CCarter spotted
@drave I like the idea of using shape names for it, inb4 fat is beautiful people are offended by it somehow lol.
Ok so that is a pretty good parallel with the american mafia on a lot of levels. The differences would be that the mafia culture was imported from Italy while the rhombus culture we see today is mostly homegrown. So what can we learn from the rise and fall of the American mafia? I mean the culture is still there in certain areas but it's only a ghost of what it once was. How did that problem begin and how did it get solved?
It started in insular Italian neighborhoods in big US cities, with the working poor. So that's familiar right? Dense pockets of one culture surrounded by another culture. In modern rhombus culture we see the neighborhoods formed this way because of segregation, government housing projects and later rent assistance programs. With the Italians it happened that way because first generation immigrants settled near other Italians, there was a language barrier and many people in the big cities were not excited about the influx of Italian immigrants. People didn't want them in their neighborhoods. That's because the English, Irish and German immigrants had gotten there decades earlier, they had gangs and territories 50 years before the Italians started coming in significant numbers. Oh yeah, white gang culture was the original gang culture in America. They owned the cops and the politicians, the Italians were the new kids on the block and so they formed gangs to protect their neighborhoods, people and their property.
When Mussolini started trying to wipe out the mafia in Italy the mobsters that could flee came to the US and landed in these neighborhoods. These guys brought organization and structure to the Italian gangs but most historians agree that if it had not been for prohibition the American mafia would not have become the force it became, it would have stayed a street gang type of organization. Prohibition was to the mafia what crack cocaine was to modern gangs, it caused an explosion of growth. A difference of course is that while prohibition was short lived, our ban on drugs fuels criminality to this day. See my thought is that if you want to steer a group of people away from certain behavior then you remove whatever is incentivizing that behavior and then fill the void with incentives to engage in better behavior. If drugs weren't profitable people would not sell them. If drugs weren't illegal they could be sold in gas stations. People wouldn't buy from the shady guy on the street, just like we wouldn't buy alcohol from him in current day. It's not so crazy, Portugal did it.
So overturning prohibition was a good thing to do, it was only strengthening the criminal organizations. Of course the mafia went on to engage in all types of other unsavory businesses to compensate. But what ultimately undid them was not the RICO laws or the purging of the corrupt police forces or the advent of the witness protection program, those things helped sure but the #1 factor was the assimilation of Italian Americans into the rest of America. The more generations they had away from Italy, the more their strong Italian nationalism weakened. In the heyday of the mafia they would go to prison for their countrymen, never breathing a word, their loyalty and sense of community kept them insulated, disciplined and organized. Their gradual assimilation into US culture made them more into individualists. Again this is why welfare reform is so important, allow those densely packed pockets of culture to dissipate and blend with the surrounding culture. Give people opportunities and incentives to moving up and out.
If the only successful people around you are drug dealers and criminals then you might grow up thinking that that is how you get success. It's lack of opportunities but also isolation from the rest of the population that creates these types of beliefs and cycles. You pointed out that mafia guys didn't leave the mafia after getting rich, firstly leaving the mafia is not as easy as all that and secondly they were almost certainly poor and young when they got in, if you spend 10 years as a criminal you probably have an arrest record and you probably don't have many other marketable skills or you would not have got in to begin with. I'm sure very few doctors and lawyers are quitting their jobs to become drug dealers. So the trick is to create a situation where joining a gang or being a criminal would be an unattractive, non lucrative choice compared to what else is available. JMO also thank you for the discussion, I missed this place <3