will learn the art of reflection, inconspicuousness, courtesy, and decent manners.

Or maybe they will simply learn to keep their mouths shout when they are inclined to yell and pick a fight with others if they know a vigilante citizen is there to hold them publicly accountable for their behavior.