Many years ago when I was a teenage pothead, I wrote my first short story, called “The Perfect Citizen” about a young man, Justin, living in a totalitarian society where every spoken word was scripted by the state and deviation from the script was absolutely forbidden. It opened at the family breakfast table where the four members of his family (Dad, Mom, Justin and younger sister) first pulled their scripts from the wall-mounted printer and then carried on a typical conversation that involved carefully reading their lines aloud for the benefit of the state compliance agents, who – because it was a private home – had microphones but not cameras for monitoring script adherence.
But, between the lines, using non-verbal signals and deviations from the script too minor to trigger police action, they carried on a separate exchange “off-script.” In this case it involved the father’s effort to invite the son to a secret rebel resistance meeting, stirring instant fear and tension among the family members.
The main conflict of the story was the boy’s internal struggle over loyalty to his father vs. loyalty to the state. In the end, to win the favor of his girlfriend – a social-climbing statist – he turns in his dad to the compliance police. The story closes with the scene of Dad being loaded into a squad car while Justin’s bouncing-for-joy girlfriend exuberantly lavishes him with hugs and kisses, exclaiming, “Oh Justin, you’re the perfect citizen! The perfect, perfect, perfect citizen!” as a single tear trickles down Justin’s cheek.
I was a full-blown leftist in those days, in the sense that George Orwell was one (though I didn’t actually read Orwell till I was in my 30s). Subconsciously, I had glimpsed America’s own Marxist future and captured it in a work of “fiction.”
Yesterday, when a December 2021 news article was belatedly linked at (ironically enough) Citizen Free Press, I saw The Perfect Citizen come one giant step closer to reality. Under the title “Worldwide Social Credit Industry – Infrastructure to Support Social Credit Systems Represents a $16.1 Billion Opportunity by 2026,” the article matter-of-factly discusses the great money-making opportunities now possible in the emerging field of police-state surveillance of the citizenry. After listing some of the multinational corporate giants competing for market share in our future slave-state, it summarized the “opportunities” in a set of bullet points:
“The COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated substantial interest in citizen monitoring solutions. …
- Cameras and other optical equipment for social credit systems will reach $723M globally by 2026
- Advanced computing will be used in conjunction with AI to provide nearly flawless identification and tracking
- Various forms of biometrics will be used for identity verification as well as verifying the presence/location of people
- Starting as tangential to public safety and homeland security, the social credit market becomes mainstream by 2026
- Social credit systems represent the ability to identify (mostly people but also some ‘things’) and track activities for purposes of grading behaviors and applying ‘social credit scoring.”
While no mention is made of the Maoist origins and goals of “social credit” ideology, the article admits that “most systems will have socially acceptable behaviour at their core … government, companies, and society as a whole must determine ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘marginal’ behavior within the social credit market. … [S]ystems will ultimately be used for a variety of commerce and lifestyle-related issues … accessibility within public places such as concerts, sporting events, and other assemblies. High social scoring individuals within the social credit market will be granted preferred access to both real and digital assets. … [T]he convergence of … disparate technologies … will facilitate value within the social credit market … sensors, biometrics, cameras, and other optical devices, computer vision systems, and other advanced computing platforms.”
Ah, the banality of evil as our natural rights and freedom die not in a blaze of glory on a battlefield but by slow-motion absorption into a real-life “Matrix” of cybernetic transhumanism facilitated by financial advisers.
In the end, social credit slavery will come down to saying what the elites tell you to say. You will need to prove your allegiance to their groupthink narratives through vocal affirmation, because as we learned during the BLM riots “silence equals violence.” Mere tolerance of things you disagree with will never be enough: you must bake the “gay pride” cake. And if you don’t, you will be destroyed – even if you win temporarily in court because the judicial system has not yet caught up with the “tide of history.” (Ask the Boy Scouts whether even a Supreme Court ruling can save you from that.) One cannot silently ignore the enemies of the State – the homo/transphobics, the unvaccinated, the white equalists, the Russia apologists, the climate change deniers, the Trump supporters – you must actively fight them to keep your social credit score from falling.
How close are we to being conquered by China? You can measure it by the extent of anti-Putin jingoism. We expect weak-minded liberals to be easily manipulated, but I use the Putin example precisely because it showcases the power of China-aligned elite-captured propagandists to generate “moral outrage” among Christians and conservatives on an issue where nearly all available information is controlled by the same corporate media and globalist elites that took down Trump and orchestrated the Wuhan plandemic. Even the minority willing to defend the Russian nation are routinely throwing Putin himself under the bus as a concession to the mob.
It is plausible based on what the American public has been shown on TV that Putin is (repeat after me) “a murderous psychopath,” just as it was plausible in early 2020 that COVID-19 would decimate humanity without global totalitarian lockdowns, just as it was plausible in early 2017 that Trump had colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary. But if, like me, your standard for judgment is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you strongly question everything the lying media wants you to believe and perform your own “due diligence.” On Putin you could start here.
While reviewing that evidence, remember that bloody televised war propaganda, constantly reinforced as the official narrative by politicians and pundits, is EXACTLY how public opinion was controlled in Orwell’s “1984.”The main point of this article is not to defend Putin, it is to warn that YOU will be the next Putin, the next Trump, the next Lively if the left decides you’re enough of a threat to warrant a propaganda campaign against you (or the group you belong to).
When the slave state fully arrives will you dare to speak “dangerous” truths? (Are you daring to do so now?) Or you will be The Perfect Citizen?
###
