Being Polite Doesn’t Make You Right

Lately I’ve seen a few viral incidents on social media that follow more or less the same pattern.

Someone does something that’s clearly wrong or against the rules.

Someone else calls them out. Sometimes quite aggressively. They’re angry, loud, or maybe just unpleasant to watch.

Then the person who was in the wrong apologizes.

They’re polite. Calm. Their body language looks much better than the person confronting them.

Then I open the comments.

“He already apologized.”

“At least he has better manners.”

“Why did the other guy have to get that angry?”

“He was wrong, sure, but look at the way he spoke.”

And somehow, the moral positions start to flip.

Obviously, I wasn’t there when any of these things happened. I’m seeing the same thing everyone else is seeing: short viral clips, whatever context is circulating around them, and people’s reactions on social media.

So I’m not particularly interested in deciding who is a good person and who is a bad person based on a few minutes of video.

What interests me more is how everyone watching reacts to it.

Because this pattern keeps showing up.

A question that should’ve been fairly simple:

who broke the rule?

slowly turns into:

who looked more polite?

And I think we mix those two questions far too often.

But he already apologized

One recent example I saw going viral involved an unofficial parking attendant.

From the context circulating online, a content creator confronted the attendant after his wife had previously been asked for parking money and there was an interaction that upset them. The location itself apparently had a sign saying parking was free.

I watched the clip, then went through the comments.

The reactions were mixed.

Some people focused on the original issue: if parking is supposed to be free, why is someone still collecting money?

But plenty of people started focusing more on how the two people behaved during the confrontation.

The parking attendant looked calmer.

He apologized.

Meanwhile, the person confronting him was emotional and spoke harshly.

And suddenly the parking attendant became the more sympathetic character.

I’ve seen another viral incident with basically the same pattern.

Someone was riding against traffic and got confronted by another rider who was actually going in the correct direction.

The person riding against traffic eventually apologized and looked polite while doing it.

The person confronting him was still angry.

Then the comments started shifting again.

“The guy who’s wrong actually has better manners.”

“You could’ve just told him nicely.”

“He already apologized.”

And every time I see something like this, I keep thinking:

Okay, but wasn’t he still riding against traffic?

Maybe the person confronting him was too emotional.

Maybe he could’ve spoken better.

Fair.

But that’s a second discussion.

Being bad at calling out a violation doesn’t somehow erase the violation that happened before it.

Both things can be true at the same time.

You can say someone was wrong for riding against traffic while also saying the person confronting him could’ve handled it better.

We don’t need to turn one person into the protagonist and the other into the villain.

But somehow, when the person who did something wrong looks more polite, we often give them a kind of moral high ground.

And I think there’s something strange about the way we understand manners when that happens.

I’m not against good manners

I actually think manners matter.

How we speak matters.

How we treat people matters.

Being right doesn’t automatically give us permission to humiliate someone.

But I think manners should shape how we do the right thing.

They shouldn’t become a substitute for being right in the first place.

Being polite and being right are two different axes.

You can be right and polite.

You can be right and annoying.

You can be wrong and polite.

And, obviously, you can be both wrong and annoying.

Ideally, you’re right and polite.

But if someone does something wrong and then behaves politely afterward, their politeness doesn’t retroactively make the original action correct.

Apologizing is good.

But an apology is a response to a mistake.

It’s not a time machine that makes the mistake disappear.

What concerns me more is when “good manners” start being used to shift attention away from the actual behavior.

As if someone getting angry about a violation is somehow a bigger problem than the violation itself.

“It’s only two thousand rupiah”

I don’t think this pattern stops at the comment section of a viral video.

There’s another pattern that feels very familiar in everyday life here.

“It’s only two thousand rupiah.”

“Just for a minute.”

“It’s nearby.”

“Just this once.”

“Everyone else does it.”

Parking somewhere that’s supposed to be free?

Come on. It’s only Rp2,000. It’s not going to make you poor.

