Tag: Future History

When Does the Break Occur?

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When I was just a young kid, I started reading science fiction.  And why not?  Science fiction was all about rocket ships and there were real rocket ships going into real space right before my eyes.  And one of my favorite authors was Robert Heinlein.  He wrote all about the early days of man’s conquest of the universe.  And he built his own fictional universe with a “Future History” timeline that talked about how all this progress would effect mankind.  And one of the things he “predicted” was “The Crazy Years.”  These were tucked into the 1960’s and would involve the breakdown of social mores and widespread confusion and anti-social trends.  Reading it makes it sound very much like what the actual sixties were like.  And the prediction was that this breakdown of societal stability would lead to wars and revolution and dictatorships to address the lack of order.  By the 1980’s I was feeling bad for old Pops Heinlein when we didn’t fall into chaos.  After all Ronald Reagan had reestablished order on the shining city on a hill.

Well, time has shown me that I was too impatient.  I didn’t wait long enough for the end of the Crazy Years.  And who better to officiate at the climax of the Crazy Years than a dementia patient?  Good Old Joe Biden.  Joe has taken it upon himself to finish off the American republic for good and all.  He’s not working around the edges like his boy Obama.  No, he’s got his knife right at the throat and is just waiting to have Congress put the bowl out to catch the blood so they can pass it over to their vampires to gorge on.

But the Future History timeline also showed that eventually the Crazy Years would be ended by serious men.  They would organize and topple the insane governments that allowed their people to be victimized by the insane and the lawless.  Usually in Heinlein’s stories they would be military or former military men.  Only after order was restored would civilian government be restored.  But even then, things wouldn’t go back to the way they had been.  A lesson had been learned.

So, I have two questions.

  • How long, if ever, will it take for men to emerge who will say this has gone far enough and we’re going to fix this?
  • Will any changes be put in place to prevent the madness from coming back?

I’ve been trying to answer these hypothetical questions.  Probably it’s just a fantasy with little or no science to it.  But it makes me feel better to think I’m at least looking ahead.  If I was going to guess I’d say that it will happen in some area of the country where the proportion of normal people is still fairly high.  And how it will happen is that some city in this healthy area will start causing serious damage to the people in the suburbs and rural areas.  After that, the state government will try to address this situation and the federal government will try to prevent them.  And that’s where the flashpoint will occur.  If the state gets Washington to back down that will set the pattern for greater and greater state autonomy and less and less power by Washington.  And once the other Red States see this, they will follow suit.  That will be the tipping point to changing what is happening across the country.  New laws will be made to address the underlying causes of the instability and lawlessness and at some point, the Red States and the Blue States will have to recognize and formalize the changes to the way they interact.

But if the federal government crushes the state’s attempt to end urban lawlessness, then it will take a much longer time for vigilantes to start self-policing their local areas.  It will be a grassroots movement and it will be fought by the FBI investigating disappearances of known felons who went too far out of their home turf and just vanished.

Now, how long will it take to reach these places?  For something to be done by the states, that could happen tomorrow.  Let’s say anytime in the next few years.  For grassroots vigilantism to become a widespread phenomenon, I guess it depends on how violent the attacks become.  But I’d say it might take five or ten years for people to get desperate enough to stake their lives on it.  These are just guesses.

As for my second question, what changes will be put in place in a new national government.  I would say that the biggest changes would be mandatory gun ownership, codified right to state secession from the Union and permanent migrant control policies.  If I were to add anything to these three things, I’d add outlaw affirmative action and female suffrage and restore an all-normal male armed forces and finally start taxing companies based on what percentage of their workforce is in the United States.

So, the bad news is, unless some governor successfully backs the federal government down on the lawlessness they’ve unleashed, it could take a decade for a grassroots vigilantism movement to mature into something powerful enough to take hold and move us toward the restoration of order.

So, there’s my crack at being a right-wing Nostradamus.  In most of Heinlein’s books revolts went along with a lot of bloody battles.  And there was no guarantee that outside forces wouldn’t lob in some nukes to make it interesting.  But I gave you my best shot.  What’s your thoughts?

Back to the Future (Make That Back to Heinlein’s Future History)

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Back in the nineteen-forties and –fifties Robert A Heinlein was writing his “Future History” stories about the time period that currently is the recent past. And on his very impressive chart somewhere between the beginning of space flight and the beginning of a theocratic dictatorship in the United States was a period around the nineteen sixties that he called the “Crazy Years.”  You get a flavor for what he meant in a story called “The Year of the Jackpot.”  In this story social mores were unravelling.  Women would spontaneously strip naked in public without knowing why they were doing it and transvestite men and women would challenge the authorities with prosecution for daring to notice that they were queer.  Whether Heinlein was truly prescient or whether he just detected the beginnings of the curve and extrapolated it to its outlandish extreme is unknown to me.  But obviously he was being cautious.  No kidding, the current events that greet each of us as we survey the contents of our daily purveyor of fake news is well beyond what would have passed for science fiction or parody a few decades ago.  States are suing the federal government to prevent it from ascertaining if a census form is being filled out by an illegal alien.  A “woman” who used to be a man is marrying “man” who used to be a woman and we are supposed to believe that somehow now a man will be giving birth to the child.  A porn actor is suing the President’s lawyer for defamation of character.  Does a porn actor even have a character that can be defamed?  We’ve been laughing at these insanities for decades but none of it has gone away or even slowed the march to the brink of insanity.  Heinlein’s theocratic dictatorship is looking less and less like a nightmare scenario and more and more like a really good idea.  I’m really starting to wonder how much worse Sharia Law would be than the current politically correct straight jacket we currently endure.  At least under it there are easily recognizable roles for the traditional individuals most of us remember as normal.

 

Heinlein later in his career wrote a sort of spy novel with a female replicant heroine called “Friday.” In that universe the United States and Canada had balkanized into a number of smaller states.  Some of the states mentioned are Brit-Can, Quebec, the Alaska Free State, the California Confederacy, the Republic of Texas, the Vegas Free State and the Chicago Imperium.  This later novel is significantly less optimistic than his earlier works.  I definitely don’t claim that Robert Heinlein was particularly more skilled as a prognosticator than any other seers around but I begin to see a rationale for separating from behavior that keeps trending not only farther and farther from normalcy but even begins closing in on suicidal.  I still hope that the path forward is the majority of Americans rejecting the progressivist nightmare that is currently unfolding and at the least restore the conditions needed to allow a functional society.  But I have to admit I’m starting to worry that the Alt-Right may not be just making up their apocalypse.  I better get my passport stamped for the Republic of Texas, or should that be the Vegas Free State?