The great exception is those who while/thanks to flaunting community standards become rich and powerful. Such people have ways of rehabilitating their reputations by donating to charity a small portion of brazenly-gotten gains, and gossip about these individuals’ brazenness also becomes one of the ways that their status is recognized and valued. To be rich or powerful is to not have to play by the rules; to be blatantly not playing by the rules suggests power or wealth. Or, to elaborate on what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has said in regards to our political system, an ambitious American does not seek to be a part of the system, either as a ruler or as a subject. He or she seeks to manipulate the system for his or her own ends, and thus to feel and appear superior to the many lesser souls who do participate and are manipulated.

        If, however, those of us of the dwindling middle and burgeoning lower classes let our children treat stores’ merchandise in the same uncaring manner that stores treat children and parents, the chances are good that we will find ourselves scorned by other members of our communities. (Be this for acting inferior or uppity.) It may be only the longtime big-city residents among us (people such as me) who even consider letting a child run amok in a store. In a big city, should a store or group of people find one’s behavior objectionable, there is always another store or group, and there is little chance that these next will have heard the least thing about one’s behavior elsewhere. In a small town such as the one where my family was then spending weekends, most everybody hears of most everything out of the ordinary that anyone else has done — along with whatever additional outrages the local gossips invent. (Workplaces feature similar communal practices.)

A parent has a great, if not entirely fulfillable, responsibility to prepare his child to survive as well as possible in the social, professional, commercial and psychological jungles in which the child will find himself. And learning must be done step-by-step. Even if a child is ready to understand a complex moral argument, if he lacks a sufficient foundation of experience it will simply be an academic concept, hard to take seriously or retain.

         In The Education Henry Adams recalls how the New York politician Thurlow Weed had told him “some stories of his political experience which were strong even for the Albany lobby”.

         “‘Then, Mr. Weed,’” the young Adams asked, “‘do you think that no politician can be trusted?’

         “Mr. Weed hesitated for a moment; then said in his mild manner: — ‘I never advise a young man to begin by thinking so.’”

          At the time, Adams reports, he assumed Weed was saying that youth needed illusions. But as he grew older he came to see that the point was that “young men most needed experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a general rule.”
      

May each parent decide for himself at what age his child is ready to move on from “Put that back where you found it” to “Americans think that if you are not going to buy an item you should put it back where you found it”, or, “The store has suckered you into grabbing that item, now do you want to let it sucker us into giving them money for it?” Or, “If you think anyone may have seen you break that item and you want to fit in, it may make sense for you now to make a show of telling some member of the store staff what you did and that you want to pay for the item.”

          Or perhaps the task is much more straightforward: devote all one’s efforts to ensuring that one’s children have sufficient wealth, power and lack of empathy so that the rules do not apply to them.