Things Used To be Different – Gang Member Business Cards

This was an interesting blast from the past:

CHICAGO — For decades in Chicago, gang members came with business cards in hand.

Brandon Johnson’s book, “Thee Almighty & Insane,” explores the vintage business cards Chicago’s gang members carried during the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Johnson recently sold out his first edition of 500 copies, which each sell for $30, and he’s planning a second edition of at least 1,000 more books for May publication.

“It’s very interesting that these business cards existed,” Johnson said. “People are amazed in general by this phenomenon…”

Johnson said the cards were used to assert their pride, recruit new members and serve as general tokens of affiliation…

It stopped being practiced in the early 1990s, likely because of the “digital era coming upon us,” Johnson said.

“They just went out of fashion,” Johnson said. “And I imagine the gangs just stopped being interested in doing them.”

Amygdala deterioration is everywhere. Even gang members had some measure of conscientiousness in the past.

You see the changes everywhere. School shootings used to be unthinkable. Guns could be ordered over the phone and shipped through the mail, but mass shootings didn’t happen. Federal buildings didn’t have metal detectors, but nobody would ever shoot them up. You could show up at the airport and just get on a plane, and nobody would ever think it would be hijacked. The President didn’t even travel with protection, and his assassination would have been unimaginable.

Today guns are more controlled than ever, and yet mass shootings, even by children, are a part of the world. TSA security is impossible to deal with, and yet nobody could imagine shutting it down because the threat is so big. Every government building you travel to has to use metal detectors to check for weapons because if they didn’t somebody would bring in a gun and shoot the place up. And if you got rid of the President’s Secret Service detail he would have enough assassins to kill him five or six times a day.

People are different today. These threats are all a measure of amygdalae that are deteriorating. It isn’t happening to everyone, but when you look at the population there are enough people whose amygdalae can no longer constrain their behavior that we expect such grossly aberrant behaviors to be a part of our world.

Imagine going back to the time when all of those things were unthinkable. Imagine if everyone was cut in the form of a human who would be aghast by all of that. Imagine if none of those legitimate fears today could exist at all.

The Apocalypse will be harsh. But if if it is harsh enough, it will bring back that model of human.

And it looks like it will be harsh enough.

Spread r/K Theory, because you will want your business card to say, “K-strategist”