There's a lot to this. Folks inevitably live their lives inside a mentally-constrained model of what society *is*; what it can do; how it changes. For most folks, war, civil unrest, depositism, mass-detentions etc are things that happen to other people on the same screens that you watch fiction on.
conclusion: add something to the water supply to make everyone more neurotic
Back in 2003, J. G. Ballard told an interviewer: "Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us."
One imagines that is what the judge was thinking who yesterday let malevolent Mr. Miller walk free until January 2nd. Miller's car had a fake license plate, he had multiple guns and multiple fake passports, and all this transpired 95 miles from the Calexico border post. What was the judge thinking?
I deeply believe that stuff can happen anywhere (and thus am fairly terrified right now). What I’m not at all sure of is whether such events CAN be prevented, as human nature, or at least human groupthink, seems the root cause of most bad outcomes. And fatalism isn’t much better than denialism.
This was me before brexit
Maddeningly, I once engaged with someone who couldn't connect with the "what if it was you" while talking about displaced people, until I said (because the guy smoked) "there must be someone in gaza who's a chain smoker and can't get a cig anywhere", and he was like "that's gotta be hard" 😑
They don't happen to *you*. If your mind wanders towards the premise, they reject it. An internal threat would be unconstitutional, so it would necessarily be averted. An external one defeated by America's prized ability to coordinate overwhelming force.
I think a lot about why there have to be fines for moving violations: nobody believes they’ll be the one to kill somebody. But we all know we could be fined.
At the risk of annoying absolutely everyone, this is pretty much the introduction of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan.