What are good manners?

At the minimum, social conventions. 

I always believed a tie was designed to be uncomfortable, that it had no real point otherwise. I thought the buttons on a suit jacket—button this one, but not that one—were more or less random ways of building secret knowledge tests into daily life, arcane little rituals to screw the regular guy.

The author of this article describes manners in this way:

They are norms or customs which describe a polite way of doing something, and later become rules, and then after that approach doctrine. Whether they’re “real” in some sense doesn’t really matter. If manners did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

Polite, rules, inventions. A world of constructs and appearance open to be exploited by deceptive minds.

In any case, what's wrong with the regular guy?

The article here.

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