Guest Post by Ol’ Remus
If you want to know what collapse looks like, look around. We’re living in an ongoing collapse—civil, economic, military and moral. Everything’s political, acquiescence is mandatory, dissent is a crime 
. We have fallen far. We shall fall much further. Emergencies and disasters follow each other ever more closely, each more astonishing than the last. Sociopaths and madmen—the mainstream, the real lunatic fringe—have neither the capability nor the will to fix them. And so we fall. The collapse will end when we can fall no further.
The “Ferguson Effect” is everywhere now. It’s rank extortion , and violence is an accepted part of the process. When an unruly mob (wink wink) invaded the library at Yale, threatened and criminally assaulted students at their study, Yale apologize for being Yale and humbly caved to their demands, a lesson fundamentally different from what had been taught since 1701. What was unbelievable is unbelievable no more. In turn, the unbelievable will give way to the unthinkable, the unthinkable to the unimaginable. Violence works. It works because we are in collapse.
Violence is misunderstood. There’s no such thing as senseless violence. All violence makes sense to someone. Nor is violence ever entirely random. The perp chose to be where he was, when he was. Not random. We say the victim was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” meaning where and when the perp was. Bad luck, but not a random event. We can’t know the “when” until it’s too late, but we can recognize the “where” with some reliability. There are places it’s wrong to be, at any time. The principle is simple: when violence occurs, be somewhere else.
My personal rules assume a continent-size penal colony with armed inmates, to wit: no public place is safe, but I especially avoid cities, airports, sports venues, malls, bad neighborhoods and bars. I’m not in public places much past dark. I avoid minorities. If there are two or more of them and one of me, I’m the minority in the only way that matters. I avoid mass transit and heavy traffic, rallies and demonstrations. In short, I stay away from crowds. I’ll not be missed. When a crowd is unavoidable, I part company as soon as I can. The declared purpose for a crowd is nonbinding, its conduct volatile and its fate my fate. There are no good crowds.
As the collapse deepens my rules will be amended until they can be amended no more. Everything, including universal entropy, argues for doing this. I would happily be wrong, but I see no compelling argument for doing otherwise.
