Why Cruise Ships Function Better Than Your Local City/Town

The ironies of consumer capitalism abound...

This essay follows up on last week’s observations on a family cruise experience:

The Modern Cruise Experience Will Exceed Your Snarky Expectations

Ask 10,000 social scientists for a definition of community, and you’ll get 5,000 different answers. The other 5,000 will dodge the question entirely because the topic makes them instantly sweaty and nervous. Why? Well, many social scientists are misfits and highly suspicious of anything approaching the concept of ‘normative.’

Sigh. We need a definition to understand why a privately managed cruise ship probably offers a more functional human community than your local town.

“COMMUNITY” DEFINED

Communities exist to a) protect and b) nurture their members. The fuel of communities is shared obligation and sacrifice. Without members sacrificing something for the sake of community norms, communities simply can not function healthily. Communities that ask little of members succumb to various forms of corruption or exist as phantom, easily politicized identity groups (e.g., ethnic identities, MAGA).

I would argue that any group in question is not a real community if you do not feel inconvenienced as a member (or you are NOT a committed member). Constraints on autonomy are critical to a viable community. The constraints shouldn’t feel onerous, but you know they are there.

Individuals in corrupt communities (families with neglectful parents, corrupt municipalities) will often disengage and revert to more minor forms of normative community, such as their ethnic group or residential family group, and, in the worst cases, they survive with a partner or even alone hooking up with a transient parade of transactional allies (i.e., cue The Last of Us).

Communal corruption stems from something my anthropological colleagues often fail to note due to their anarchist bias: bad faith leadership. Regardless of how many selfless members it has, a community will offer neither meaningful protection nor real nurturing without mature leaders who spend most of their time defending community norms (and sacrificing a lot of their time in doing so).

Real leaders interact nonstop with their members; they don’t hide from them.

Real leaders do not have time for much leisure, any more than a busy 19th-century farmer/father managing his family farm.

Leisure does not exist for real community leaders; something we often forget.

Leaders do not issue shock-and-awe directives to their communities, terrify community members, and then fly off to play golf and dine nonstop for three and a half days straight.

THE GANG AS A DESPERATE COMMUNITY

Even gangs can vary based on this variable of mature leadership. The worst possible gang is essentially a criminal cult of weak-minded age peers, led by a narcissist. Not a new thing in the history of urban civilization. On the other hand, La Cosa Nostra had a strong, internal moral code in the 19th and 20th centuries, based on the honor rules of male-dominated Sicilian culture. Yes, there is cruelty inside the mafia, but there is also order. There are rules. There is a strong concept of a good Don versus a corrupt one—a protector versus a psychopath.

Mafias and gangs are violence-based communities that only thrive in times and places overtaken by poverty and civic disorder at higher levels of community formation. In these broken worlds, gangs oversell protection and under-deliver on nurturing. That is the terrible bargain they offer in distressed societies. And that is why people flee such broken places… anyway they can.

How The Homeless Expose America’s Uniquely Weak Community Bonds

For much of human history, the scope of community has been clan/caste and family. That was it. Some in America would like to return to this era. We are so far from this family-centered world, though, it is beyond impossible to return to it. Almost every basic human need relies on global trade and complicated corporate alliances. Ironically, the individual is our unit of action, analysis, and responsibility for most life decisions. Our market economy prefers the individual as the analytic focus. Most of us like it this way, too, deep down. We crave flexibility, optionality, and a lack of rigid obligations, especially to family.

When you grew up comfortably in America's middle class and then personal problems and a series of bad luck incidents brought you to homelessness, you will fight it hard. You will try to defend your dignity and privacy by gathering resources anywhere you can so you can crawl back alone to where you were.

Yet, our society makes escaping homelessness incredibly hard because, deep down, we are all trained to blame the fallen, whether or not we admit this unconscious bias. And this includes family members. And the fallen believe they should deal with their plight as lone individuals. They live in a cloud of deep shame.

Patrick Fealey’s story in Esquire highlights how individuals, rightly or wrongly, fall out of local communities (municipal, work, and family) and are ignored (or even blamed) for their misfortune. The suddenly homeless individual quickly becomes invisible and morally suspect.

Image Courtesy of Esquire Magazine

Patrick’s story is generalizable for one reason: it shows how tough it is for a middle-class person with little savings, living alone, to get back into housing in this callous country. This simply does not happen in the rural villages of Asia or tribal Amazonia. Help is partly everywhere in those worlds because ‘living’ there is very cheap. On the other hand, living in first-world countries is expensive per capita.

Enter the Cruise Ship Community

America, we have a problem. A publicly traded, for-profit, foreign-owned leisure company offers more mature leadership, protection, and nurturing within a leisure context than most local governments can in their 24/7 public service context.

Yes, a for-profit community has a much easier time raising money for the required infrastructure it needs. I agree. And, yes, a leisure community is full of people predisposed to happiness as they engage in communal activities. Hence, they are probably easier to satisfy than the jaded citizens of a local town or city who wake up with low expectations about rent and local road conditions.

