"Chinatown" Morality Productivity and Power

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Morality and Productivity are rare and mutually reinforcing conditions that just happen, perhaps randomly, to have developed faster in the West. Ancillary benefits or attributes include the Rule of Law, Self Government, and Privacy including Private Property Rights. Under the assault from the Left they are eroding.

Forty-five years ago in a film "Chinatown" could represent the Other as a place where the Law was subservient to Power, but ordinary people could hope to not be affected. What F. Scott Fitzgerald said about the very rich applies to the very powerful, only the cynicism is not soft but hard. Without the intricate and complex and flexible and resilient but sometimes fragile system accreted over the centuries of Western Civilization the restraints on Power erode and both Morality and Productivity are lost.

In China, and most human societies, people live and die under regimes either efficient or chaotic but all eroding under a corruption founded on a lack of Morality and the arbitrary nature of Power. That Power naturally seeks to protect itself by using technology to extend its access to information and its ability to control and respond to threats. The threats are real, although an increasing number arise from the very lack of Morality that the erosion of Western culture in the face of arbitrary Power expressed as Socialism fosters. Individuals desperate for protection seek the benefits of the technology and support its use by those with Power.

1. Now we are all in "Chinatown."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cWnubJ9CEw


2. Facial recognition surveillance cameras in schools.
h/t Closed Group

3. China is facing a Moral Crisis.

h/t Wretchard T. Cat