On Trust and Chaos
Corruption, incompetence, failure, and dysfunction are becoming increasingly entrenched as contract conditions of living in American society.
If you’ve lived in an American city, there are certain things you put up with. It is generally true that crime increases the more tightly you pack people together, but American urban life has a specific flavor to its crime problem. I can recall plenty of these incidents from my days riding the T (Boston’s subway) during my time there: staring straight ahead, avoiding eye contact, discreetly moving to the sides or even to other train cars as necessary. Vagrants throwing up in the middle of crowded train cars. Fights breaking out on trains. People being pushed or harassed by the homeless. Drug users passed out or even overdosing in broad daylight on the floor of the train. It seemed to get worse every year, and incidents eventually became so common that I no longer felt safe taking the train. We did what most aspiring middle- and working-class people do: moved out to the suburbs. This has been a recurring pattern in America for decades now, referred to under monikers such as “White Flight”, though this doesn’t really capture the modern iteration of this phenomenon, as it more so is a multi-ethnic exodus focused on improving living conditions and quality of life. Looking back, I am surprised at how long I put up with being confronted by the decay of our society daily, in potentially dangerous situations. But after only a few years of seeing relatively mild incidents compared to some, my trust in the city and the broader society at large had all but evaporated. I couldn’t wait to get out, and I was shocked at how the conditions could be so well-known, but never addressed. It’s the biggest open secret in the country.
Boston is a wealthy city. When I moved there, I had an idea of what to expect from visiting friends in New York City, but growing up in a small rural town had presented a picture of American life that simply doesn’t exist in most of the country anymore, especially in the cities. Things seemed to have worsened over the years, with crime on a steep rise across the country following the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd riots. The impacts of these momentous events are easily observed. As police dialed back their presence in cities, crime (unsurprisingly) increased. Normal interactions that the police would oblige to keep the peace are simply no longer worth the risk to officers and departments for fear of political backlash. As a result, being harassed by the medically insane, witnessing illegal immigrants trashing expensive city amenities, stepping through drug markets in popular city districts, and witnessing robberies or even violent felonies are all frequent experiences. This begs the question: how can citizens trust their government to handle the increasing societal decay and anarchy, especially when they are the ones largely responsible for causing it either through deliberate inaction or punishment of law-abiding citizens?
In 1997, a Danish woman in New York City was arrested for the crime of leaving her baby outside in her stroller alone:
“I had lived in New York [during school], so, of course, I knew that I didn’t see prams all over the city,” said Sørensen. “But . . . I had been living in Copenhagen, I had given birth to my daughter in Copenhagen, I was raised myself in Denmark . . . That’s just how you do it in Denmark.”
She was rightly shocked. In Denmark you can leave your baby outside in a stroller, unattended, because you know who is around and because people look out for one another. They care about their society, their people, and their future. People return their grocery carts to the carousel, they don’t litter, and they make sure everyone keeps it that way. How could the wealthy superpower America be in such a state?
I should note that while we still have many insulated high-trust places, there is no denying that trust is in steep decay in the post-COVID era overall. What has made America unique in the past is that it could deny this decay for a while by virtue of its physical space. Those who experience crime can move to another city, state, or town as a means of escape. America has a robust history of internal migration, with various groups seeking new beginnings when faced with the tyranny of their surroundings. Besides the phenomenon of White flight, African Americans fleeing to northern industrial cities after the civil war and the Mormon journey westward to Utah are great examples of this phenomenon. But eventually, even America begins to run low on space and we are faced with the consequences of kicking the can of social decline to the very end of the road. During the last few years, this effect has brought massive changes to the demography of the country, as middle- and working-class citizens of all stripes flee blue cities in favor of suburbs and red states.
However, when people move, they take their resources with them. During the last 60 years as more middle- and working-class residents fled to the suburbs, cities lost business revenue and tax base. Wealth became concentrated in financial business cores, tourist districts under tight observation, and the outer fringes, while major sections of cities languished. Cities like Detroit went from booming industry towns to rotting corpses in a single generation. Crime became less a problem to solve and more so an infection to manage in the eyes of police in these areas, who simply no longer had the resources, political support, or manpower to handle it.
