After watching Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it begs the question: WHY did people trust so easy back then? In today’s day and age, if you were to invite some stranger back to your apartment for some beers, let alone some pictures, red flags would immediately go off. So why were people so naive back back?
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I think that you have it a bit backwards: What changed to make us so paranoid that anyone and everyone can be, and should regarded as, a potential threat.
The answer is: People like Jeffrey Dahmer.
As a society, if you go to a small village, you’ll often see people who barely know one another actually be at least on fairly good terms, and that’s a norm. People in those places tend to act under the mantra of “you get baseline trust not to be a complete shitbag, until you prove that you’re a complete shitbag”.
In bigger cities, where you probably cannot remember the existence of everyone, it becomes a lot harder to give that baseline trust.
But people are now less prone to this, because Jeffrey Dahmer, and other nutjobs like him are now more well know cases. It’s not “why weren’t we afraid”, but rather, “why do we know to be afraid”?
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