In 1993, New York's Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart from shared standards. When unwritten rules are violated over and over, Moynihan observed, societies have a tendency to 'define deviancy down' - to shift the standard. What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.
( Steven Levitsky )
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