Think of the situation that a paleolithic hunter-gatherer was in: No hard-and-fast rules, nothing written down. You did what you wanted to, circumscribed only by the customs and relations in your tribe. A “people-blind” person, one we’d characterize as autistic, unable to “read” people in the “now”? They’d be at an incredible disadvantage, and unlikely to survive.

So… The written word and the codification of custom into law was, I would suggest, highly conducive to the autistic sorts that innovate and build new things. Hell, “the law” and writing were probably concepts one of them thought up because they were tired of having to learn the rules, only for the “consensus reality” of the verbal world change on them…

And, considering that much of our civilization was built by such people, is it any wonder it took us this long to get where we are?

In my darker moments, I sometimes find myself wondering if the socially “ept” people like the Kardashians are actually the human norm, and it’s the ones who build and keep civilization going that are the actual aberrations.

Two advantages of written rules are 1) they facilitate debugging; and 2) they can sometimes be learned very quickly just by reading, without embodied interaction. You can read and imagine how to interact with the system without taking risks.

The “foreign traveler” rules take a long time to learn, and require embodied interaction. You must risk getting hurt by the system while you interact with it, and for a long time, you must labor in a state of ignorance.

We tend to assume that everything is written down, somewhere, but it really isn’t. Think about your daily life–How much would you actually bother to write down? What specific causes are there, what choices did you make, to create your daily routine? The everyday ritual observances we make, derived from God alone knows what inputs we had, earlier in life.

Friend of mine does a full walk-around of his car, checking for anything unexpected. He can’t get into the thing, without first walking around it, and looking underneath it. He parks his car where he can do that without having to get on his knees, when he can, and he’ll walk a half-mile to park in a spot where he can do that. He won’t let you go near the car until he does that, especially his wife and kids.

Why? Because he’s looking for the signs of a planted car bomb, from forty years ago in Northern Ireland. You observe him doing this, you think “Oh, that’s a nervous tic, a ritual…”. But, it’s not–There are roots to it, and reasons.

Chesterton’s Law about the removal of fences applies here. And, there ought to be a corollary stated, that goes to the effect that there’s generally no behavioral pattern without an underlying cause, however remote and obscure.

They apply even when the distance of space or time or culture isn’t necessarily that large — as between neighbourhoods or across a city or between two broadly similar cities, as the Pittsburgh Left indicates. Once you get to state/province or country/country, even quite similar countries, many bets are off. Not all, but many.

I grew up in Ontario with two British born parents and my upbringing had some British elements, not by design but habit. Still found Britain quite dissimilar. Adjustable, but dissimilar.