The Wall Street versus Main Street narrative is popular. It is comforting to believe that greed and putting your own interests ahead of others are confined to Wall Street, while the rest of us are merely innocent, norm-abiding bystanders.

Wall Street’s behavior does feed this perception. The real estate boom preceding the Great Recession of 2007-08 featured an ugly feeding-frenzy devoid of ethics. Some of our most highly esteemed financial institutions developed a massive ethical blind spot that violated our society’s most treasured moral norms.

A closer look, however, shows a more nuanced – and balanced – picture. Yes, the banks had lowered their ethical norms. Yes, they had handed out so-called “liar mortgages” indiscriminately. Yes, the rest of us were fleeced.

But that doesn’t mean that Main Street’s ethical norms remained pristine while Wall Street’s norms deteriorated. The liar mortgages were given to people who blatantly lied about their own financial situation.

Unfortunately, we appear to be living through a period of general decline in ethical norms. Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as “anomie” – a state of normlessness.

Such periods are not “black swans” that happen only once every few centuries; they are normal occurrences that break out in all cultures at one time or another. We are living through one of these bad patches today here in the United States.

A general decline in ethical standards is not easy to detect or document.

My research on public values suggests that one sign of moral decline is an increasing frequency of over-the-top behavior by law-abiding citizens. Ordinarily well-behaved citizens engaging in bizarre and deviant behavior is a danger signal of something morally amiss in the larger society.

For example, our nation’s colleges are experiencing steady annual increases in student rape. The rape rate has now reached 20 percent – one out of five students are victims of a crime that once used to invoke the death penalty. The president of the United States cited this statistic as one of his major worries.

Our military services – the navy, army and air force – are all currently caught up in a series of scandals that has the Secretary of Defense worried about our moral character and courage. The scandals involve a wide range of violations of social norms: cheating , drug abuse, accepting kickbacks and sexual misconduct. Hundreds, if not thousands of military personnel are involved, including high-ranking admirals and generals.

On the civilian front, an ever growing of number of Congressmen and other government officials are being caught in sexual misconduct. One example of weakened moral norms stands out: In a movie theatre just outside of Tampa, Florida a 71-year-old retired police captain shot and killed a younger man – a total stranger – because the younger man wouldn’t stop texting while the movie previews were playing.

Two ordinarily law-abiding citizens allowed their own willfulness to override the most elementary of social norms, resulting in violence and tragedy. This is an extreme example of over-the-top individualism – people sweeping aside social norms that interfere with their own desires. “I’m going to do what I want. If you don’t like it, fuck you!” Ordinary citizens are crossing the line, oblivious to the moral norms that have prevailed in our society since we became a nation.

I don’t know what an ideal education looks like, but I do know that mine was different from most. Nestled among the redwood trees at a public school in a small town of 100 families, I grew up in one of the last true havens of radical 60s thought.

They say that Janis Jopin used to play there.

My initials are carved into the road by the post-office – the only public building besides the school. This wasn’t some act of teenage vandalism – though such a deed is not unheard of. The road had washed out. The road from the post office up to the tracks, where the railway used to run. A lot of families live up that way, and the road had washed out.

So what’s a community with no police, no fire department, no Public Works Department, to do? They rebuilt the road. Among them, they had the knowledge, expertise, and skill, and they rebuilt the road.

And the school walked all the students over so we could watch. This is how our community works, they told us. When something breaks, we work together to fix it.

That’s just how it goes.

At some point, later or earlier, I’m not sure – a student teacher who’d just started working there, came into my classroom and started pulling kids out. Someone had seen a student throwing rocks at cars (not outside the realm of possibility). They didn’t know who it was. Someone blond.

So they pulled all the blond kids out of class and started sending them home. Somebody needed to be punished.

We protested. We were told adults knew best. We pushed back. Adults invoked their power. We didn’t back down.

We were, I believe, about to go into full on riot mode, when the teacher explained it was all a set up. Welcome to a unit on American internment camps during World War II.

It was definitely a unique education.

I’ve never understood the story of Pandora’s box. Pandora opened the box, allowing all the evils of the world to escape. The only thing left was hope.

So. If the box was full of evils, why was hope in there in the first place? If opening the box is what unleashed evil upon the world, how is it a good thing that hope didn’t make it out? Doesn’t that mean the world doesn’t have hope?

To hear it told, that doesn’t seem to be the point of the story.

Of course, the whole thing was a set up. An elaborate plan to punish man and degrade us in response to our burgeoning capacity.

Prometheus defied the gods and gave man fire. For that he won an eternity chained to a rock having his liver devoured by an eagle.

Like Sisyphus, though, one must imagine Prometheus happy – the sheer torture of being eaten alive balanced by the knowledge of what he’d done. Not only had he created man – shaping us out of clay – he’d truly given us life. He gave us fire. He gave us knowledge. He made us conscious.

It was that gift of consciousness which the gods could not abide.

And so, Prometheus endured eternal torment, a daily cycle of liver devoured and regrown. The worst punishment the gods could muster. But even knowing his fate, Prometheus would commit his crime again. I imagine him calmly greeting his winged tormentor – a painful reminder that what he’d accomplished was truly miraculous.

But punishment for Prometheus was not enough. He was made to suffer for his act, but what of the young upstarts, recently blessed with consciousness, empowered by Prometheus’ fire? How should the gods punish them?

Pandora and her box were gifts to Prometheus’ brother: Epimetheus was as near sighted as Prometheus was far sighted. The perfect rube for a celestial con. Pandora, created specially for the occasion, was endowed with insatiable curiosity and, perhaps, a healthy dose of defiance.

Pandora was told she must never, ever open the box with the full intention that she would, of course, open the box. She was the unwitting time bomb sent to unravel the power of man.

So she opened the box – as she was instructed not to and as she was designed to. All the evils of world were unleashed.

Except hope.

The moral here, I suppose, is this: even with all forms of evil forever tormenting us, even with despair, illness, conflict and worse, even in a world without hope – we still have life.

We still have fire.