The Washington Post recently published an article about Dr. Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. It started off mockingly, describing Carson's theory that the movie The Purge could easily become really given a specific set of circumstances.

If you aren't familiar with it, The Purge franchise is a series of movies that take place in a dystopian not-so-distant future. In that future world, things are pretty similar to how they are right now – there aren't any flying cars or AI robots serving breakfast – except for one night a year.

And on that night, people can commit any crime without worry of punishment. Anything they do that night is legal, there are no first responders to save the victims, and there won't be any court cases later.

It was Christmastime in Washington, and Ben Carson couldn't stop talking about the apocalypse.

"Did you know," the secretary of housing and urban development asked his acting chief of staff, Deana Bass, at a Capitol Hill holiday party, "that if North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon into our exosphere, it could take out our entire electrical grid?"

Bass shook her head.

"What's that movie where there's complete lawlessness and anarchy for one night a year?" Carson said, calmly resting his right hand over his left. " 'The Purge'! It will be like 'The Purge' all the time…" (source)

And honestly, he's not wrong. There are a lot of people out there who seem like they'd salivate at the chance to off their neighbors without any repercussions. One of the movies, The Purge: Election Year, seems particularly timely after the vitriol of the last presidential race.

Crimes are becoming more shocking and brutal

We have reached an era of extreme brutality and virulent hatred that I certainly haven't seen in my lifetime. Recently, I wrote an article based on the essay of Sir John Grubb about the end of empires and discussed unfathomable crimes.