Living Under the Same Roof
Part 1: Moral Performance
There’s a woman standing in a parking spot on the street, holding up her right hand in a “stop” gesture to a driver attempting to park. She’s saving the spot for a friend. In her left hand, she holds her cell phone. The driver, gripping the steering wheel with his right hand, also has a phone raised in his left. They’re filming each other.
The exchange escalates. The man accuses the woman of blocking the road. The woman claims the man tried to run her down. And the cell phone cameras capture it all.
“I’m recording you!” shouts the man. “You’ll be famous!”
“I’m recording you too!” the woman retorts. “You’ll be in jail!”
What’s going on here? Even if you haven’t witnessed this kind of scene firsthand, chances are you’ve seen something like it online: a public standoff, moral outrage, and cell phones wielded like weapons of judgment. Sometimes the confrontation is outrageous. Sometimes petty. But increasingly, the goal isn’t resolution. It’s about the performance.
As a society, we’ve subordinated moral substance to moral theater. Often, these confrontations begin with a violation of a social norm. In this case, the woman holding the parking spot is clearly in the wrong, exercising entitlement in a way that grates on most people’s sense of fairness. Her behavior is frustrating and self-serving. But the man’s behavior deserves scrutiny too.
His initial goal was straightforward: to park his car. But once the camera came out, his priorities shifted. Filming the confrontation didn’t bring him closer to reaching his goal. It replaced it. The interaction turned into a performance of moral superiority. Justice gave way to justification. Winning the argument mattered more than solving the problem.
Private Behavior, Public Cost
Public confrontations aren’t new. People have always yelled, vented, and lost their cool. What is new is the size of the audience. What once occurred in the presence of a few bystanders now reaches millions in minutes. The viral video has transformed the nature of the performance.
Sociologist Erving Goffman, in his classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, explored how people manage their behavior in front of different audiences. He described life as a kind of stage: in public, we present our “front region” self. This is a well-groomed, socially acceptable version. In private, or the “back region,” we let down the mask. We speak freely, sometimes thoughtlessly. We break the script.
But in a world where every interaction might be recorded, back regions are vanishing. There is no guaranteed privacy. Not at work, not in a restaurant, not even in a car.
Real-world examples illustrate this collapse of boundaries:
- A man records himself berating a Chick-fil-A worker and uploads it. He loses his job, and his family suffers deeply.
- A drunken passenger assaults a taxi driver. The footage goes viral. He loses his livelihood.
- Countless videos expose people labeled as “Karens” for behaving badly in public.
Few would defend the behavior shown in these videos. But there’s a deeper question underneath: Should a behavior committed in a moment of weakness or stress — what Goffman would call a back region moment — lead to life-altering public consequences?
The man in the Chick-A-Fil video may have acted poorly, but his children lost their home. The punishment extended far beyond the offense. What used to be a moment of embarrassment has become a mechanism of social erasure.
When Resolution Isn’t the Goal
One of the quiet tragedies of this dynamic is that conflict resolution has been replaced by conflict performance. The goal is no longer to solve the issue. Instead, it’s to film it, to post it, to prove oneself right in the court of public opinion.
We’re not resolving problems. We’re showcasing them.
The parking lot standoff is just one example, but it captures a much broader trend. As moral performance gains clout, genuine communication suffers. And when every public interaction becomes a potential broadcast, everyone becomes both actor and audience.
In the next part of this series, we’ll examine the hidden forces that drive these performances, cognitive biases and distortions that shape how we perceive others and justify our own actions. These psychological shortcuts may feel like truth, but they often lead us further from it.
