I once lived in a building that called for an emergency meeting one weekend, to decide if a group of four young men could continue renting an apartment on the premises. Their crime was watching too much television, apparently, which they did right through the day, presumably because one or the other would always be home. It wasn’t the first time our building’s secretary reacted the way he did. These meetings were common, called after one or several residents would complain about some male or female tenant supposedly disturbing the peace. Eventually, a few years after I had moved, I found out that a series of rules had been put in place to dissuade all owners from renting out their homes. This couldn’t have happened without consensus on who could or couldn’t stay in that building. It saddened me.

And yet, the weirdest thing about this tame anecdote is how uneventful it now seems, because of how we have normalised the setting up of mini fiefdoms in our societies and townships. This behaviour would be considered strange in most countries, because I haven’t come across such dictatorial tendencies anywhere else, but we take it all for granted because of how common it is.