history – Ridley Park

A note from Ridley Park on behaviour, control, and the illusion of peace.

Well, it’s out.
Propensity has officially launched.

This one’s been brewing for a while. If Sustenance asked what happens when we can’t understand each other, Propensity asks what happens when we stop needing to.

No invasion. No superintelligence. No overt dystopia. Just a device—quietly implemented—that modulates human behaviour through neurochemical cues. Less anger. Less risk. Less faith, libido, disobedience. More calm. More compliance. More… nothing.

And nobody notices.
Because the best control doesn’t look like control.

The Premise

Imagine a world where we solve violence—not through laws, treaties, or education—but by dampening the neurological signals that make people aggressive in the first place. You don’t choose peace. Peace is chosen for you, chemically. You just comply.

That’s the Propensity Device: a system designed not to control what you do, but to shift what you’re likely to do. Your odds of revolt drop. Your odds of submission rise. It’s not sedative. It’s statistical.

Free will doesn’t vanish. It just stops being statistically significant.

The Themes

The novel explores what happens when:

Free will is reframed as background noise
Consent is irrelevant because no one thinks to object
Violence becomes programmable—but only directionally
Peace is achieved without ideology, meaning, or narrative
Narrative itself becomes residue

There’s horror in here, but it’s not loud. It’s administrative. Institutional. Clean.

The horror of things working exactly as designed.

The Tone

Think Black Mirror but less sensational. Think Ballard after a lobotomy.

A dash of Ligotti. A flicker of DeLillo. A long stare from Atwood.
Propensity is soft dystopia—flattened, not broken.

And yes, there’s a fall. But it’s not a collapse. It’s an asymptote.
A tapering. A loss of signal fidelity. A kind of surrender.

Why Write This?

Because we’re already doing it.

Because behavioural nudge theory isn’t fiction.

Because control doesn’t need to be malicious—just implemented.

Because some of the worst horrors are quiet, polite, and empirically validated.

Because I wanted to ask: what if peace worked too well?

Now Available

You can get Propensity on Amazon and other booksellers.

If you do read it—thank you. If you don’t, that’s alright.
The system will keep humming either way.

📘 More about the book →

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Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.

After an extended hiatus, I’m back in writing mode. I’ve got an unfinished prequesl to Hemo Sapiens and several unfinished short stories.

Currently, I am focusing with themes of language morphology and mundanity of history.

History is like an atom – more space than substance — yet it feels somehow significant to us in the moment. The substance-to-space ration is that of a pea in a football stadium, and yet we perceive these things as solids, liquids, gasses, and plasmas.

History is hitting the only car in an otherwise empty car park. Of course, you and your insurer give it extra significance, but history is more often than not self-absorbed narcisism and filling in the blanks with somewhat cohesive storylines.

As for language, people understand the notion that contemporary language is “living”, but they don’t realise as much that over time tiny perturbations result in huge shifts. Consider Middle English from the days of Chaucer, some 650 years ago, versus Shakespeare, only 450 years ago. The latter, is relatively readable; the former, nosomuch.

In the short term, some complain about incorrect usage, “Save cursive writing”, and “kids forget how to write” with their texts and social media shortcuts. What’s the world coming to?

I ‘ve always questioned time-travel stories where people visit places in the far-future or -past and everyone happens to be perfectly understood, save perhaps for a British accent for good measure – perhaps Germanic for ill measure. lol

I’ve been writing some future-forward stories involving artificial intelligence and more on the nature of time and space, but I’ll save these for another day. Now, I need to focus on Temporal Babel.

Tag: history

📡 PROPENSITY Has Launched