Riding a motorcycle on the sidewalk?

Just for a bit. Traffic is terrible.

Going against traffic?

The U-turn is too far away.

Not wearing a helmet?

It’s nearby.

Parking wherever you want?

Five minutes.

Almost every small violation has a story that makes it sound reasonable.

And I understand why.

If you look at them individually, most of these things do seem insignificant.

Two thousand rupiah isn’t going to make me poor.

A motorcycle going twenty meters down a sidewalk probably isn’t going to collapse Indonesian civilization.

Someone riding to the minimarket without a helmet isn’t going to end the country either.

But I don’t think the interesting question is how much damage one tiny violation causes.

The interesting question is what happens when small violations are constantly treated as negotiable.

Because eventually we learn something:

rules are flexible.

Not flexible because there are legitimate exceptions built into them.

Flexible because having a reason that sounds reasonable enough is often enough.

And once enough people do the same thing for long enough, eventually it stops feeling like a violation.

It just becomes part of the environment.

When everyone treats it as normal, rules become suggestions

This is where I think social norms and law enforcement start interacting.

Indonesia obviously has much more complicated law-enforcement problems than people riding against traffic or unofficial parking attendants.

Sometimes the rule exists but enforcement is weak.

Sometimes it’s enforced, sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes the exact same behavior gets punished in one place and treated as completely normal a few hundred meters away.

And I think that inconsistency matters.

If formal enforcement were strong and consistent, public opinion wouldn’t matter quite as much.

If every motorcycle entering a sidewalk reliably faced a consequence, people could say “it’s only for a minute” a thousand times and it wouldn’t change much.

But when formal enforcement is weak, the social environment becomes more important.

People look at other people.

What does everyone else do?

What gets called out?

What gets ignored?

What is considered normal?

The problem is, when enforcement from the state is weak and social enforcement is extremely permissive, violations face almost no friction at all.

The police don’t do anything.

People around you stay quiet.

You see everyone else doing the same thing.

And when someone finally calls it out, somehow they’re the one being told they’re overreacting.

Eventually the question isn’t:

“Why are you breaking the rule?”

It’s:

“Why are you getting so angry about such a small thing?”

That’s a pretty bad feedback loop.

Violations keep happening because they feel normal.

They feel normal because they happen all the time.

And they keep happening because almost nothing happens when you do them.

Rules slowly stop being boundaries and become suggestions.

Follow them when it’s convenient.

Ignore them when you think people will understand.

Then why are we surprised when rule-bending is everywhere?

I don’t want to make the lazy argument that:

“People tolerate unofficial parking attendants, therefore Indonesia has corruption.”

Obviously it’s not that simple.

Corruption involves institutions, politics, power, economics, law enforcement, and a lot of other things far bigger than anything I’m talking about here.

But it’s still hard for me not to notice a familiar social pattern between them.

The habit of negotiating rules when we think our justification is good enough.

It’s only two thousand.

It’s only for a minute.

It’s just this once.

Everyone does it.

Other people are worse.

Nobody is getting hurt anyway.

The scale is obviously completely different.

I’m not equating someone riding against traffic with someone stealing public money.

That would be ridiculous.

But the mechanism we use to rationalize our behavior feels familiar.

Most of us don’t wake up thinking we’re going to deliberately do something wrong today.

Usually, we have a reason.

And the more often the people around us accept that reason, the easier it becomes to move the boundary a little further next time.

Today’s violation is small.

Tomorrow’s might still be small.

But the lesson we’re learning isn’t about the amount.

The lesson is:

rules can be negotiated as long as our reason sounds reasonable enough and the people around us are willing to tolerate it.

That’s why I don’t think a culture of following rules can be built through written laws alone.

It’s also built through thousands of tiny interactions about what we tolerate and what we decide isn’t acceptable.

This doesn’t mean everyone who runs a red light is a future corrupt official.

That’s absurd.

But I do think a society that gets comfortable saying “it’s fine” whenever someone bends a rule will have a harder time building a culture where rules are actually treated as boundaries.

