Cart Narcs a Symptom of Unrestrained Utopianism.
Recently videos of so-called “Cart Narcs” have gained popularity on the internet. If you’re not familiar with the concept, these are people accosting others in supermarket parking lots when they don't return their shopping carts to the stalls. The “narcs”(since when is being a narc a good thing?) seems to be operating on the idea of “Shopping Cart Theory” a concept that from what I can find seems to have first appeared on 4chan in May of 2020. It argues that,
"The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.”
At its core I think we can all see the point, an unreturned cart could damage someone's car and will make more work for the store employees, so returning it is the decent thing to do. But the theory does not end there…
“A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it. The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.”
Putting aside the obvious influence of 4chan, the cart narcs took this theory and ran with it. Deciding that they could make people become more moral by publicly shaming them for not returning their carts. A course of action that ironically completely invalidates the point of the theory, by creating a social cost for not returning your cart where previously there was no incentive either way.
While we can not be sure about the political views of these cart narcs, we can make some informed assumptions about their philosophy and where it comes from. The idea that you can enforce morality by encouraging “good” actions isn't new, it's been around since the dawn of Man, but in the American tradition it has its roots in New England, and the puritans who settled there.
New England was settled by people looking to create a Christian utopia in the New World. And this idea and drive still exist, in the ideological descendants of the pilgrim fathers. Much of the ideological friction we see in our society today comes from the fact that there are two competing factions with differing ideas on what actions are “good” and should be encouraged.It is however the modern progressive that has more fully embraced the utopian outlook of the pilgrims.
A functioning society requires, to some extent, the participation of everyone in it. Utopianism takes this principle and turns it up to eleven, requiring the participation of both believer and nonbeliever. This is why the modern progressive talks about how anti-racism or anti-fascism requires positive action from those professing such beliefs, and why inaction is seen as a moral equivalent to actually being a racist, a fascist, etc.
This utopian drive has led to many good changes in our society, abolition, civil rights, and workers rights just to name a few. But, it has also led to excesses, from witch trials, to modern witch hunts. The main difference between past christian progressive movements and today's secular movement is the conception of what kind of utopia we are creating. In the past it was the kingdom of heaven on earth, today it is entirely secular.
The trends we are seeing in modern progressivism today are the result of that utopian drive becoming divorced from the moderating influence of christian theology. Christianity at its core has always been about how imperfect man is saved by willingly accepting the Grace of God, via Christ's sacrifice, and how accessing this grace is a personal journey between the Individual and God, with the Church existing as a guardian and guide along that journey. Without this theological acknowledgement of individual responsibility, the utopian dreamers of today don't see any meaningful difference between the individual and the group, leading to the prevalence of talking points such as,
All Billionaires and Millionaires are evil, and it is impossible for them to have gained their wealth through fair means..
All work is exploitative
All White people, and only white people are racist
All men are a threat to women
All people of color are oppressed
Etc.
All these talking points collectivize motivations for behavior across all members of a group, allowing for progressives to conceive policy based on collective identity as opposed to individual action.
This is a very convenient outlook to have if you're trying to create a perfect society. It means one is able to say that certain groups must behave in certain ways to better society (e.g. all white people must acknowledge they are inherently racist, and spend all their efforts in atonement for this). It allows you to identify groups that have values opposed to your own and need to be removed or as one reddit comment put it “the RepubliQan Party should be both recognized as a terrorist organization and shut TF down. This isn't a game or a valid difference of opinion in the 21st century; they are draconian monsters who are in dire need of deprograming, and remediation, for the sake of the planet.”. You can single out individuals who are resisting conforming to their group's roles as needing to be either reeducated or removed (e.g. gay, trans, black or Hispanic conservatives).
This is what happens when individualism is rejected and replaced with its poor imitation, intersectionality. In the Superman comics Bizzaro is a clone of Superman that went wrong, and while from a distance he looks like Superman, he is in fact a bumbling parody of the real Man of Steel. Because it's such a powerful metaphor it has made its way out of the comics and into general discourse. In this case what we are seeing is the replacement of individualism with its Bizarro version, Intersectionality. Intersectionality allows for a hierarchy to be established based on who can claim to be most oppressed, as opposed to the one based on merit produced via individualism. And even though logically intersectionality will end with the acknowledgement that every individual is ultimately unique. In practice it is used to suppress the individuality of the “oppressor class” by encouraging its members to adopt “oppressed identities” in order to escape their guilt by joining collectives that actively suppress independent thought and encourage the adoption of the new utopian values. So while Bizzaro goes around thinking he's helping protect Metropolis in actuality he's undoing all of Superman's hard work, making everything worse in the process. So too does Intersectionality go about trying to fix things that individualism has already solved, while actually making everything worse.
So this brings us back to the “Cart Narcs”. When I first saw these cart narc videos I found them cringe inducing and annoying. Why is this? It's not because I felt called out like I'm sure they would say, off the top of my head I can’t think of one time I've abandoned a cart in a parking lot. So why did I feel like the cart narcs were the bad guys in the video? Initially I thought it was because it's all for show, and it felt a little bit like a modern BUMFIGHTS, where you have an “influencer” capitalizing on the misery of others for profit. After some thought though, I realized even more than that it's because the outcome of their intervention is ultimately worse than the outcome of the person abandoning the cart. From the videos we can see that the person being accosted gets angry and combative, while the narc keeps laughing at them. Directly because of the “narcs” intervention there's more anger and negativity in the world.
Now you may ask,
“What about the negativity that will be created by a cart getting caught in the wind and slammed into someone's car? Or what about the poor employee who has to work late gathering up carts? Surely it's better that the inconsiderate dick who abandoned the cart feels that negativity than a poor bystander?”
And I’d say you’d be correct, if that was the only other option.
Except it's not, if these “cart narcs” really cared about making the world a better place they wouldn't be spending all this time and energy camping out in parking lots looking for people to abandon their carts. Instead they would be going around gathering up the loose carts and returning them to the stalls themselves. Because they don't do this, they are just as bad if not worse than the people abandoning their carts. If you abandon your cart you're just acting selfishly, but by confronting people the “narcs” are acting like petty tyrants, in pursuit of their utopia of cart less parking lots.
Is the pursuit of Utopia wrong? No, not at all, when individual liberties are protected and respected the utopian vision encourages people to take individual action to make the world a better place, and sometimes in the face of true evil one must make a forceful stand and say “not here and not today”. It must however always be done with the understanding that not everyone will make good choices, and not all bad choices are evil. Allowances must be made for this to prevent good natured people from becoming tyrants. It is always preferable to lead by example than by force, and when force is used it MUST be moderated by a respect for individual agency.
Utopia is always sold as a beautiful idea, but too often its pursuit will devolve into a dystopian perversion of the marketing, and It is only the respect for individual agency that has prevented the American Experiment from becoming such a dystopia.