This is all a pattern that breeds distrust, as citizens stopped trusting police to do their jobs, and police stopped trusting citizens to follow the law or respect their authority. People have come to expect and accept crime, so they stopped caring about the physical spaces around them. Cities became dirtier, monuments were vandalized, and graffiti began to litter the buildings. People saw the government taking more and more of their money for social programs to compensate, but they also saw the problem worsening. They saw shop owners boarding up regularly due to fears of rioters, gangs, and looters. Eventually, they just gave up.
COVID accelerated this process greatly by further eroding trust in our institutions with dubious vaccine profiteering, draconian lockdown policies, dishonest election “fortifications”, and a serial pattern of media lies. The concept of working from home was pioneered as a response to these challenges, to further escape the chaos that was growing in America’s population centers - to build virtual space. But this only exacerbated the problem by further hollowing out cities and replacing human interaction with online life.
Additionally, the riots of 2020 marked a crucial turning point in how the middle- and working-classes viewed urban life in America. Violence during the riots was endorsed by politicians, the media, and every other major power center in the country such as corporations and celebrities. They created bail funds for killers and child rapists, gleefully cheered on the burning and looting of businesses, tried to prosecute people who defended themselves from violent felons, and ignored innocent bystanders who were murdered. This had a significant chilling effect on trust.
As a result, crime itself became a political football, with the right fearing a new crime wave and the left pretending it doesn’t exist. Crime festered during the COVID years, egged on by radical District Attorneys in state offices nationwide (funded largely by billionaire liberal mogul George Soros) who would regularly punish people who defended themselves and release repeat offenders back onto the street to kill, rape, maim, or steal again. When a store clerk managed to fight off an attacking thief, he was sent to Rikers for daring to defend himself. All the while, the Biden Administration has used the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other federal agencies to attack their political enemies, including anti-abortion activists and parents concerned about sexual grooming in schools. How could anyone trust a government that responded to their concerns this way?
Some cities even stopped enforcing laws, or changed them to promote their social engineering plans, such as when San Francisco decriminalized theft under $900. Videos of looting, burning, and murder have plastered social media in a steady flow. What struck me most about these stories was not only their frequency, but the attitude of acceptance that our ruling class (and the left in general out of deferential political loyalties) have developed over their occurrence. The rest of us learned quickly that the normal rules of engagement with the criminal underclass were now out the window, and that defending yourself or innocent bystanders might land you in deeper trouble than being victimized in a crime.
Take the Jordan Neely incident from this past month as an example. Neely, a known repeat criminal, finally met his match when a group of 3 passengers, including former US Marine Daniel Penny, subdued him during one of his episodes on the NYC subway. Tragically, he died shortly after the incident while recovering in the hospital. Video footage showed the passengers putting him in a sleeper hold to eliminate the threat, as Neely was reported to have said “I’ll take a bullet” on the train, and that he was going to “kill a mother******”.
But quickly thereafter the national media and politicians were saying Neely was lynched. They claimed he was “just a street performer”, and innocent soul who would never harm a fly, and that he was murdered by a white passenger who strangled him to death because of his race. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to lionize Neely and form a public mob against Penny in response to the killing in order to pressure the city to charge the passengers who intervened with murder. The Marine Corps even doxed Penny. Penny is currently being prosecuted for manslaughter by New York’s radical District Attorney Alvin Bragg, notorious for his politically-motivated legal targets.
The point of all this is, of course, to sow chaos and erode public trust even further. This is part and parcel of living in a big city, they claimed. See, you should want to get screamed at by violent ex-cons while trapped inside a moving metal tube deep below the earth (or else you’re racist…or something). You should consider yourself an enlightened American to be so culturally enriched by the act of having to step over the homeless and mentally disabled people who crowd our streets. You should feel grateful to the Regime for the chance to witness open air drug markets at your children’s school bus stop. If you don’t like these things, or want to protect others from it, you’re part of the problem, the media droned. At every available opportunity, the Regime seeks to exacerbate the question of trust for their own gain.
According to the Regime, you shouldn’t feel comfortable in your own city. You shouldn’t feel like you can trust your neighbor. You shouldn’t feel at ease in your own country. You must not question or even notice why these things are happening, lest you wish to invoke the fury of a political mob. Elon Musk found that out in the wake of the Neely incident, when he dared to simply commit the crime of noticing crime statistics. Elon should know exactly where the road to low-trust leads: his home country of South Africa is a primary example of what a low-trust society looks like when everyone decides to give up or hole up in the countryside. The lights literally shut off. In America, if you dare to act to prevent a potential maniac from committing murder, theft, or rape, you will catch the ire of powerful forces in the Department of Justice, potentially having your entire life ruined or losing it to a lifetime sentence brought down by a politically-motivated prosecution, enforced by loyal party advocates in the jury pool. You can’t even rent a bike in New York City without risking your job and personal safety, as one 6-month pregnant nurse found out this past month.