Breaking the rule is comfortable. Calling it out isn’t.

There’s another part of this that I think helps keep the whole thing alive.

We’re often afraid of looking like the bad person when we tell someone they’re wrong.

And I get it.

Calling people out is uncomfortable.

Especially when everyone around you seems fine with what’s happening.

You might be called annoying.

Self-righteous.

Obsessed with rules.

Unempathetic.

Aggressive.

Or, again:

someone with no manners.

Sometimes the social cost of calling out a violation feels higher than the social cost of committing it.

And I think that’s backwards.

Imagine ten motorcycles going against traffic.

One person calls them out.

Then instead of supporting that person, nine other people say:

“Come on. Everyone uses this road like that.”

What does the eleventh rider learn tomorrow?

Not only that they can do it.

They also learn that if someone complains, there’s a decent chance the person complaining will be treated as the one causing trouble.

Now the violation isn’t just low-risk.

It’s socially safe.

And as long as breaking a rule feels more comfortable than calling it out, I don’t think we should be surprised when the violation keeps happening.

So should we be more confrontational?

Probably, yes.

But I should explain what I mean by that.

I don’t think every person who makes a mistake deserves to be humiliated, publicly shamed, or treated however we want.

Responses should still be proportional.

And obviously there’s a line between being firm, being angry, and using violence.

But I do think we’re too quick to treat confrontation as something automatically bad.

Sometimes people should feel uncomfortable when they’re doing something wrong.

Sometimes they need to be called out.

Sometimes anger is understandable.

And most importantly, if someone actually breaks the law, there should be a real consequence from the people and institutions responsible for enforcing it.

Ride against traffic? Get fined.

Run an illegal parking operation? Deal with the enforcement.

Commit corruption? Face the punishment.

Whether someone is polite or rude isn’t the variable that determines whether the violation happened.

Manners might matter in how we treat a person.

Accountability should still follow what they actually did.

I think we spend too much effort trying to create a situation where everyone stays comfortable.

But a society with rules sometimes requires discomfort.

Doing something wrong should have friction.

Whether that comes from the law, from the people around you, or at the very least from someone willing to say:

“No. That’s not okay.”

Maybe manners and firmness need to exist together

I don’t want to live in a society where everyone screams at each other every time someone makes a small mistake.

That sounds terrible too.

But I also don’t want to live in one where people get more angry about how someone calls out a violation than about the violation being called out.

Ideally, we have both.

Manners, but also principles.

Empathy, but also accountability.

Politeness, while still being able to say something is wrong when it is wrong.

Because manners without principles can easily become nothing more than keeping everyone comfortable.

And principles without manners can easily become arrogance.

What worries me is when we’re so afraid of appearing rude that we stop being willing to draw a line at all.

Especially when the majority already considers something normal.

Having an opinion that goes against the crowd is uncomfortable.

Calling out something everyone has learned to tolerate is uncomfortable too.

But if our idea of right and wrong eventually depends on how many people agree with us, then we’re just following wherever the crowd happens to go.

And the crowd isn’t necessarily right.

Maybe that’s what bothers me the most whenever I read the comment sections under those viral incidents.

It’s not that people have empathy for the person who broke the rule.

Empathy is good.

It’s not that they criticize someone for being unnecessarily harsh either.

That’s fair.

It’s that sometimes, in our effort to be the person who appears to have the best manners, we lose the courage to say something much simpler:

what’s wrong is still wrong.

Apologizing afterward is good.

Being polite is good.

Forgiving someone is good too.

But none of those things require us to pretend the violation doesn’t matter.

I don’t think an orderly society is one where everyone is afraid to call something out because they don’t want to look like the bad person.

Maybe an orderly society is one where breaking the rules feels more uncomfortable than saying that breaking them is wrong.

And if we’re not there yet, maybe we’re still a little too comfortable with the small violations we keep maintaining ourselves.