You’re right and it depends largely on the framing. In a different setting I’d probably be for such a system of trust, in an Ivy League school my cynical view of it just seems more realistic to me.

The people who are studying at Princeton get told they are supposed to be the better than the others, are under constant pressure to perform and in an overall highly competitive environment. This is not an environment that builds trust, in my experience it builds distrust between competitors.

Trust to me should ideally be fostered in a system that encourages a collaborative environment, in which the students don’t surveil each other, but work together to achieve their goal of learning.

Short answer: yes!

This is all new to me and fascinating. If someone knows more, please correct me.

The way I understand it the system relies on students swearing on their honor not to cheat and then a system of self supervision (aka snitching). There is an honor committee that consists of students who make sure no one cheats, and who investigate cases where it is suspected. Additionally there seems to be a culture of snitching on each other, should anybody break code.

I guess this presupposes a culture of immens pressure and a zero sum game where collaboration between students is unthinkable because your peers are made out to be your direct competitors… sounds toxic as hell to me.

I know a guy who works for Apple. Quite high up too. He has dreamed of working there all his life and just because Tim Cook decided to crawl up trumps ass he did not change his views one bit. He gets payed incredibly well, builds products that he is excited about and gets a lot of additional benefits. From his point of view I don’t really see any reason for doubt. He does exactly what he always wanted to be doing. I assume it’ll be like that for many of the guys working there.

Mac Miller was probably the worst one… I’m a little younger than him and watching his career from early on felt like watching an older brother develop and making it big. He made the soundtrack to most of my youth.

Definitely a tragic one. RIP Danya

I think you’re onto something here, and I think it’s a feature, not a bug. The US have been at war the entire time since WW2, but they usually don’t have a draft. So they need to rely on different methods to motivate young men into becoming soldiers. An integral part of being a soldier is the use of violence to solve problems, usually to the point where you might be expected to kill. If your society sees violence and killing unacceptable you’re gonna have a hard time finding people who wanna sign up to do the killing for you. So you honor your veterans more than any other part of your population, you make movies and games about valiant soldiers fighting for the good cause and step by step you slowly manufacture a cultural climate that says killing and violence are legit means of achieving a goal, sometimes even necessary.

It‘s not one singular factor, like education or better mental health care or the group of people who own them. Sure, those are all important, but they only in part tackle the main underlying issue why people do these things. Young men (and nearly all mass shooters are young men) in american society are told that they are supposed to be achievers, they are supposed to get rich, be cool, have many friends, get a girl, get a house, get a fancy car and all the other status symbols. But most of them don’t see a way of achieving this, since it’s pretty unrealistic with how things are in capitalism. This tension between the life they want and some think deserve, and the life they actually lead is pretty tough to handle.

Most adjust their goals, or get into political activism, or hustle culture, or drugs or do whatever else to get over this perception of a stolen future. But a tiny group can’t get over it and they are angry at society for taking what they think is their rightful life from them. They usually find other people with similar resentments online, radicalise further, and at the end you have a tragedy. Guns aren’t even necessary, they just make it easier to hurt a lot of people in a short time span.

Now Switzerland isn’t socialist heaven, but there is in general a higher standard of living, better education, better mental health care and less demands for young men to become as rich as possible. There are also more strict checks when issuing guns than there are in some us states and strict rules about storage. So a 17 years old will be less likely to develop the toxic ideology needed to want to do something like a mass shooting, have a better safety net to deradicalise him and have a harder time getting the needed equipment.

This is obviously generalising a lot, so don’t take it as a universal answer, because there isn’t.

Yo I sympathise with the sentiment and it is really fucked that there is so little done about that stuff.

But, and I don’t mean this as an attack, you sound like you could use a news break for a while and maybe talk to someone in person. Sitting in bed at noon crying is definitely a sign of stuff being a bit out of balance and sometimes shit just gets too much to handle on your own in our time of flooding the zone with shit and hypernormalisation…

So let’s continue with the appeasement policy. Worked great last time…