Anti-civicality

What I'm calling "anti-civic" behavior is trickier to pin down. This refers to anything that injures the connective tissue of the social egregore itself, whether by undermining the preference-aggregation process, or impairing its ability to act, or by bringing its very existence into doubt. Anti-/pro-civicality is difficult to explain or define under methodological individualism, because it deals holistically with the social aggregate as such and not merely with a sum of individuals. It is a concept that only makes sense in the context of a society possessing a corporate existence, such as a guild. In a thriving culture of guild participation, people would learn experientially how to recognize anti- and pro-civic behavior from an early age. But in our present world, most of us have never been in a position where concerns about anti-civicality even come up at all, and so there are no shared background norms to refer to. People who are new to this game will therefore tend to blithely violate these "norms" without even a second thought, because in daily life they are accustomed to behaving in perfectly acceptable pro-social ways (according to the individualistic understanding) and receiving no negative feedback for it. It's hard to discourage certain types of behavior if you can't even articulate what the problem is, or if the very idea that it could be a problem has never occurred to any of the people involved. Hence the following