Central authorities continue unraveling: navigating a weak fragmented society

In an earlier post I showed how the weakness and instability of the elite position in the US today can be seen by comparing the attempted COVID-related coercion to the attempts of the 9/11-related measures by the Bush admin in the 2000s.

There was utter uniformity in the responses back then — not a single airport manager said, "Yeah, we're not gonna bother with that fake security theater shit, you can keep your shoes on and have your family and friends with you at the gate". And everyone followed those rules on the commoners' side as well.

Moreover, there was a high degree of conformity in the set of beliefs people had — did Saddam have WMD, did he pose a big threat to Americans, did he have anything to do with 9/11, etc. — and the types of responses they thought we ought to take — bomb to send a message, occupy with troops, etc.

Twenty years later, all of that former cohesion has gone out the window. The leaders and commoners of some of the most populous states defied the COVID hysteria consensus last year, and much of the others have joined them this year.

Shutdowns only continue where Democrats monopolize the sector, as in public education (while still, of course, drawing an income and benefits from the taxpayers). Masks lasted less than a year (and no, the fearmongering about the Delta variant has not caused normies to put them back on, nor have flyover state governors re-imposed a mask mandate). A small share of the "vaccine hesitant" actually gave in and got the jab, and there are no teams of NGO flunkies or the Army roaming around door-to-door giving the jab against the wishes of the hesitant. Vaccine passports are not happening, and will only be rolled out, if at all, in super-libtard cities like New York and San Francisco.

Aside from the failures on the material policy side, they haven't even managed to win the psychological war. A large share of the population thinks the whole thing is overblown, and will never think / feel / act as though it were a grave threat personally or collectively. People have less faith in "the experts" than ever, and as a result the capacity of institutions to use fearmongering to manipulate has evaporated. Psyops thrown together by the flunkies at the intel agencies have never been more impotent and embarrassing.

It is entirely irrelevant that some minority of the population has wholeheartedly adopted the suite of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that the experts have urged everyone to adopt. They are mindless midwit bootlickers, so it requires nothing from the authorities to make them get with the plan. Pushing an open door is no test of your strength — try pushing a door that is being steadfastly pushed from the other side, then the spectators will see how strong you really are.

Worse than merely being weak, our authorities are devoted to proving it over and over again, lest any doubt remain. They don't understand a simple law of transitivity — that if you fail at something easy, you will fail at something hard, so don't bother and find something better to do. And yet, having failed at getting everyone to wear masks indefinitely, they take on the even harder project of getting everyone vaccinated — and then having failed at that, they take on the still harder project of implementing vaccine passports nationwide.

And rather than these repeated failures representing bad luck or incompetence, they came from a far more unsettling source — defiance from those who they were presuming to coerce. They got their bluff called, and they couldn't do jackshit about it. Now everybody knows that the authorities have little to no power in coercing either the elites or the commoners into their harebrained scheme du jour.

Now they have revealed that they rely entirely on their targets already forming a diehard super-fandom for the Establishment — otherwise compliance will be spotty at best, since the elites and their institutions have torched their credibility for good-faith and benefit-of-the-doubt trust from the general public, or from their fellow elites for that matter (e.g. the governors of Florida and Texas).

In short, we live in the polar opposite of the authoritarian / totalitarian dystopia that both the left and right still believe is a looming menace. A state with strong authority is a dystopia to libertarians, and that's what 99% of the elites still are, and have been since the libertarian revolution of the late 1970s and the Reagan era that cemented it in the '80s.

But while that may have been a relevant stance from which to oppose the 9/11-related coercion under Bush, it is irrelevant and out-of-touch today, when national and international cohesion among the elites has collapsed. We have no strong state to fear, since it has never been weaker, as proven by the failures above on both the material and ideological levels. And make no mistake, that is where they have invested all of their efforts over the past year and a half — it's not some minor throwaway project that they fucked up on, but their drop-everything-else majorest of major priorities.

The trend for the near-to-medium term is societal disintegration from the top down. Imperial stagnation and now fragmenting outside our national borders has already begun. There will be no national authority, but there could be authority at the state level. Still, it will be more of a city-state, where authority applies more in the core city and not so much elsewhere. But some city-states will go one way, and others another way.

Even within a city, there will be smaller fiefdoms that go one way or another, with weak authority from the city government (let alone the state or national govs trying to enforce local outcomes). The Walmart fiefdom will allow you in without a vaccine passport (their greeters don't want to get killed in an angry stampede of Walmart shoppers), while the Whole Foods fiefdom will put more obstacles in the way (knowing their shoppers are more eager to comply). The restaurants in some neighborhoods will flout the city regulations about COVID, while others will try to enforce them.

It will make life more annoying at first, having to understand where you can and cannot go, given your preferences. But we'll get used to it. Even if one place switches sides, we'll react no more annoyed than if they had adopted a new type of background music ("I remember when this place used to be cool..."). It will be a total joke of a society compared to a decade or so ago, but that won't make the trends reverse, and we'll learn to adapt to a shittier way of life.

These days, the dystopia is libertarian. We don't have to plan for a way around an authoritarian society — we have to plan how to prevent or punish crimes on our own, since the police will be another institution to collapse in power (already under way, with soaring crime rates in the past year or so). We have to preserve culture ourselves, since the libraries, schools, and museums are busy emptying or outright destroying what they were entrusted with. And we'll have to figure out which specific places or fiefdoms will be favorable to us and those close to us, since uniformity is gone. Perhaps none will be favorable, and more will have to be done in-house, as it were.

The seemingly related trends of the 2010s will actually be of minimal help here, since those were all still very much in the rugged individualist framework of the Reagan revolution. How to eat right, lift right, fix a flat tire, prepare meals in a crockpot, and so on and so forth. That was all self-improvement and self-reliance, and as such it relied on a relatively stable set of institutions at the societal level.

Rugged individualism in an environment of collapsed authorities means the law of the jungle, and a quick death. With no large-scale institutions, the major task now is to build best-we-can-do replacements. And that takes social networks for recommendations and warnings, whether neighborhoods, communities, families, etc.

Paradoxically, and similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, indulging the self is only possible in a cohesive society, although such egotism wears away at the communal foundation that supports it. Self-improvement and actualization was for the Boomers who grew up during the full flower of the New Deal, which they progressively eroded during the Reagan era. Now that the institutions barely exist anymore, the post-Boomer generations cannot indulge in the self-improvement framework. I don't mean that (only) in a normative sense — just descriptively and mechanistically speaking, they are incapable of doing so even if they wanted to.

It's time to get better connected, or go under. Find out which fiefdoms are most favorable to you, now that central authority has collapsed.