Land with no aunties

For a system to work, there needs to be a regulators (negative feedback loop), to ensure the system doesn’t go off the rails.

Society is a system, which is regulated by law culture, and enforced by law enforcement aunties

Aunties is a term in Asian culture representing an older lady—relative or not—who’s always ready to stuff you with snacks, dish out unsolicited life advice, and side-eye your questionable fashion choices.

Culture Creates Laws

People create laws based on what they want to see in their society. Law codifies cultural rules.

Here are a few examples that show culture creates laws, rather than the other way around.

Aunties Regulate Culture

When I was a kid, there would be an auntie yelling from the balcony, “Don’t play with that, you’ll get hurt.”. Another auntie would look from the window and snitch to my parents that I was holding hands with a girl. During COVID-19, I was on my way to the basketball court without wearing a mask. An auntie warned me saying, “Young man, wear your mask until you reach the court.” (1) I am 30 years old (2) the court was 20 steps away…

Honestly, I hate these reactions from aunties. Who are they to tell me what to do? But… they were right. They were the ones who were looking out for me and everyone else in society.

Below are the common judgements by aunties.

Aunties tell you not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear.

Aunties tell you not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear.

Land with no aunties

Nowadays, in Western countries & big cities, there are significantly fewer aunties to regulate society. This is caused by various factors like increased individualism, urban anonymity, and the decline of multigenerational households.

There is a single land where there are no aunties. That is San Francisco.

A land with no aunties is a land with no cultural enforcers. Without enforcers, the system has no checks & balances. This causes extreme shifts in culture. These shifts can be positive or negative for society. There is no check, and that’s the challenge. The path goes somewhere that no one knows if it’ll be good or bad.

With no aunties enforcing rules, individualism is all-time high in SF. People who couldn’t fit into society were accepted. This created interesting outcomes:

• Misfits were welcome. I met a community of Pagans where they couldn’t fit in LA, Tokyo or Paris but fit in SF. Because no one is judged. People who couldn’t fit anywhere else could now have a home. There are many more misfits from Hippies, LBTQ, Homeless, CyberPunk, Techies etc. were all accepted by SF.

• Bad actors are welcome. If you meet an average SF person, they would be very nice people, well-spoken, and well-educated. But, why is SF full of homeless, drug addict people. The society values individualism so much that it’s ok to have people in misery, defecating in public. A culture of accepting misfits also accepts these people to exist in their community. If you go to Japan, India or Turkey — if there is someone with bad communal behaviours, the aunties will take care of the problem. If a guy is peeing on the street, the aunties will attack him with kitchen utensils. If homeless, will provide shelter & food, or call the authorities. If drug addict, they will shame and call the cops. In the end, that person will either obey the community rules or stop being in their community.

• Innovators are welcome. SF is known for its tech. The reason is that in other places kids are encouraged to be doctors/lawyers, buy a house, and have kids. In SF, you are you. Do whatever you want. Take risks even if it means you can lose everything. This acceptance of risk allows the best innovating minds to experiment. The majority fail, but some succeed. Those some turn out to be people inventing semiconductors, personal computers, internet, smartphones, EVs, AI, and more. Modern technology is created in SF by risk takers.

• Extreme ideologies are welcome. If a behaviour is accepted, people will do that behaviour more. They will try to push the limits. The results are very clear in SF. Innovator extremists turns into Longtermism, Cyber-Libertarianism, Transhumanism. Gay extremists turns into Sexual Liberalism, Nudism, Kinkism, Queerism, Postgenderism.

Where there are no aunties, new aunties are created

In the recent decade, Liberalism ideology had an integer overflow. Instead of aunties who have kids & grandkids enforcing the culture, students in colleges became the enforcers of cultural norms. Society has reverted. Now you could only say what is allowed by these students. SF’s virtue is accepting you regardless of who you are. This turned into accepting only certain types of misfits and rejecting the majority of society & cultures. SF’s ability to turn everything into extreme, made wokeism and cancel culture’s influence expand from SF to the rest of the global, enforcing all other cultures.

Conclusion

I believe SF is unique in the world. It has its charm and flaws. In a world where everywhere is full of aunties, I believe there should be a land for the misfits. However, what we learned in the past half-century is that if a land does not have any aunties, it’ll create its own aunties.