The New Age of Defensive Living
We no longer live in a high-trust society. "Defensive living" has now become an objective necessity of life.
This is an important article that I recommend highly. Not only to my author friends, who are (or are thinking about) producing audiobooks. But to people in general, who still need to learn the lesson in Monalisa's subtitle. Paraphrasing:
We no longer live in a high-trust society. Continue acting as though we do at your own peril.
A high-trust society is one in which people, culture and government are restrained, at least for the most part, by shared and civilized ethical values. It's one in which social institutions treating you fairly can be counted on as the norm, and exceptions to that rule are exceptions. And anyone who thinks we still live in such a world needs a serious reality check.
Our civilization is collapsing around us. It may have been reasonable as recently as five years ago to think otherwise, but there are no rational grounds for it any longer. The evidence is too stark and too obvious, and the only way not to see it is not to look. It's understandable that people may need a period of cognitive dissonance to come to terms with that evidence and to revise their worldview accordingly. But anyone who's not on that path by now isn't off it innocently.
We've reached a period in the history, not only of America, but of the "civilized" world, where proactively defensive living has become an objective necessity of life. The alternative is to run a very real risk of brutal exploitation by corrupted institutions. That won't change until or unless we can right the ship of civilization. And that will take a massive, counter-culture effort, and one that every decent person participates in, across years if not decades.
There are civilized places in the US, but they are slowly being stamped out. Putnam's "Bowling Alone" is becoming more and more relevant as multiculturalism takes hold. There is this notion that the US is a "melting pot." Except for food, this is untrue. Assimilation means taking foreigners and making them into Anglo-Saxons, especially the Anglo-Saxon habit of settling disputes without violence. Now that there is no assimilation, the US will certainly either fall apart or fall into tyranny. There are no other choices.