Left turn here, but it points at what I see as the deep problem:
The other night I watched "Dredd", the one from 10 years ago. It takes place in a terrible dystopian megalopolis overrun with crime, right? What I noticed, though, is that even in that portrayal, 0.1% are ultra-criminals but 99.9% are just ordinary law-abiding people going about their business.
If we look around today, that's not what we see and not where we're headed. It's worse than a comic book writer could imagine.
The reason society is not (or historically had not been) overrun with crime wasn't because of ubiquitous and merciless law enforcement, or elaborate surveillance and security systems, or impenetrable defenses of people and property. It was because almost everyone found such behavior unthinkable.
You could theoretically commit crimes of all types, of course, but somewhere along the line in some way or another you absorbed that you should not. It was something you simply did not do. I came to realize that that had been woven into the very fabric of our societies, and was indeed an essential part of anything we would care to call "society".
But it is that process, that fabric, that the Elites have managed to erode. The resulting chaos and destruction are simply downstream effects of that.
So it's not just altering shoplifting laws and defunding police and prisoner release and the like, another big part is the ever more obvious two-tier "justice system". For example, if the cops found a baggie of coke in your house, would they just walk off and that would be the end of it? Sure, if you lived in the White House.
We all followed the law (more or less) because... we all followed the law (more or less). Plato pointed this out a long, long time ago:
Where the law is subject to some other authority and has none of its own, the collapse of the state, in my view, is not far off….
Funnily enough, the dude that made me think about the situation more deeply was Frederick Douglass. In fact, upon looking into it more, one of his famous quotes was, "I would unite with anyone to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
I had a friend in high school from Nigeria. Let's just say he didn't fit in well at my school. He played basketball but couldn't jump, he was too "ethnic" for most blacks at my school, and so on. Super nice guy. We played on some terrible basketball teams together. But he wore ankle weights for like a year straight until he could dunk. It was crazy.
We're still friends, and he runs a charity that literally drives around feeding homeless people at night. Doing something like that takes some real cajones. He even posts videos so people can see what the people and situations are actually like in some areas.
By comparison, there was this one dude on the track and cross-country teams that was black and "proper" (like preppie type dresser), fairly smart and all, but always rubbed me the wrong way. Almost never talked to him.
Turns out, he practiced track because he was a long-time drug runner. Had oodles of guns, was in multiple gangs, you name it. Even had an AK-47 LOL. This was a private school I went to, btw. Shitty, but private. Like $3000 a year when I started there LOL. It's like $18000 now, and I ain't that old.
Unfortunately for me, out of sheer boredom, I mainly hung out with the "shenanigans" crowd. It was hard for me to fault people that generally just want to have fun. Not always the best or smartest people though. But it gets REAL easy to sense people who have generally good intentions from those that don't.
Left turn here, but it points at what I see as the deep problem:
The other night I watched "Dredd", the one from 10 years ago. It takes place in a terrible dystopian megalopolis overrun with crime, right? What I noticed, though, is that even in that portrayal, 0.1% are ultra-criminals but 99.9% are just ordinary law-abiding people going about their business.
If we look around today, that's not what we see and not where we're headed. It's worse than a comic book writer could imagine.
The reason society is not (or historically had not been) overrun with crime wasn't because of ubiquitous and merciless law enforcement, or elaborate surveillance and security systems, or impenetrable defenses of people and property. It was because almost everyone found such behavior unthinkable.
You could theoretically commit crimes of all types, of course, but somewhere along the line in some way or another you absorbed that you should not. It was something you simply did not do. I came to realize that that had been woven into the very fabric of our societies, and was indeed an essential part of anything we would care to call "society".
But it is that process, that fabric, that the Elites have managed to erode. The resulting chaos and destruction are simply downstream effects of that.
So it's not just altering shoplifting laws and defunding police and prisoner release and the like, another big part is the ever more obvious two-tier "justice system". For example, if the cops found a baggie of coke in your house, would they just walk off and that would be the end of it? Sure, if you lived in the White House.
We all followed the law (more or less) because... we all followed the law (more or less). Plato pointed this out a long, long time ago:
I guess that's one for all the doomers out there.
Funnily enough, the dude that made me think about the situation more deeply was Frederick Douglass. In fact, upon looking into it more, one of his famous quotes was, "I would unite with anyone to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
I had a friend in high school from Nigeria. Let's just say he didn't fit in well at my school. He played basketball but couldn't jump, he was too "ethnic" for most blacks at my school, and so on. Super nice guy. We played on some terrible basketball teams together. But he wore ankle weights for like a year straight until he could dunk. It was crazy.
We're still friends, and he runs a charity that literally drives around feeding homeless people at night. Doing something like that takes some real cajones. He even posts videos so people can see what the people and situations are actually like in some areas.
By comparison, there was this one dude on the track and cross-country teams that was black and "proper" (like preppie type dresser), fairly smart and all, but always rubbed me the wrong way. Almost never talked to him.
Turns out, he practiced track because he was a long-time drug runner. Had oodles of guns, was in multiple gangs, you name it. Even had an AK-47 LOL. This was a private school I went to, btw. Shitty, but private. Like $3000 a year when I started there LOL. It's like $18000 now, and I ain't that old.
Unfortunately for me, out of sheer boredom, I mainly hung out with the "shenanigans" crowd. It was hard for me to fault people that generally just want to have fun. Not always the best or smartest people though. But it gets REAL easy to sense people who have generally good intentions from those that don't.