Nevertheless, exploring any modern community that functions well is worth exploring to see what we can learn, even when profiteering is the ultimate origin of the community. I’m borrowing from the business concept of ‘best practices,’ which remains, sadly, America’s most consistent repository of thought leadership on ideal communities and mature leadership (i.e., capitalism wants healthy businesses).

Let me make the case for cruise ships as the epitome of a healthy community -

1. PROTECTION- Your first move when you board a modern cruise ship is an obligation. You must head straight to your stateroom’s Muster station and receive a safety briefing. When you cross the gangway, staff will be there to interrupt your forward movement and ask you IF you know your Muster station. On Royal Caribbean, the staff use a customer service tone to nudge you to your mandatory Muster briefing. Remember, you can not enter your stateroom later until you have received this briefing and had a safety officer tag it in their giant database by scanning your Seapass. But rather than use a military tone of command and demand, staff simply smile and ask, “Have you located your Muster Station?” The company then positions enough people at the gangway to contact everyone coming in. They staff appropriately to nudge everyone. There are six muster stations and you need to divide passengers properly or you could never evacuate these ships in an orderly manner.

   

   Royal Caribbean’s Quantum-class megaships have 18 motorized, supply-filled, sealed boats holding 370 passengers each. They drop vertically into the water from the fifth deck. Passengers exit down inflated slides from three muster stations on each side and into the waiting rescue boats below. There IS a plan that forces you to know your muster location upfront. Safety is everything (safety also protects corporate assets from immense passenger litigation!).

2. Nurturing - I described the incredible hospitality on Royal Caribbean’s big ships last week. I was honestly shocked. I have experienced this level of service only at the Four Seasons, Taj, or Fairmont hotels. You won’t find it at any middle-class hotel in the United States. Or, if you do, it was a fluke. But, daily leadership moments also mattered to tying 6,600 strangers together into a community. Young, ‘Latin-accented’ Cruise Director Anna gave morning and evening calendar announcements over the PA system in a well-trained radio voice sure to pique the attention of all the older men on board. This is a reminder that ‘being attractive’ is an excellent tool in modern leadership! It gathers attention cleverly, not like the ‘leaders’ in The Handmaid’s Tale. The Scandinavian-accented Captain gave morning and evening itinerary and weather updates to prepare and reassure us that everything was on time (or delayed). These announcements reminded us that seasoned professionals were in charge, and ‘on it!’ Cruise leaders do not just make announcements at departure and return (i.e., like lousy faith politicians).

3. Rules and Obligations - All the staff on these ships are empowered to confront passengers breaking the rules. And they do. When I tried to get some coffee at the Solarium lunch buffet without a shirt one day, a uniformed dining room attendant quickly reminded me of the rule and gestured to the door. Oops. It wasn’t obnoxiously delivered, but it was firm. Pants in the white-clothed dining rooms? Not only did people wear pants, but most of us dressed up! Amazing how a small signal not to come in with your bathing suit on leads to semi-formal attire (for some folks). Healthy communities repeatedly advertise their standards and enforce them firmly but politely.

Epilogue - Our Inability to Solve Local Homelessness is A Failure of Leadership

Recently, I was on a podcast where we explored solutions to homelessness that do NOT involve raising an entitlement fund to redistribute cash (i.e., for rental deposits). The non-monetary solution I offered was conceptually simple - mature leadership at the city level that focuses on negotiating with corporate landlords who control local rent costs.

Mature city leaders would sacrifice their political capital to get local corporate landlords into one room for 2-3 days of discussions. Perhaps you might threaten to cancel their business licenses if they did not attend. Like a Quaker meeting, everyone would agree NOT to leave until participants reached a consensus, however painful for all. The objective would be to find alignment on rent ceilings for the struggling working class, the poor, and the homeless (i.e., not a rent cap on high-income renters). This kind of discussion almost never happens, because it is assumed that corporate landlords can not be seduced into such a room. Instead, American cities have politicians fighting with corporate leaders in the press, on social media, and relying on the symbolic violence of elections to ‘resolve’ matters of critical importance. We are seeing the limits of symbolic violence in the current era of intense political polarization.

Healthy communities do not simply replace physical violence with pure symbolic violence of election tit-for-tat. This is the false bargain Americans are making, because it allows us to avoid actual, high-conflict negotiations with community stakeholders. The wealthy hide in gated communities and ‘fund the opposition.’ No one insists that they come into a room and compromise. No one is willing to lose re-election by insisting and then shaming the corporate landlords who refuse to attend. But, mature leaders do insist, enforce, and shame members. They do.

If the themes in this piece resonate with you, you will enjoy my humor-laced social science critique of American individualism, winner of the 2024 Best Indie Nonfiction Book Award.

And, if you hate Amazon, you can purchase a discounted hardcover directly from Ingramspark (no Amazon involved).