Main Character Syndrome
I had completely forgotten that “The Shopping Cart Theory” had done in a round in the meme discourse a few years back. I rediscovered this when I went looking for that video for yesterday’s blog post where the guy pushes his cart over the mountains in the style of a BBC nature documentary. This means I had also forgotten the small but very loud crowd that pushed back on it, and how hard they worked to justify not doing something that they didn’t want to do.
I’m not going to link to any, because they don’t deserve attention, but the web is positively littered with terrible takes from a few years ago building giant edifices of faux-philosophy to explain why having the moral sense of a toddler is Good, Actually.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised—I’ve been Extremely Online for about as long as that was possible to be, and there’s always some low-empathy dork using the biggest words they can find to justify being a jerk to everyone around them.
Because there are always too many people out there with a scorching case of Main Character Syndrome.
You know Main Character Syndrome: this isn’t garden variety selfishness, or thoughtlessness, this is the deep-seated belief that they’re the main protagonist of reality, and that everyone else exists only to support their journey. I’m only going to do the cool stuff I want to do, and someone else, who is not the main character, will handle all the stuff that keeps things working.
These are the same people that think if the missiles fly they’re going to shoulder-roll out of the way, cut the sleeve of their leather jacket, and then drive around having adventures, not realizing that no, we’d all end up in the mob of people in the background.
And I know I shouldn’t be surprised that people work really hard to justify not doing something they don’t want to do, because we’re watching a global pandemic roll on into its fourth year because too many people weren’t willing to wear a mask for another couple of weeks back in spring 2020.
And this is all way older than the Web—there’s reliably been enough Main Characters that Any Rand, the American Liberal Party, and the post-Regan/Thatcher neoliberal establishment have all run a tidy grift reassuring tteenage boys they don’t have to be nice to people.
But somehow arguing against returning shopping carts got me. And not just saying “nah, I don’t bother,” but genuinely attempting to construct an argument where it’s ethically wrong to ever ask someone to return their carts.
There’s something deeply American about wanting not only to be a jerk to strangers, but to also be immune from criticism for doing so. Just own it, dorks. Don’t waste our time justifying it.
There’s a joke that libertarians are like house cats—fiercely convinced of their own independence while completely dependent on a system they neither see nor unserstand.
This feels like the final evolved form of that: Someone sitting at home, using the vast infrastructure our civilization they don’t understand which is maintained by people they don’t value, typing out long justifications why they should get to act like a jerk without being criticized.
This is not an original sentiment, but this feels like the end result of 4 decades of the neoliberal project: People sitting utterly alone, convinced that any personal inconvenience is tyranny, unable to even imagine what solidarity looks like, all while the planet burns and the rich get richer and sell another toy store for scrap.
So, on the record, let’s be real clear here: the meme is correct. Returning the shopping cart is the objectively correct thing to do, and it is the perfect test of how someone will behave in a situation where there are no consequences for not having empathy.
If you’re capable of using the cart, you can put it back where it goes. We’re trying to have a civilization here. We’re only going to get through this together.