It’s important to note that the transition to a low-trust society doesn’t only refer to crime, though crime is a good indicator of trust levels in society more broadly. But it also means a breakdown in the trust between men and women, a destruction of the dating pool, a reduction in family cohesion, and a lower birth rate. It means people no longer trust the schools, because schools have become politically motivated grooming centers. It means ethnic groups view others with increased suspicion and scrutiny. It means people no longer can find healthy modes of interaction, opting for the safety of a technological barrier. It means people stop donating to charities because the charities are incompetent, fraudulent, or ineffective. It means people no longer care about the environment around them, since they believe the planet is going to boil in the next ten years anyway. It means people don’t care where their tax dollars get spent, since they see money being wasted by the truckload every day. It means legal migrants languish while illegal immigrants pour over the border and are rewarded with fresh iPhones upon arrival. It means people don’t trust pharmaceutical companies, because they push faulty vaccines for profit. It means that people don’t join the military, because they see military leadership replaced with political commissars and endless wars that serve no purpose. It means people don’t trust companies to make products in their best interests. It means voters don’t care about elections, since they view them all as rigged.
It means citizens no longer feel invested in their society, let alone improving it for the future. It means our irrational, hedonistic, eternal now has nothing to temper its fever pitch.
The incentive for government and our ruling class to perform their most basic duties disappears. Institutions become corruption mills for parasitic elites and political radicals. Once this happens it’s rarely reversed without some sort of massive crisis; reform, war, civil conflict, or revolution. In this way, low-trust societies are a two-way street. While people no longer trust the government, the government also begins to become paranoid about the citizenry.
The ruling class recognizes this, leading to the formalization of anarcho-tyranny, as the government no longer trusts the people and seeks to keep them at bay . Law abiding citizens are punished while criminals are uplifted. Chaos reigns, and the only certainty is uncertainty. Elites exploit this chaos for cover, accumulating more power to insulate themselves from the consequences of their grand designs. Every action the government takes will further cement elite control over society, and every action the people take in response fuels elite paranoia. As this cycle accelerates, things breakdown: infrastructure decays, crime rises, education falters, and culture becomes decadent. You can see evidence of this in much of what we call the “Third World”. These are low-trust societies, where even full boatloads of foreign aid simply go missing due to corruption. Trump’s infamous comment on “shithole” countries was less so a comment on poverty and more so a comment on low-trust nations which are viewed as incapable of snapping out of this death spiral. America itself is quickly approaching the end of this long descent into madness.
Living in modern times comes with its advantages, especially in the West. We have, for the most part; clean water, easy access to food, shelter, robust creature comforts and conveniences. But the Regime and its patrons have actively accelerated decline by breaking the bonds that hold society together in trust. They have betrayed us deliberately and repeatedly for their own power. This can be summed up by the 10 Ds of societal dysfunction:
Despair
Despondency
Distraction
Degeneracy
Destruction
Depression
Demoralization
Degradation
Destitution
Dependency
It is difficult to know whether that trust can be repaired or rebuilt at all. The rest of us watch day in and day out as this process nears its inevitable terminus, sidelined by fear of retaliation, immobilized by the pace of decline, and paralyzed by the shock of what has been lost in so short a time.
One thing is abundantly clear: retreat is no longer an option. America has run out of space to escape to, and we can no longer afford to weep over the birthright we squandered out of a misguided desire to be agreeable. Decline and decay will follow us until there are no places left to hide. It is time for us to figure out a new path forward, one that will allow us to fight the evil in our midst and build a new social contract.
Now is the time for courage. Be bold and valorous in your principles. Embrace the derision of this illegitimate Regime. Challenge the vile opprobrium they would unleash against your nation. Hold fast to the life your forefathers bled to give you, and do not pawn it to those who would sooner see you enslaved. Teach your children to honor their past and preserve the fire of history for their own. Demand a life of meaning and order. Cast off the albatross of chaos they would seek to foist upon you. Reject the charade of polite servitude they wield against you. Above all, do not accept the kind of hollow life they want you to live, devoid of purpose and bereft of all glorious spirit.
“There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.” – Theodore Roosevelt