Notes from the edge of civilization: November 23, 2025
Low-trust norms meet high-trust systems; AI fakery hits home; China's gift to the world.
This week, a video of long lines of wheelchair-bound people — visibly Indians — went viral online, sparking a controversy that had nothing to do with disability and everything to do with trust. The post cited data showing that nearly 30% of passengers on some Air India flights now request wheelchair assistance. The airline apparently logged 99 wheelchair bookings on a single Delhi–Chicago flight, 90 on Delhi–Newark, and more than 100,000 wheelchair requests every month across its routes.
On paper, it looks like a sudden national mobility crisis. Ah, but look again. Wheelchair assistance — free, priority-based, no-questions-asked — has become the unofficial fast track through the world’s most chaotic mega-airports. Seniors who can walk perfectly well use it to bypass long waits and navigate confusing terminals.
This is the predictable collision that happens when a service built on honesty meets users shaped by a very different operating system. In low-trust environments, you take whatever the system offers because if you don’t game it, you’re the sucker. Export that logic into a high-trust structure like international aviation and the system buckles, forcing it to respond with fees, verification, and bureaucracy. In other words, a race to the bottom.
The video wasn’t shocking because people dislike Indians; it was shocking because it showed, in one slow-moving procession of borrowed wheelchairs, how quickly a high-trust system collapses when the cultural assumptions beneath it no longer hold.
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If we stick with trust for just a moment… let’s say you’re not yet convinced that the breakdown of trust is leading to a disintegrating society. Allow us to present to you none other than Klaus Schwab’s muchacho de mantequilla*: Yuval Noah Harari. He’s here to assure you that collapse of trust is indeed happening — and it’s your fault.
"One of the reasons that the order of the world is collapsing is that we have a deficit of trust, and it makes us extremely vulnerable to AI.” Don’t watch if you’ve recently ingested food — you may puke listening to man who refers to humans as “hackable animals!”
* Collapse Life would like to thank Doug Casey for this hilarious moniker, which when translated into English is literally ‘butter boy,’ which shows up in a November 2024 International Man missive. —Ed
Everyone knows we here at Collapse Life are huge John Rubino fans. He’s such a smart, down-to-earth, genuine commentator and author. Did we mention smart?
So when his simple-but-clever update came into our inbox this week, we thought we should share it. The article is part 18 of Rubino’s Becoming Invisible series and he points out that ‘deepfake’ scams are now blending caller-ID spoofing with AI-generated voices to create terrifying, urgent situations designed to bypass your logic.
In one example he cites, a mother who gets a call from what appears to be her daughter — same caller ID, same voice — crying from the ER and begging for money to get “life-saving treatment.” It’s all fake, but the panic is real.
This is the new frontier of fraud. If scammers can mimic the face, voice, and phone number of an actual loved one, ordinary social cues are no longer reliable.
Rubino’s advice:
Hang up and call back if something feels off.
Establish a family safe word — a simple, shared phrase that AI can’t guess on the fly.
Assume nothing is real until verified.
As AI-generated sludge floods YouTube, X, and the wider internet, the only sane posture is extreme skepticism. Believe nothing. Check everything.
(Hey, weren’t we just talking about low trust societies?!)
If China has wanted to troll the Christian world, the country of Brazil, and the entire climate priesthood gathered at COP30 in one grand, brass, gift-wrapped gesture, they couldn’t have chosen better than unveiling a horned dragon-jaguar idol in Belém — a city whose name sounds uncomfortably close to Balaam, the biblical prophet and diviner.
The CCP calls their gift — which was presented to the host of this year’s UN Climate Conference — the “Dragon-Jaguar Guardian Spirit,” a cute little fusion of Chinese dragon energy and Amazonian jaguar essence. Critics, however, are calling it what it looks like: a horned chimera gripping the world, straight out of Revelation fan art.
Brazilian Christian leader Estevam Hernandes didn’t mince words when talking to the Brazilian press, pointing to Revelation 12:9 — you know, the part where the dragon is literally named as Satan, deceiver of the whole world.
And the great dragon was thrown out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who leads all the world astray. He was thrown to the earth, and his messengers were thrown out with him.
The perfect symbol of cultural friendship at a UN climate summit, right? But here’s where the irony goes full biblical-plague level:
A massive fire literally broke out on the grounds of the summit, sending 13 people to the hospital for smoke inhalation.
The beauty of it all: A fire, possibly started by a microwave oven, at a climate summit, underneath a horned dragon idol, in a city named like the world’s most compromised prophet. We may be drawing to a close, but man does 2025 keep on delivering.
The UN says the blaze started in the “Blue Zone” pavilion, while negotiators were gearing up to “strengthen international efforts to address the climate crisis.” Nothing says “trust the experts” like setting your own climate conference on fire.
The veneer of civilization is very thin. My own experience has shown me that a great number of people, some of them relatives, friends, colleagues, church-going people (!) are actually very unprincipled and selfish to the extreme. Is it the human condition? Are we being manipulated into become zombies (rhetorical question)? At any rate, knowing this does not make life any easier. To end on a more positive note, thank you for the information in this article, particularly the piece of advice about sharing a safe word with your love ones. Great, thoughtful work!
Amazing revelations , statues, safe words and getting ahead of the queue. I have been tempted to use that ploy at Airports 😂They are so confusing and tiresome.
Travel will not be possible soon with all the mandatory bio metrics coming in. That solves that problem.