The architecture of anxiety

When castles and their defenses begin reappearing, it signals more than a fear of crime — it signals a loss of faith in the commons.

There is a moat in the well-to-do desert town of Scottsdale, Arizona — not a metaphorical one, a literal one. It is 100 feet long, 20 feet wide, seven feet deep and it surrounds a house being sold for $15 million. Beyond the moat are sour orange trees planted strategically because of their four-inch spikes.

“If you try to run through that bush, it will be a bad day for you,” the home’s owner, David Widerhorn, recently told the Wall Street Journal. If an intruder does breach the perimeter of Widerhorn’s home, they would be greeted by a three-inch steel front door protected by 13 deadbolts. Their every move would be captured by 32 AI-enabled cameras and laser-powered invisible tripwires. If something moves where it shouldn’t, a fireplace inside the house glows red.

These details were cataloged in a story in the Journal headlined: ‘The Mega-Rich Are Turning Their Mansions Into Impenetrable Fortresses.’ It described other homes featuring bunkers with 2,000-pound doors and nuclear, biological, and chemical filtration. In Las Vegas, security packages now run into the millions. In Beverly Hills, armed patrols monitor infrared feeds. In Miami, residents prize privately-owned island communities because outsiders cannot legally enter their streets. Biometric parking garages scan faces and license plates before deciding which elevator you may use.

On the surface, this is nothing new. Society’s upper classes have always lived behind protected walls. Think Medieval Europe’s castle system, or Venetian merchants who built inward-facing palazzos. Power has rarely slept with the doors open.

What feels different is that castles belonged to feudal societies where hierarchy was explicit. Those systems did not pretend that everyone shared equal standing. The lord defended the land and the people worked it. The lines were clear — where you were born is where you stayed.

America was born out of a desire to tear down those proverbial walls. To shed protection of the privileged and replace it with progress for the populace.

Well, if what’s happening in this country is any indication, it would appear that we love our hierarchies, we embrace oppression, we despise the divine spark within us, and we very happily accept that we are not masters of our individual destiny.

That feels very much like the endgame we’re witnessing… watching private sovereignty return in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, all while the language of equality continues to gaslight, producing a particular kind of dissonance for those with eyes to see.

When executives receive home security as a corporate benefit, developers integrate facial recognition into residential towers, and moats appear in Sun Belt suburbs, something deeper than the fear of being burgled is happening. It’s a clear sign that a loss of confidence in the commons has taken place. And instead of getting to the root causes and repairing it, the instinct is to engineer around it.

What we are witnessing in realtime is the ongoing bifurcation of America. Today, the wealthy have hardened enclaves and are hedging against systemic failure by insulating themselves from it with seemingly endless resources and technology.

Not everyone has the option to buy a bunker, hire private security, or install AI cameras linked to their fireplace. The vast majority are simply living their lives, trying to make ends meet as prices continue to rise and their dollar buys less and less. In New York, hundreds recently lined up for a five-day “free grocery store” pop-up, capped at 300 customers a day. Across the country, more seniors are returning to work because retirement no longer balances. Others sell plasma, juggle gig shifts, or quietly go without.

These are folks who can’t engineer risk out of their lives. So they live inside it.

Legitimacy is thinning and the social contract is no longer something people assume will hold. All the while, we watch the simultaneous death of a hard-fought republic and the re-emergence of an aristocratic class in America. A feeding at the trough of riches for the select few, and the pacification of everyone else through sports spectacles and elaborate halftime shows… to say nothing of the free food and stimulus checks and sordid titillation of elites gone wild.

If history has anything to say about the American experiment, it might be that we weren’t so different from any of the other supposedly great societies that came before us. There’s nothing new under the sun, is there?

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