Month: September 2023

I was reading an article about shoplifting and the author said something like, the way things are going having food on open display in a grocery store may soon be too expensive to allow because of shoplifting.  And that struck me.  Imagine if you couldn’t walk down the aisles of a supermarket and pick out your fruit and meat or even a can of beans or a box of spaghetti.  Imagine if you couldn’t go to a big box store and get some nails or screws or a saw because the store couldn’t afford to leave these things on shelves.

So that’s what they mean about a society going from high trust to low trust.  The stores can’t trust the public not to steal everything in sight.  That got me thinking, where else has trust disappeared.?

Well, off the top of my head, you can’t trust that your public school isn’t trying to groom your kids for homosexuality or even stranger things like trans -gender dysphoria.  And you certainly can’t trust the Republicans to be conservative.  You can’t trust anything about the government.  You can’t trust scientists to tell the truth about the climate or the drug companies with your health.  You can’t trust the tech companies with your information and you absolutely can’t believe a word that the news organizations say.  And we used to depend on the police and the courts to keep us safe from criminals but that’s gone too.

If you think about it, the world we knew was based on a bunch of relationships of trust that no longer exist.

Based on this, I think it would make sense to try to imagine what the world will be like in a few years when all of these changes have reworked our relationships with each other and the larger institutions around us.  The first thing that came to me was that where you lived would become increasingly important to determine how you would live.  Currently the larger cities run by Democrats with large poor minority populations are becoming more and more like third world locales with businesses moving out and increasing rates of violence.  It would make sense that around these disaster areas will develop concentric rings of suburban areas where the levels of crime and other dysfunction will gradually decrease as you move outward in much the same way as a topographic map records rings of decreasing elevation in circles around mountain peaks.

Proximity to these danger zones will also determine things like the existence of stores selling luxury merchandise and levels of safety precautions like bars on windows and security systems in homes.  Of course, the definition of “luxury” will be completely relative to the wealth of the area.  In some places toothpaste may be a luxury item.

Security problems like these may explain the real basis for the “fifteen-minute city.”  What these enclaves are really designed for is excluding strangers from the area.  The kind of surveillance that will be possible in the future will make the non-local with no business in an area stand out like a sore thumb.  After all, if you have nothing to hide why worry if the government knows everything about you?  So, only people that the government thinks should be somewhere will be able to get there.  No freedom, no crime.  Pretty slick.

But out among the peasants, not so slick.  It appears that there is an intentional destruction of the old world going on.  People living together in free association, voluntarily following sensible rules and laws, will be overwhelmed by the encouragement of criminal behavior in dysfunctional communities that won’t be constrained by police forces and the old legal system.  The new world of the elites will be separated and insulated from these areas by diminishing transportation options, advanced electronic surveillance systems and a social credit system that will control what you can do and how you will live.

This seems to be the direction things are going.  Whether this plan will be successful in all or some places and how long it will take to implement is yet to be seen.  But that is what seems to be happening.  Otherwise, how do you explain what’s going on in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia?  These cities are being made unlivable by the people in charge and so far, nothing has been done to stop the change.

I hope it is within reason that some areas of the country will successfully prevent this program of sabotage from succeeding.  If they can restore law and order to their jurisdictions, I think the existence of these oases of normalcy will eventually destabilize the new system.  Maybe colonies from the normal areas will eventually establish themselves in the depopulated wastelands and eventually return them to civilization.  But maybe I’m being overly optimistic.

Okay H.G, Wells, how’s that for some extrapolation into the future?  In your face Herbert.