Barbarians At The Gates

Originally published 12/29/2023 on A Convict’s Perspective

I imagined the detectives in their surveillance van down on street level watching their state-of-the-art monitoring equipment closely. They had the payphones tapped and probably our pagers too. They were utilizing all of the latest and most advanced technology in this sting operation from video surveillance to sound amplifiers to wires so small they were functionally invisible. 

From agents to vehicles to technology, they likely had hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars tied up in this one operation. What chance did lowly corner-boy drug dealers have against the full force of the modern law enforcement juggernaut?

Suddenly, a glass bottle shattered on the ground where a pair of hitters watched the doors leading into the old warehouse where a re-up was being conducted. Their eyes immediately shot upward to a pair of ten-year-old boys on an adjacent rooftop. My friend pointing frantically at the building across from us where we could see a pair of detectives clear as day, given we were higher up, holding a parabolic microphone dish from a covered position.

In an instant, word traveled inside and moments later, every man in that warehouse was walking out separate exits. Every bit of incriminating evidence, drugs, money, and weapons, simply left inside with no way to make a direct connection to anyone. Not only that but now these men were aware they were being watched.

The entire investigation had gone up in smoke in spite of its overwhelming advantages. Defeated by a pair of pre-teens and a bottle. You're too reliant on technology and that's why the Barbarians will always be at the gates. 

Your well-organized civil society is going to fail. 

You feel safe in your isolation and behind your screens. Yet no empire has ever survived Barbarians. This is because while you're becoming more comfortable, more complacent, more dependent on the advancements around you, barbarians are exactly as they have always been. They are timeless.

Once an empire reaches its peak where none can challenge it, it's all over. The Romans, the British, the Mongols, the Qing, and the Ottoman all fell because they were the greatest. Without the threat of an enemy nation that fights as they do, they lost the desperate drive that made them powerful in the first place. They lost their creativity, their resolve, and even their savagery. Feeling safe and unassailable, they slipped into decadence, laziness, gluttony, and naivety.

I have no doubt our military could wipe China’s out in a week, yet 20 years in Afghanistan accomplished nothing. Goat herders making homemade bombs were in charge before we arrived and are once again in charge now. The military-industrial complex is helpless against anything built differently than itself. So don't count on might to keep you safe. 

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Our entire society is sitting in front of TVs, staring at their phones, soaking up air conditioning, and eating pre-made meals. Our comforts grow exponentially each year making us more slovenly and meek. Meanwhile, barbarians are out there doing barbarian work. Almost exactly as they have for thousands of years. With each day we become more helpless while they remain the same. 

People talk about the dystopian world where we're all plugged into technology to such a degree that our physical bodies barely matter. That AI will run the world and we'll all be subject to its programming. I can at least ease your mind in that sense because even if it happens, it'll barely be a flash in the pan. You may be wired in however your enemy will not. 

Before that point society will achieve a critical mass of weakness and the barbarians will do the rest. Walls, an analogy for technology, alone cannot defend a castle, warriors do. And in the absence of these soldiers, those protective barriers, your defenses, are defeated by a ladder. The more we plug in, the closer they come to taking everything we have. 

And you're already surrounded.

The Barbarians I'm referencing are not simply what you consider to be backward cultures on the other side of the world. They're everyone outside your gleaming societal bubble. Street-level people. People who have always had to struggle, to survive in spite of your shining city on the hill. Living near and in it, yet not a part of it. Anytime the economy suffers, your quality of life is threatened, but gang bangers don't even notice it. When things get ugly, I'll feel safer in the hood than in the suburbs. They'll still be business as usual.

There is no invading army or greater nation stepping in to take control. You won't be replaced by a superior culture that simply absorbed us into their more advanced ways of being. It'll all crumble in pieces from within. A city's expansion of higher class neighborhoods does not spread into and improve the ghettos around them but rather those hoods seep in and eventually take over these developments. Barbarians always win. 

That's because civil society loses on an individual level. Barbarians have something you, a “good” citizen, do not. No matter who I'm up against, I will always have a trump card available. Were you my enemy, you may be smarter, richer, wittier, better educated, and more worldly, with every advantage and protection society has to offer at your disposal, yet you lack one thing. I know where the gap between your 4th and 5th ribs to the left of your sternum is located and that's potentially my first resort rather than my last.

That is not a promotion of violence. It is simply meant to state that those quicker to utilize it will always have a significant advantage in any given confrontation. The more “civil” your world becomes, the more vulnerable to barbarians you'll be. While you're enlightened and advanced society squabbles and debates on the “nuances” in any given situation, barbarians are creeping up behind you feeling no conflict whatsoever.

Here's the part you'll have the most difficulty with. You're not supposed to win. Barbarians toppling empires is the natural order, the balancing factor. Nations and dynasties become too large, too corrupted, and decadent to be permitted to continue. I'm sorry, but your culture in its current state is not superior. The moral high ground that once defined us has been abandoned.

We debate things from our comfortable isolation that do not need debate. We accept the unacceptable. We justify what should be intolerable and excuse whatever allows us to do whatever we feel like doing. Becoming nothing more than a fat emperor who's completely oblivious to the world, and threats, beyond his excessive lifestyle.

So even now the barbarians are coming, massing, outside the gates. Your technology and “advanced” morality means nothing. It didn't matter in every society that's fallen before us and it won't matter in the ones that follow. Whether slowly through decay or loudly with fire in the streets, this end is inevitable. Cultures grow until they become poisonous to themselves and barbarians start everything over.

Just like how “civil society” forgot how to fight and subsequently lost the war on drugs, relying on being advanced rather than in the streets, so too will this all fail to a pair of kids throwing a bottle.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.