With the news that Spirit Airlines is going out of business, a strange and unrepeatable Golden Age of aviation comes quietly to a close. Not because Spirit was a great airline — no one seriously contends that — but because no other carrier contributed so generously and so consistently to the national archive of viral chaos. Entire subgenres of social media content owe their existence to those fluorescent yellow planes. Spirit did not merely transport passengers, it produced episodes. It was, in effect, Jerry Springer Air. What appeared on the surface to be a commercial enterprise was, at a deeper level, a social experiment, one that tested how much strain the thin fabric of public civility could endure before tearing outright.
The formula, once understood, was almost elegant in its brutality. Position yourself as the Walmart of the skies. Strip away every civilizing cushion: comfort, space, free bags, flexibility, and whatever remains of dignity. Take an already unpleasant experience (modern air travel), and convert it into a pressure cooker of fees, hard seats, tight aisles, delays, and small, accumulating humiliations. Then cram strangers together in close quarters, add a handful of exhausted authority figures, a few desk clerks who delight in causing frustration, and a flight crew wholly unequipped for the sociology experiment unfolding around them. Roll the cameras!
The result was not constant chaos as millions of flights occurred without incident, but something more interesting: a reliable production of edge cases. And in the age of smartphones, the edge cases are the only cases that matter. A minor slight turns into a mid-air shouting match, hair being pulled in the aisles, pajamas being ripped, followed by the obligatory flight diversion, reinforcing the airline’s reputation as less a mode of transportation than a stage. Those of us who go to court for a living see this sort of thing in the hallways all the time. But in the air? This was a first!
And you always knew it was Spirit. It had to be. If you saw a video of a fight on an airplane, you knew it wasn’t Air Alaska, or Air France, of Lufthansa, or Delta Business Class, or United Polaris. It was always Spirit.
Spirit was basically a redux of the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, too, ordinary people were placed into an artificially constrained environment, with some assigned to be guards, others prisoners, and the results were immediate and unsettling. The guards grew authoritarian, the prisoners became distressed and emotionally unstable, and the entire exercise spiraled so quickly that it had to be terminated after six days even though it was supposed to last two weeks.
Spirit, to its credit, lasted rather longer. But the underlying lesson is the same, and it is not a comfortable one. Human behavior is far more contingent than we like to believe. Remove the small rituals and structures that reinforce civility — space, comfort, predictability, dignity — and replace them with friction, stress, and anonymity, and you get instant volatility. When people feel squeezed, they behave differently. And when an institution’s entire business model depends on monetizing that squeeze, it should not be surprised when the results occasionally resemble a gate-area episode of Cops.
In that sense, Spirit’s legacy is oddly instructive. It did not create bad behavior so much as reveal it and amplify it. It showed, in compressed and exaggerated form, how fragile the norms of public conduct really are, and how quickly they can erode when the underlying incentives change.
For years, we laughed at the videos. Now, with Spirit gone, we may find that the joke was less about the airline than about us.
You may also be interested in:
- Why Decency Matters: Lessons from ‘Young Woman and the Sea’ – Conservative Opinion
- The Laughter of a Lost Civilization – Conservative Opinion
- The Enemy Is Us: Facing Our Complicity in Violence – Conservative Opinion
- The Devils We Know – Conservative Opinion
- Why Wouldn’t We Have a Mental Health Crisis? – Conservative Opinion
