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The other night I witnessed an attempted robbery. At 2 in the morning, a masked man ran past me on the sidewalk before going around the corner at an apartment building. From maybe 60 feet away, I heard an argument, then gunshots. Smoke from the gunfire wafted through the air. I went back inside.
The cops were there in under 5 minutes and there were a dozen witnesses or more. No shooting victim materialized so they called it an attempted carjacking. Whatever the story was, it's not ideal to have masked gunmen running around my street in the middle of the night. It's not ideal, but neither is it surprising.
I often say that we live in a dystopia and I mean that literally. The vast majority of people are actively making society even more dystopian and most of them think they're good people. Their lives and identities are all wrapped up in continually making things worse while imagining that they're making things better. All of the information they access affirms them in their mistaken beliefs.
Even so, identity is multidimensional and dynamic, with the salience of a given dimension of identity determined largely by circumstance. Social identity involves group membership, and the importance of that membership in a particular situation. These days our social identities are heavily manipulated. Many of the groups we associate ourselves with were created or co-opted by the control regime to sort our population according to its preferences.
Accepting that we live in a dystopia gives context to the social engineering. It makes it easier to see this and all of the other madness for what it is without taking it personally. There's no cause for outrage in dystopia. The whole thing is outrageous on all levels, but everyone who gives it even a second of honest consideration already knows that.
Despite the divisive programming we're continually exposed to, working together is still our first instinct when disaster strikes. In times of crisis, we naturally band together to cooperate and help each other. This natural tendency was hijacked by the regime during COVID. To trick the public into accepting distancing rules that Anthony Fauci himself later admitted had no scientific basis, the powers that be emphasized to the public that distancing was a way to help others instead of telling the public that it was a way to protect themselves. It's vaguely ironic that there was good science behind the propaganda supporting the unscientific policy.
Maybe there's a way to amplify our natural tendency to cooperate while protecting our cooperative ventures from manipulation. Maybe we can figure out how to deprogram ourselves alongside other people doing the same thing. Imagine replacing the censorship and propaganda that dominates today's public discourse with actual sensemaking. Imagine people talking openly about living in dystopia and how to make the best of that.
The crime I recently witnessed wasn't caused by the system. It was caused by bad individual choices. But the system was largely responsible for determining the options available to the shooter. And the crowd of militarized police that responded to the event wasn't exactly comforting. It didn't feel like a war zone, as Minneapolis did in 2020. But it did feel much more like occupied territory than like a free land.
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