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A societal precipice

Every time I spend any significant amount of time engaging with news, I feel I'm sold the idea we're on this sort of societal precipice. War, inflation, polarization, mis/disinformation, racism, inequality, on and on. That we're constantly on this cliff, and we need to keep refreshing the feed to watch the collapse in real time. When we see that collapse happen elsewhere, like in Ukraine, we love it. It's impossible to turn away from. A captivating pattern.

That said, it sometimes does seem like there are a lot of signs that we're on the edge of a precipice. I know, I know. But to say that everything is fine and dandy and all the bad stuff is some kind of communal hallucination is just as insane an idea as the news-farmed notion that the whole thing is going to go poof tomorrow. So here are a few general trends that might be representative of something larger.

A pulling apart of common morality

There is a seeming disregard, at the individual level, for certain morals we've come to assume most hold. The recent mob-looting of stores is quite a blatant example of people being extremely smart about doing crime and seeming to not really feel bad about it. Many people are evidently walking into stores, grabbing merchandise, and walking out in an extremely nonchalant manner. Stores in {San Francisco} are boarding up their windows to prevent mobs from smashing them.

A coworker described an example they witnessed of a man walking into a Walgreens, grabbing things from a shelf, and walking out the doors. An employee said "aren't you going to pay for that?" and he said "Nope, merry Christmas!" I'm not the law and order type[1] but when I hear stuff like that I certainly recognize there is a serious societal problem. We need to be able to trust that this sort of thing isn't going to happen into order to operate.

Another recent example is the looting of trains in Los Angeles[2]; when trains stop at a depot downtown, containers are being torn open and contents pulled down onto the tracks. In a letter to the L.A. district attorney[3], Union Pacific notes that an average of 90 containers a day are being opened. About the increase in looting and arrests, they write:

But even with these expanded resources and closer partnerships with local law enforcement, we find ourselves coming back to the same results with the Los Angeles County criminal justice system. Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence. Without any judicial deterrence or consequence, it is no surprise that over the past year UP has witnessed the significant increase in criminal rail theft described above.

While much of the conversation around these events[4] revolves around Los Angeles' new restorative justice policies and the role of consumerism[5] and capitalism[6] more broadly, it's clear that there's an underlying moral issue here. People seem totally okay with this sort of behavior enough to organize and participate in it, and others suggest perhaps it's warranted given facts such as that most of the goods stolen are from Amazon. The point is, regardless of how you feel about Amazon, this sort of behavior is not in anyone's best interest; having widespread looting doesn't create a healthy society. The "shrugging off" of this sort of behavior--from the looters, passersby, police, and courts--is telling of a lack of care for the social, physical, and spiritual environment we exist within.

Normalizing uncomfortablility

As Sydney and I were riding BART back home from the airport this afternoon, a man came into the car we were in and procceeded to start banging the seats and walls, talking and yelling to himself and the inanimate things around him. He was clearly high on something, and caused that strange sort of uncomfortable feeling I've come to expect on public transit. He wasn't overtly dangerous--he was being weird--weird in the sense that you didn't want to look at him for fear he'd come up to you. After a while he took out a jug of milk, and I kid you not, poured the milk wall-to-wall across the floor of the train car. He sat down and took out a bag of candies, placing each candy on the floor in the milk wile having a discussion with it.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. Nearly every time I ride BART there's some person like this who's behaving in a way that straddles the line between just plain weird and potentially dangerous. Everyone just puts up with it.

I'd never really thought about how strange this is until I heard Curtis Yarvin discuss how unusual it is that we put up with the ugliness and the danger of our modern cities. It's not the case that cities have to be uncomfortable, dirty, scary places. It's a choice that we continue to make to maintain that state; a choice that gradually becomes normalized to the point where it no longer looks like a choice and rather "just the way it is."

Lives gone digital

The digital commoditization of our social lives[7]. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with our social lives being more digital. Where there does seem to be a problem is when those social lives are deeply intertwined with commoditization--social attention being sold.

Social incentives online are pointing in the wrong direction; they're directing us inwards at ourselves. As a society our attention is extremely plastic, and what it is we focus on can now be easily engineered. Unsurprisingly if the goal is engagement, having us attack each other is hugely effective.

No more borders

There's a kind of disregard amongst many coastal elites[8] for the nation as an entity of importance. Many seem to find the nation's existence to be totally arbitrary--there's much talk of how "inhumane" borders are, for example. The complete vitriol for entities that enforce borders--Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the U.S.--is another manifestation of this.

I think discussing the ramifications of borders in the modern world and the enforcement of laws of passage is good, but there's a kind of absolutism around the topic that makes it seem like borders are the most pure manifestation of the Absolute Evil of a "colonial power structure." A love of the nation is along the same lines; a big no-no amongst the enlightened class[9].

If we're going to exist as a nation[10] we all (or most of us anyway) need to agree it's a good idea.

...

Maybe I, like everyone else, am being deceived into thinking things are worse than they are. And I probably am. But the fact remains that as a society we're going in a direction that's clearly totally unexplored territory. Some say that's progress[11]. It feels to me like the further we get from our true nature[12] the more problems we're going to have.

Last updated Thu May 05 2022 in Berkeley, CA